The blame game gets even more crazy

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He is technically correct on the basic facts (Soros did assist the Nazis in confiscating Jewish property, he has stated that he feels no guilt about it, etc) but, as can only be expected from someone who actually takes Beck seriously, the conclusions he draws from those facts are utterly ridiculous.

In fact, Soros, then 13 and living under the protection of a non-Jewish Hungarian, on one occasion joined the older man when he was ordered by Nazis to inventory the estate of a Hungarian Jew who had fled. On another occasion, the local Jewish council had ordered Soros to deliver letters to local lawyers; Soros' father, Tivadar, realized the letters were to Jewish lawyers, and meant to expedite their deportation. He told George to warn the targets to flee, and ended George's work with the council.

Last I heard from his own mouth based on interviews Soros has had, he has a God Complex and considers the time he collaborated with the Nazis as one of the happiest times of his life and he isn't even remotely ashamed about it. Sounds to me is left the Jewish Faith behind long ago and is an atheist.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank defended a recent column where he admitted even if there is no evidence that Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck inspired Jared Loughner to shoot Congresswoman Giffords, criticism of Palin and Beck is still deserved because “both are finally being held to account for recklessly playing with violent images in a way that is bound to incite the unstable.”

Host Howard Kurtz asked the right question of Milbank in the following exchange:

Kurtz: “It’s fair to hold a talk show host responsible for what some violent or perhaps unbalanced person does because they like what this person says on the airwaves?”

Milbank: “Yes Howie in the aggregate . . . [they] need to worry about that fraction of 1% who just might be driven over the edge.”

Milbank offers the final justification for his assertion by saying “in Glenn Back’s case, I’ve documented a few cases in which it’s led a crazy person to snap.” Therefore Milbank believes even though rhetoric of the right might not be responsible in this case, attacking Beck and Palin now is a legitimate form of “rough justice” for their past sins. Milbank’s argument follows the tortured logic of Media Matters founder David Brock who claimed Beck was responsible for three thwarted assassination attempts either because a psychopath claimed Beck as an influence or some tangential evidence existed to suggest an unstable lunatic may have watched Beck at some point in their life.

What is most disturbing about this week’s entire conversation of “rhetoric” and summed up here, is what if by chance Loughner actually did have a t-shirt from the Beck/Bill O’Reilly “Bold Fresh Tour” or dare I say, had Sarah Palin’s Alaska saved on his DVR? Is it the serious argument of intelligent people that in such a case Beck and Palin would be responsible for the deranged individual’s actions? And even more, that in our society everyone’s free speech should be constrained by what a “fraction of 1%” might construe to be an incitement to violence? If that’s the case then Milbank better stop talking because as the author of an extremely unflattering biography of Beck, he himself could then be held responsible for Beck’s current fifteen operating death threats.

This ludicrous argument that agitators on the right or the left could in any way have culpability for the actions of one crazy person is seemingly so absurd, yet strangely so widespread amongst commentators. Thus Palin and Beck are entirely justified to defend themselves from anyone’s, yes I’ll use the word, libelous implication that they somehow are responsible for a violent act perpetrated by an unhinged “fan.” Beck has thus far laughed off such accusations, while Palin passionately declared them “reprehensible.” Yet no matter their reaction, the fact remains that such false accusations of blame are themselves dangerous forms of rhetoric, and if we’re playing the “words can incite violence” game, then they were likely the cause of yesterday’s death threat made to a Tea Party leader.

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

– John Green, father of nine-year-old Christina Green, who was killed in Saturday’s Tucson shootings.

Let me just say that I know the despicable, shameless, and dishonest antics of Inuyasha enough to know the source will probably be World Net Daily, crybaby conspiracist Glenn Beck, or a random post on the Free Republic. Regardless, it looks like many Jewish leaders and scholars disagree with Glenn Beck's nonsense.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/dana-milbank ... -violence/

I too can cut and paste.

I don't care if he cites World Net Daily, Newsbusters, WSJ, Fox News, or paranoidrightwingbloggersanonymous.net. Whateve,r just give the FULL UNEDITED CONTEXT SO I CAN INTERPRET THEM FOR MYSELF. So far Inuyasha has failed to do this for his "these were the happiest moments of my life" quote.

If you had bothered to look they also had video for you to watch, which proved their point. Right now Fox News has proven to have a much better track record than all the sources you use COMBINED, not that it is hard to have a better track record than the sources you use. The National Enquirer has a better track record than New York Times of late.

Well, we know that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and their irresponsible, hateful rhetoric had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the shooting in Tucson, because… well, they (and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right-wing punditacracy clown parade) told us so. Right? Right??

But what of the people who were actually shot, but survived, or who were eyewitnesses to the tragedy? What do they think? Who do they blame for the sorry state of the toxic political climate that led a complete lunatic like Jared Loughner to seek to inflict his “Second Amendment remedies,” on them, as per the innocent, blameless Sharron Angle?

Well, can’t say it’s much of a shock to report that at least one of the shooting victims, Eric Fuller, a 63-year-old disabled veteran who had campaigned for Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign last Fall, DOES blame Palin, Beck and Angle. Fuller, who was shot in the knee and wounded in the back, told Democracy Now that “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for second amendment activism has been fulfilled.” In remarks Fuller prepared in advance for the interview, he added “Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls.”

In my book, Mr. Fuller’s opinion holds more water than Palin’s, Beck’s, Angle’s, Limbaugh’s and the whole of the Fox News staff’s (especially Steeve Doocey, who is a blithering idiot) combined. He took a bullet, two, in fact, so he’s got a right to his opinion. He earned it with his own blood. Suck on that, Sarah Palin!

What’s pathetically ridiculous about the entire argument from the right that the specific words of these specific people had no effect on this matter because Loughner is so very obviously batshit crazy is that this ISN’T the first incident like this in recent memory. It’s (at least) the second (if not the third: the name Richard Poplawski ring a bell?).

Why are so few people in the media talking about what happened when Glenn Beck decided to make the tiny Tides Foundation into a fearsome component of his “the progressive movement wants to destroy America with their evil Socialism” conspiracy theories last year? It HAS happened already that a mentally unbalanced person has decided to fight the vast-leftwing conspiracy that Beck and others subscribe to and propagate, with violence. Just seven months ago, a bank-robber out on parole, Byron Williams, en route to murder the staff at the Tides Foundation, opened fire on Oakland police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Williams told told authorities that he wanted to foment a revolution by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching Fox News and was angered by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Williams thought that the Tides Foundation was part of a conspiracy in which the BP oil spill was a deliberate act of sabotage masterminded by George Soros and progressives.

Sound like a Glenn Beck fan to you?

(Self-described “progressive hunter,” Williams told a reporter that Beck “blew [his] mind.” Who I am to disagree?)

Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is a**holes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.

I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.

Even if the right has always been the spiritual home to the racist and cryptofascist fringe, from the KKK to the John Birch Society to today’s Teabaggers, there are crazy people all across the political spectrum. The next time—and there is going to be a next time—it might be a former member of the American middle class who has lost his home or pension who comes gunning after a Republican. The next shooter might come from the ranks of the 99ers. The next cold blooded killer could be a radical environmentalist. The next political assassin might be someone whose child died because their insurance company didn’t pay for a new medical treatment or ...?

This toxic political climate in America today is a direct or indirect consequence of a small number of politicians and pundits on the far right calling those who they disagree with “evil.” Does anyone with half a brain, really dispute that? Then something awful happens, like what happened in Tucson. And then there is more blame. Then the momentum of the bad craziness builds in some lone-wolf lefty lunatic and this energy reemerges with someone on the right getting hurt. And then it will start again. Back and forth, back and forth.

When, not if, the next politician, government official or TV news pundit who is killed turns out to be someone on the conservative side, Palin, Beck, Angle, Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the idiots at Fox News will have no one to blame but themselves.


Op-Ed by Richard Metzger found on his Dangerous Minds website found at www.dangerousminds.net

We get it. You've quoted that same post a million times, so put a sock in it already. And oh, looks like you've just proved that the crap you were parroting about the right wing inciting violence doesn't make sense now that someone wants to shoot a leader of the Tea Party .

Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is a**holes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.

I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.

I don't buy that rhetoric has any sort of consequences on political violence. The insane lack the checks and balances that the sane have, so they have the capacity to internalize to an extent that allows em to act the way they do. This makes em vulnerable to internalizing possibly anything. Who knows? An actress in a movie might cause em to shoot a president to impress her. I don't know too much about Glenn Beck and I dunno sh** about George Soros, so I don't have any comments for that. The article is pretty fair, but you're obviously still contributing to the political scapegoating. Yeehaw git yer guns, if they wanna take one of ours we'll take one of theirs!

And I'll admit I tend to skim through posts, but I am pretty conscientious when it comes to getting the point of it, so I do re-read if I have to.

Does violent rhetoric about violent rhetoric cause violence?

good article here