ThoughtCrimes.org

Political violence in the United States, of course, is hardly a novelty.

The deranged gunman John Hinckley, JR., shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Anti-government fanatic Timothy McVeigh murdered scores of Americans when he bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Matthew Dallek, The Daily Beast

Well, see the problem with this is that John Hinckley Jr’s attack on Ronald Reagan had less to do with politics than with celebrity. He was a nutjob motivated, not by political conviction, but by the delusion that shooting Ronald Reagan would impress actress Jodie Foster. (He’d stalked President Jimmy Carter for the same reason.) There’s little evidence that Hinckley’s drive to shoot Ronald Reagan was fueled by opposition to Reagan’s politics.

Tim McVeigh on the other hand, was motivated by politics. Insane politics, perhaps, but still politics.

This false equivalency is just one part of what makes Matthew Dallek’s piece in The Daily Beast a classic example of a dozey moderate looking over history with his eyes resolutely unfocused. Like most people who promote the “all things being equal” myth about leftist and right wing political violence in this country, Dallek ignores an important difference, one that has historically made right wing violence more tolerated and, as a result, more lethal in this country. Members of the radical left could not count, as members of the radical right could (like the Klan in the American south), on covert sympathizers within law enforcement and the courts.

But the most glaring omission in the piece – and others like it -- is that we actually have today, in the United States, a working illustration of the dangers posed by right wing violence and the extent to which it can become normalized.

Anti-abortion violence.

Moderates who dismiss the dangers of right wing violence often do so by hyperbolizing concerns about it into concerns about a massive right-wing government takeover. To read many of their arguments, those of us who criticize Fox News and take seriously the dangers posed by the rhetoric of Glenn Beck and others like him, are envisioning armies of American Brown Shirts marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, assassinating the president, and taking control of the government.

No, I don’t consider that likely. What primarily worries me and others who have followed right wing violence over the years is a resurgence of what we saw in the ‘90s, the firebombings and murders that peaked with Tim McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Building in Oklahoma city.

But I also worry that the dismissive attitude about right wing violence towards liberals and perceived liberals could result in this violence becoming business as usual -- as anti-abortion violence has become business as usual.

Since 1993, nine people have been murdered in the United States simply because they worked in abortion clinics. Nine people have been injured, including a woman who was widowed in the same attack, and a nurse who was maimed and lost an eye. There have been 17 attempted murders. Prochoice America reported, in a January 1, 2010 report:

6,100 reported acts of violence against abortion providers since 1977, including bombings, arsons, death threats, kidnappings, and assaults, as well as more than 156,000 reported acts of disruption, including bomb threats and harassing calls.

That same report details the level of security that has become business as usual in clinics that provide abortions:

Clinics are spending thousands of dollars on bulletproof glass, armed guards, security cameras, metal detectors, and other security measures. Doctors are wearing bulletproof vests and arming themselves with handguns and other weapons. Some have even purchased armored vehicles.

Clinic workers have been instructed by federal marshals to vary their routes to work, to drive to a safe haven if followed, and to call police if they receive a suspicious package, as it could contain a bomb.

Rochester, New York abortion provider Dr. Morris Wortman carried a gun and wore a bulletproof vest to work immediately after the deadly shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian. His clinic also has thick bulletproof glass and a video surveillance system. In 2002, Dr. Wortman had a protective concrete wall built along the side of the clinic adjacent to a day-care facility. Explaining the barrier’s construction, Dr. Wortman stated, “There are kids over there every day . . . I had the berm [wall] put up for their protection. If we ever get bombed, the berm would hopefully deflect any debris from hitting the day care center.

Boston, Massachusetts abortion provider Dr. Maureen Paul no longer sits in the third-floor atrium she built for herself as a dream spot. In light of Dr. Slepian’s murder in his home, she feels too vulnerable there, which, according to Paul, “really makes me angry because, wow, this is the space I created for me. I don’t get to be home very often and so it really, really disturbs me that I have to think about getting shot in a place I love.

Like many other clinic directors, Dr. Warren Hern, an abortion provider and director of a Boulder, Colorado reproductive-health center, installed bulletproof glass in his office, hired private armed security guards, and wears a bulletproof vest at some of his public appearances. Stated Dr. Hern, “I walk out of my office and the first thing I do is look at the parking garage that the hospital built two doors away and see if there is a sniper on the roof. I basically expect to be shot any day. . . . It’s a war zone. . . . It’s very frightening and it ruins your life.”

The result, as that same report details, has been to severely restrict access to abortion services. What the far right has learned from murdering doctors and blowing up clinics is that terrorism works. You don’t even have to kill scores of doctors or injure hundreds of clinic workers. Just that “few” -- just those nine -- do the trick nicely.

And the reaction of many Americans? A shrug. A yawn. Oh well, that’s just the way things are, seems to be the attitude.

It didn’t have to be.

I can guarantee you that the lesson learned from the normalization of raw intimidation in this case has not been lost on the far right. We’re seeing now a grassroots drive to silence not only politicians, but liberals in general. In addition to vandalism and personal threats aimed at public figures, a doctor has boasted about turning away Obama supporters. An employer has boasted about firing Obama supporting employees. And incredibly enough, at least one Republican politician, Louisiana Representative John Fleming, has put his own stamp of approval on this idiocy, saying of that physician turning away Obama voters. “I applaud what he said and did.”

The only caveat he sees fit to add in the video embedded below is that the media might (Oh so unfairly!) make a doctor turning away sick people because he dislikes their politics sound like a bad thing.



It’s possible that Representative Fleming actually thought he was doing his bit to ratchet down Tea Party rhetoric, but his approach amounts to praising with faint damns – the same approach from the right that helped to normalize anti-abortion violence. Threats and harassment against either politicians or private citizens because of their politics cannot be treated as if it were acceptable or "understandable." It cannot be allowed to become normal.

We must not let this society get to the point where merely voicing a liberal opinion is likely to put someone a higher risk for harassment – even possibly “legal” harassment, like being fired or turned away from medical care.

“But when your doctor tells you ‘You have cancer’ he doesn’t hate you. ‘Why do all these doctors hate me, they keep telling me I have cancer?’ Because they’re trying to save you! We should go a doctor and he should tell us we have sniffles, and that’s what Washington is doing. But no, keep going, keep going, you’re fine. I and millions of other Americans are the doctors saying “you have cancer. And we can treat it, but it’s radical treatment, but if you don’t take it, we’re going to die.” I don’t hate you. I don’t hate you. Glenn Beck, 4/8/10.

Nahh. You just think that we progressives are a cancer that needs to be cut out of the body politic using “radical treatment.”

But it’s not that you hate us!

Gawker Headline: Wikileaks Video Demonstrates Conclusively That Innocent People Get Killed in Wars

Ah, the “Little Lady Strut.” This is one of the canned responses often offered by apologists when news is released about some undeniable -- and apparently unnecessary -- mayhem committed by the apologists’ side during wartime. The apologist, faced with the photographed, videoed, or recorded proof (of what he was often vehemently denying earlier), furrows his brow, firms his jaw, hikes up the belt of his pants, and growls, in his best John Wayne/Clint Eastwood imitation, “Well that’s what war is like, little lady. It ain’t pretty. Innocent people get hurt.”

The trick is to frame the response as if other people were objecting to the usual inevitable civilian casualties during wartime, rather than, say, an Apache helicopter blowing away unarmed people who’d stopped to help an injured man.

I suppose it’s possible that there’s some unknown fact that, if revealed, would justify shooting a bleeding, unarmed human being trying to crawl away on his belly, and then blasting someone who tries to help him. Simply copping a patronizing attitude, as this Gawker headline does, isn’t convincing.

A lot has been said lately about the presumed “cognitive dissonance” coming from the right. In fact, I think what we’re seeing is not so much cognitive dissonance as it is arguing in bad faith. We’re observing different levels of a lie, as various right wingers first deny, then hide, then attempt to justify a single, consistent, and damning fact.

They don’t think liberals have the right to be liberal. Or at least, not in public where Right Wingers can see them.

If I’m to understand the rationalizations coming from the right, from both the dizzy heights of Rush Limbaugh to the depths of the right-wing blogosphere:

The Right Wing does not engage in inappropriate behavior. John Lewis and others like him (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) made up that stuff about being called “nigger” or spat on because that’s just what those people do! (They’re always complaining.)

…And I don’t even think this was genuine, I think all of this was strategized. I don’t think that anybody spat on Cleaver, I don’t think that anybody called Barney Frank the ‘F’ word, I don’t think anybody called John Lewis the ‘N’ word. There’s no evidence of it other than them. Rush Limbaugh, 3/24/10

Our side doesn’t do this kind of stuff! This is all made up, 95% of it is being made up, and it’s being done to divert everybody’s attention. Rush Limbaugh, 3/25/10

He was lying. Andrew Breitbart on John Lewis’s claim that he was called a “nigger” while walking through a crowd of tea partiers. 3/29/10 http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003290055

And if too many witnesses were present to deny the actual utterance of the word “nigger,” or Emmanuel Cleaver being spat on is actually captured on camera, or Tea Partiers are filmed insulting and mocking a counter-demonstrator with Parkinson’s Disease, Democrats probably staged those incidents to garner sympathy. It was Democrats who threw bricks through the windows of their own headquarters in various locations across the country, and liberals who insinuated themselves among the tea partiers to shout “nigger” and spit and wave inappropriate signs and publicly make fun of a disabled man. Liberals do this just to make conservatives look bad.

...if someone shouted something so grotesque, it was either a plant, an infiltrator, or a freak who attached himself to a group that wants no part of him. Pam Geller, Atlas Shrugged, 3/21/10

Anyone remember the Democratic Party fanatic who attacked his own Democratic Party offices than tried to blame it on Republicans a couple of years back? Free Republic post 3/22/10

…What’s gonna happen here is that Obama-ites and SEIU people are going to be fake members of the tea party. They’re gonna dress up, they’re gonna be clean, they’re gonna look just like all the other tea-partiers do, and they’re gonna start throwing eggs,and they’re gonna start beating people up, what have you, and they’re gonna start shouting the ‘N’ word whenever they have the chance, they will do anything to discredit the Tea Party…Rush Limbaugh, 4/2/10 http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201004020053

If the right wingers who did this stuff actually brag about it afterwards, (like the blogger who inspired the vandalism of Democratic Party offices) or find themselves restored to sanity and gracefully apologize (like the guy who pelted the Parkinson’s patient with dollar bills), then the liberals and Democrats in question obviously deliberately incited this perfectly understandable behavior by being liberals in front of innocent-but-passionate right wingers. Nancy Pelosi did not walk through that crowd with John Lewis as a gesture of solidarity and courage after Lewis was heckled and called a “nigger” by the Tea Partiers. Liberals can’t be courageous! They’re bad! It was part of a fanatical plot to incite violence against herself.

…and yet, here she was last Sunday, walking through that crowd. She was so afraid and she was afraid of the rhetoric, but she decided to ratchet it up by walking through a sea of people…Glenn Beck 3/26/10

…There’s no reason that that group of people from Congress had to walk through the crowd. They never go to the Capital that way, they get there through the underground tunnels! They want, and Pelosi carrying that big gavel with that excrement-eating grin on her face, they were trying to provoke everybody into an incident! Rush Limbaugh 4/2/10

The very act of being a liberal is, they believe, so outrageous, so vile, that it qualifies as an intolerable provocation that puts the onus on what happens next squarely on the shoulders of the liberal rather than the righteous right-winger who hits, spits, yells epithets, or hurls bricks.

This last explains much about the increasingly vicious tenor of right wing rhetoric. It explains that woman who, during the 2008 presidential campaign, decided to take a stand by denying Halloween candy to the children of Obama supporters. It explains the doctor who recently decided to turn away Obama-supporting patients, the volunteer gun safety instructor last year in Tulsa who ordered liberals out of his class, the recent Tea Party embrace of a man who lost part of a finger in the service of repeatedly punching a counter-demonstrator in the face. It explains footage of tea partiers mocking and shouting down sick people who dare to express what tea partiers perceive as “liberal” views in support of healthcare reform.

In the minds of many of these people, liberals shouldn’t express liberal opinions, vote for liberal leaders, or, if elected, pass liberal legislation, and those who do should be punished for it. The proper and reasonable response to liberals, in their mind, is not to attempt to change liberal minds, or to out vote them, but to silence liberals through sheer lung power or raw intimidation. Make the everyday lives of avowed liberals as difficult as possible. Turn liberals away from the doctors’ offices or publicly funded safety classes. Make the children of liberals cry.

Since abusing a liberal is so natural, so patriotic a response, liberals who are openly liberal are deliberately inviting vandalism, spitting, name-calling, and even physical attacks.

All the other things – expressed doubts about President Obama’s birthplace or religion, claims that he’s using “unconstitutional” methods to pass healthcare legislation – all that’s just smoke, just excuses.

What it boils down to is a rejection of the notion that any but their own views have a place in the public square.

I wasn’t there as a protestor. I was driving down the street, where I saw a group from Moveon.org and a group from Code Pink protesting on the corner in my home town then, which was Thousand Oaks California. My son had just been commissioned into the Marine Corps, and I was concerned that folks there may have been uh, uh, protesting against him and his bravery, and I stopped to question that. My questions were answered satisfactorily and I was in the process of leaving when I was accosted by, a man came across the street screaming at me that I was an effing idiot, and he was waving his arms in a violent way, and me came at me as if to attack me, and so a scuffle ensued and my fist ended up in his mouth and he bit my finger off. Bill Rice, Boo-hooing to Neil Cavuto About What Happened While Rice Was in the Process of Assaulting Someone

Mr. Rice went into a bit more detail last September when he was asked about it:

Neil Cavuto: …but reports are from witnesses that you threw a punch at him. What happened, really Bill?

Bill Rice: Yes sir, yes sir I did. He came at me calling me an idiot and whenever he got close within my range, I threw a punch.

Neil Cavuto: Okay, you threw a punch. Did the punch land?

Bill Rice: Yes.

Neil Cavuto: So then, what happened next?

Bill Rice: Then, I threw a second punch and my fist ended up in his mouth.

Interesting how the story has evolved. Nothing in that first version about the guy “waving his arms in a violent way” and coming at Rice “as if to attack me.” Just the guy calling him an idiot, and Rice punching him in the face a couple of times.

And now the tea party tale is that nobody paid any attention to the incident, that only Fox News covered it at the time. Except that going back and looking at the coverage brings up accounts in The Washington Post, , the Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, the Atlantic, CNN...


This pretty much sums up the attitude driving the tea party movement -- a man presented by Fox News as very hard done by because he lost part of his finger while punching someone repeatedly in the face.

I think we won the debate. Think of the vast majorities they have in congress, and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption, that’s all because the tea party movement, the people, all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here… Sean Hannity concluding his hosting of a discussion at the Simi Valley Reagan Library entitled, “Conservative Victory: How to Defeat the Obama Agenda” (Remarks start at 7:43 mark)
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To be fair to the audience, the applause began before Hannity mentioned Tim McVeigh, and would be unlikely to stop on a dime. It’s quite possible that many audience members were looking at each other going “waaaah?” even as they clapped.

But Hannity’s excuse? There are several possible explanations:

1. It’s a malicious April Fool’s joke and the video has been doctored. Note that the camera is not on Hannity during the comment about Tim McVeigh. Nor is it on his guests, (whose faces I would dearly love to have seen if and when they heard him comparing their fan base to one of the most loathed right wing domestic terrorists in recent memory.)

2. It’s a slip of the tongue. Hannity didn’t mean to say tea partiers were “Tim McVeigh wannabes.” He meant to say they were some other kind of wannabes. Which raises the question about who he actually meant to invoke, and why Tim McVeigh managed to slip into the discussion. It’s not like the earlier recorded conversation mentions Oklahoma City. It is interesting to note, however, that Congressman David Dreyer’s comments immediately before Hannity’s remarks were, shall we say, a bit on the apocalyptic side: “You said we lost the war on healthcare. I believe that was a battle. The war is in November. And this country is worth saving…”

3. The most likely explanation is that Hannity was attempting to mock, in his own thuddingly tin-eared way, concerns about the recent rise in violent rhetoric on the right. Which, given the recent arrests of a heavily armed right-wing Christian group, is remarkably ill-timed and irresponsible. It’s the kind of sarcasm that relies on the naïve assumption that nobody in his enormous audience could possibly take literally rhetoric from prominent right wingers about being “at war” with a Democratic president in order to “save the country.”