| richardhutnik said: All I can say is you did it AGAIN! You turn my attempt to express concerns I have had out of a person experience with one Tea Party meeting I have attended into more spin saying, "Yes, but dem liberals are WORSE and the blasted Liberal media is suppporting them!" You are arguing with me here, not attempting to have a conversation. You are once more, coming from a partisan mind view and trying to score debate points. In this, I gave ground here, speaking of 9/11 conspiracy kooks. You do NOTHING similar on your side here. Am I to think you believe there is NOTHING on the right that is incorrect and inappropriate and it is ALL justified because liberals started it? Am I to think you believe Anne Coulter is PERFECT in what she does, and she is RIGHT ON to talk about destroying the NY Times building? What I am seeing from you now is a mind of a partisan for whom this discussion is a personal war you MUST win. You have to be right, and ALL that is wrong has to be traced to everything that is liberal. After all, liberal is not only supposed to be wrong, it is supposed to be EVIL. All this reminds me of a scene from Cheers, where Sam Malone plays software against some Playboy Bunnies. He played pure hardball with them, dusting them back and just downright aggressive. The cost? He didn't score with any of the Bunnies. So, flat out, if you are merely going to use this discussion as a chance to score political points and prove that liberal side is responsible for every ill on the planet, then there is really nothing we have to discuss here. Consider yourself to have won this debate, throw yourself a celebration party and do a victory dance. Get a football and spike it there. You won, yippie! And as policy, America should round up all liberals and send them to reducation centers. Or shoot, maybe shoot them all but two, and keep them around as living fossils, agreeing with Rush: Rush Limbaugh: "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus--living fossils--so we we'll never forget what these people stood for."” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,163548,00.html Wee, this finger pointing game is fun. I think I scored a few points on the mythical "I am right, and you are not" scoreboard. |
Not at all. The point I am trying to make here is that is patently ridiculous for the people who are quaking in their boots right now to fret so about incivility or paranoia or whatever when these things have been with us... forever. As I've shown you, things are absolutely not worse now on that front than they were a few years ago despite the fact that the media tirelessly tries to drive home the message that they are. Nor do I think this sort of thing was worse during the Bush years than it was during the Clinton years, when the insane Clinton Chronicles were being circulated among people on the right. That sort of paranoia will always be there. The side currently out of power just tends to engage in it more, while the side in power freaks out over it until it's out of power and starts nursing its own paranoid side.
The thing to remember is that there is remarkably little political violence in this country, and when it occurs it's almost never from expected quarters. Despite the riveting portrait of right-wing hatemosphere than RFK Jr. paints in his Huffington Post piece, it wasn't a right-winger but a commie who killed his uncle, and it wasn't a segregationist but a pro-Palestinian who killed his father. George Wallace's attempted assassin wasn't an anti-segregationist; he was just a nut who wanted to prove his manhood. Reagan's would-be assassin wasn't inspired by the media's hate-on for a sitting Republican president but by the forbidden hotness of a 13-year-old Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. In fact, I don't even think the latter two instances can properly be counted as acts of political violence even if they were directed at political figures.
People may have heated arguments about things, and a lot of people nurse a healthy distrust for the government that isn't always expressed in the most responsible of ways, but it takes a true fanatic or psycho to kill.
