I don't want to sound Polyanna-ish here but I don't know if two shootings in two weeks constitutes anything resembling a "trend" (aside from the trend where Americans shoot Americans far too often). That sounds like some other kind of media-whipped hype, the one that tries to make folks feel as if there is violent political extremism suddenly about to explode uncontrollably.
I'm not discounting the potential danger posed by extremists but as with, say, the swine flu, there's a major difference between a "plausible concern" and heralding that an epidemic is on the loose.
That all said, I also challenge the implicit assumption underlying the assertion that media personalities are "entertainers" and therefore, have no influence. Since when has entertainment = non-influential? The entertainment industry, aka the culture industry, dictates myriad things in everyday life: what we eat, wear, listen to, watch, who we look up to, who we don't, etc. etc. Entertainers exert an inordinate amount of influence on society, just not in the same, obvious way that say, a lawmaker does. Can and is entertainment superficial? Absolutely. But superficial is not the same as "inconsequential."
O....are you also of the opinion that entertainment like violent video games and certain types of music influence people to commit crimes in any way??
I don't want to sound Polyanna-ish here but I don't know if two shootings in two weeks constitutes anything resembling a "trend" (aside from the trend where Americans shoot Americans far too often). That sounds like some other kind of media-whipped hype, the one that tries to make folks feel as if there is violent political extremism suddenly about to explode uncontrollably.
I'm not discounting the potential danger posed by extremists but as with, say, the swine flu, there's a major difference between a "plausible concern" and heralding that an epidemic is on the loose.
That all said, I also challenge the implicit assumption underlying the assertion that media personalities are "entertainers" and therefore, have no influence. Since when has entertainment = non-influential? The entertainment industry, aka the culture industry, dictates myriad things in everyday life: what we eat, wear, listen to, watch, who we look up to, who we don't, etc. etc. Entertainers exert an inordinate amount of influence on society, just not in the same, obvious way that say, a lawmaker does. Can and is entertainment superficial? Absolutely. But superficial is not the same as "inconsequential."
O....are you also of the opinion that entertainment like violent video games and certain types of music influence people to commit crimes in any way??
It depends on what you mean by "influence". Typically, the way that this has been discussed in the media is "Marilyn Manson made them kill people," which is establishing both a form of causality (A made them do B) and culpability (Marilyn Manson is responsible for the deaths of those victims).
I don't think that kind of influence exists. Right wing radio, gangsta rap songs, Salma Hayek's breasts, etc. do not incite otherwise non-violent people to commit violence in a causal way. I think "culpability" is a bit more grey area...I think there's such a thing as moral culpability (but it's fuzzy) but definitely nothing that would be legally useful.
But can entertainment/culture/media all contribute to a climate of fear or anxiety or hostility that makes otherwise rational people act irrationally? Yes, absolutely. Again: I don't see how anyone could claim that those industries/institutions DON'T exert some level of social influence.
I>However[/i], I do not think, at all, that they do so in a vacuum. The problem I have with "blame the [fill in the culture/entertainment figure/organization/genre]" approach is that it's often completely blind to the ways in which it's merely one part of a larger chain of structures that make certain things possible (or not).
Look at the current financial crisis - it's become popular in some parts to blame "the culture of consumerism" as a main culprit and I actually think this is true to some extent. A lot of people made very bad financial decisions that are now costing all of us and you could reasonably argue that this was a result of influences from popular culture to buy-buy-buy on credit-credit-credit. But that argument only works if you also acknowledge that the financial mess was ALSO a result of predatory lending, lax regulation and corporate decision-making, among other things.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that while entertainment isn't the same as "putting a gun to someone's head and forcing them to do things," that doesn't make it a neutral force in people's lives. I mean, think about it: entertainment is - to a large extent - about pleasure. And pleasure is never, ever, inconsequential in people's thinking, actions or beliefs.
I>However[/i], I do not think, at all, that they do so in a vacuum. The problem I have with "blame the [fill in the culture/entertainment figure/organization/genre]" approach is that it's often completely blind to the ways in which it's merely one part of a larger chain of structures that make certain things possible (or not).
And pleasure is never, ever, inconsequential in people's thinking, actions or beliefs.
Not sure what you mean here.....are you saying that everything pleasurable has a negative consequence?
Rock: Of course not. All I'm saying is that pleasure is a powerful force that can influence, motivate people towards certain beliefs, even actions. Whether they're positive or negative is something else entirely.
This whole thread proves what George Orwell said about poor language leading to poor thinking. The fact that it is still popular to talk about politics in terms of a left-right spectrum means that wholly conflicting philosophies can find themselves referred to by the same monkier(left or right). This purely verbal association in turn can create erroneous intellectual associations.
You don't have to read much of this brun dudes writing to see that just about the only thing he has in common with O'Reilly, Limbaugh et al is that they can all be described as right-wing. This has apparently been enough for certain people to decide that O'reilly and so on should be pilloried over this.
Oh well, if you really believe that if X's arguments diverge from what you arbitrarily decide is acceptable then they become culpable for whatever some nutcase on 'their side of the aisle' does - even if he hates X and his ideas contradict X's- then that is on you.
1) Totally besides this current point, but I emailed you back to say I'm still down to do a BH convo. Holler back.
2) Just so we get this right - are you saying that the anti-war left is anti-Semitic?
Yes we are down.
And I would not say the anti-war left is anti-Semitic. But in response to the view the Rush Limbaugh has anything to do with the museum shooting, I would point out that Rush and other AM talkers do not go on about Likudniks in the Pentagon, or Jewish/pro-Israel money influencing Congress. They like Israel and criticize Obama for pressuring Israel. It's the Buchanan/Ron Paul right and the anti-war left that busies itself with this strain of argument about Israeli influence in US politics. This is not saying that the anti-war left are Jew haters, indeed many in the anti-war left are themselves Jews. But within the camp, there are those who are obsessed with Jewish influence in American politics, or how the Israeli national interest undermines the American national interest. See Juan Cole or Stephan Walt or the Nation Magazine. The museum shooter was much closer to this view than Limbaugh's view that America and Israel are paisans in a global war on terrorists. And please, I know the guy is a nutball, I don't blame The Nation, Ron Paul or Steve Walt for his actions. But I doubt he was a Rush listener. The dude disagrees with Rush.
It is possible to be anti-Zionist, with out being anti-Semitic. Kind of the opposite of those pro-Zioist/anti-Semitic Xians.
But that is a whole other thread.
My local paper ran side by side Krugman and Jonah Goldberg columns today. Nothing either said was more insightful than this thread.
While I disdain the rightwingmedia, railing against it is as useless as railing against rap, heavy metal, video games, movies, boxing, porn or Spongebob. And trying to find any causal effects is impossible.
WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network???s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, ???amped up??? Americans who are ???taking the extra step and getting the gun out,??? maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday???s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally ??? notably during Hurricane Katrina ??? he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network???s ???We report, you decide??? mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had ???become more and more frightening??? in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he ???could read a hundred??? messages spewing ???hate that???s not based in fact,??? much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman???s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans ???out there in a scary place,??? Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: ???If you???re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who???s performing abortions???? An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller???s killer. He went on: ???If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...??? He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.
These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network???s highest-rated star, Bill O???Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him ???Tiller the baby killer??? and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O???Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only ???pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters??? would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O???Reilly, was breaching his network???s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.
What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies ??? indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it???s not change you can believe in.
We don???t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues ??? though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov???s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck ??? well before another ???antigovernment??? Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April ??? there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.
This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama???s name with ???Treason!??? and ???Terrorist!??? at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was ???palling around with terrorists.??? But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent???s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats??? ???Arab??? candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.
That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When ???the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,??? she observed in Salon, ???there is reason for alarm.??? She cited a ???joke??? repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how ???any U.S. soldier??? who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.
This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O???Reilly???s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama???s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to ???the final solution??? and the quest for ???a master race.??? After James von Brunn???s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a ???lone gunman nutjob.??? Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that ???the pot in America is boiling,??? as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.
But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What???s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party???s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because ???it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.??? Anuzis pushed ???fascism??? instead, because ???everybody still thinks that???s a bad thing.??? He didn???t seem to grasp that ???fascism??? is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find ???bad??? because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.
The Anuzis ???fascism??? solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president???s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she???s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of ???a wise Latina woman.??? She has been tarred as a member of ???the Latino KKK??? (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn???s white supremacist screeds.
Obama???s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of ???Treason!??? It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging ???in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.??? He claimed that the president ??? a lifelong Christian ??? ???may still be??? a Muslim and is aligned with ???the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.??? Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic ???charities??? that ???have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.???
If this isn???t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own
hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.
The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is ???if there is really a way to put a hold on??? those who might run amok. We???re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any ???mainstream media??? debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality ??? I emphasize might ??? belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement???s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.
It???s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as ???the height of insult,??? in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was ???warning us for a reason.???
No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party???s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight???s devout wish was to ???bring an end to this false prophet Obama.???
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren???t warned.
Comments
O....are you also of the opinion that entertainment like violent video games and certain types of music influence people to commit crimes in any way??
It depends on what you mean by "influence". Typically, the way that this has been discussed in the media is "Marilyn Manson made them kill people," which is establishing both a form of causality (A made them do B) and culpability (Marilyn Manson is responsible for the deaths of those victims).
I don't think that kind of influence exists. Right wing radio, gangsta rap songs, Salma Hayek's breasts, etc. do not incite otherwise non-violent people to commit violence in a causal way. I think "culpability" is a bit more grey area...I think there's such a thing as moral culpability (but it's fuzzy) but definitely nothing that would be legally useful.
But can entertainment/culture/media all contribute to a climate of fear or anxiety or hostility that makes otherwise rational people act irrationally? Yes, absolutely. Again: I don't see how anyone could claim that those industries/institutions DON'T exert some level of social influence.
I>However[/i], I do not think, at all, that they do so in a vacuum. The problem I have with "blame the [fill in the culture/entertainment figure/organization/genre]" approach is that it's often completely blind to the ways in which it's merely one part of a larger chain of structures that make certain things possible (or not).
Look at the current financial crisis - it's become popular in some parts to blame "the culture of consumerism" as a main culprit and I actually think this is true to some extent. A lot of people made very bad financial decisions that are now costing all of us and you could reasonably argue that this was a result of influences from popular culture to buy-buy-buy on credit-credit-credit. But that argument only works if you also acknowledge that the financial mess was ALSO a result of predatory lending, lax regulation and corporate decision-making, among other things.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that while entertainment isn't the same as "putting a gun to someone's head and forcing them to do things," that doesn't make it a neutral force in people's lives. I mean, think about it: entertainment is - to a large extent - about pleasure. And pleasure is never, ever, inconsequential in people's thinking, actions or beliefs.
Not sure what you mean here.....are you saying that everything pleasurable has a negative consequence?
You don't have to read much of this brun dudes writing to see that just about the only thing he has in common with O'Reilly, Limbaugh et al is that they can all be described as right-wing. This has apparently been enough for certain people to decide that O'reilly and so on should be pilloried over this.
Oh well, if you really believe that if X's arguments diverge from what you arbitrarily decide is acceptable then they become culpable for whatever some nutcase on 'their side of the aisle' does - even if he hates X and his ideas contradict X's- then that is on you.
Yes we are down.
And I would not say the anti-war left is anti-Semitic. But in response to the view the Rush Limbaugh has anything to do with the museum shooting, I would point out that Rush and other AM talkers do not go on about Likudniks in the Pentagon, or Jewish/pro-Israel money influencing Congress. They like Israel and criticize Obama for pressuring Israel. It's the Buchanan/Ron Paul right and the anti-war left that busies itself with this strain of argument about Israeli influence in US politics. This is not saying that the anti-war left are Jew haters, indeed many in the anti-war left are themselves Jews. But within the camp, there are those who are obsessed with Jewish influence in American politics, or how the Israeli national interest undermines the American national interest. See Juan Cole or Stephan Walt or the Nation Magazine. The museum shooter was much closer to this view than Limbaugh's view that America and Israel are paisans in a global war on terrorists. And please, I know the guy is a nutball, I don't blame The Nation, Ron Paul or Steve Walt for his actions. But I doubt he was a Rush listener. The dude disagrees with Rush.
Kind of the opposite of those pro-Zioist/anti-Semitic Xians.
But that is a whole other thread.
My local paper ran side by side Krugman and Jonah Goldberg columns today. Nothing either said was more insightful than this thread.
While I disdain the rightwingmedia, railing against it is as useless as railing against rap, heavy metal, video games, movies, boxing, porn or Spongebob.
And trying to find any causal effects is impossible.
Agreed?
WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network???s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, ???amped up??? Americans who are ???taking the extra step and getting the gun out,??? maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday???s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally ??? notably during Hurricane Katrina ??? he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network???s ???We report, you decide??? mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had ???become more and more frightening??? in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he ???could read a hundred??? messages spewing ???hate that???s not based in fact,??? much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman???s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans ???out there in a scary place,??? Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: ???If you???re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who???s performing abortions???? An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller???s killer. He went on: ???If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...??? He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.
These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network???s highest-rated star, Bill O???Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him ???Tiller the baby killer??? and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O???Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only ???pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters??? would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O???Reilly, was breaching his network???s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.
What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies ??? indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it???s not change you can believe in.
We don???t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues ??? though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov???s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck ??? well before another ???antigovernment??? Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April ??? there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.
This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama???s name with ???Treason!??? and ???Terrorist!??? at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was ???palling around with terrorists.??? But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent???s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats??? ???Arab??? candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.
That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When ???the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,??? she observed in Salon, ???there is reason for alarm.??? She cited a ???joke??? repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how ???any U.S. soldier??? who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.
This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O???Reilly???s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama???s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to ???the final solution??? and the quest for ???a master race.??? After James von Brunn???s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a ???lone gunman nutjob.??? Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that ???the pot in America is boiling,??? as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.
But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What???s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party???s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because ???it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.??? Anuzis pushed ???fascism??? instead, because ???everybody still thinks that???s a bad thing.??? He didn???t seem to grasp that ???fascism??? is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find ???bad??? because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.
The Anuzis ???fascism??? solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president???s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she???s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of ???a wise Latina woman.??? She has been tarred as a member of ???the Latino KKK??? (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn???s white supremacist screeds.
Obama???s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of ???Treason!??? It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging ???in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.??? He claimed that the president ??? a lifelong Christian ??? ???may still be??? a Muslim and is aligned with ???the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.??? Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic ???charities??? that ???have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.???
If this isn???t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.
The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is ???if there is really a way to put a hold on??? those who might run amok. We???re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any ???mainstream media??? debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality ??? I emphasize might ??? belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement???s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.
It???s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as ???the height of insult,??? in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was ???warning us for a reason.???
No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party???s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight???s devout wish was to ???bring an end to this false prophet Obama.???
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren???t warned.