WAAAAHH! Someone call Bob an WAHmbulance!

Nice job trying to make yourself out to be the victim here. As usual, the hole you are in obviously isn't your fault (it never is) - it was the big bad liberals who dug it for you.

Maybe you should have done what most rational people would have done and simply admitted that this horrible attack had little to do with religion and everything to do with a hatred of everything liberal. Instead, you had to provide your own white wash and spin and ignore everything that was obvious about this attack.

If you had simply accepted and come to terms with this and maybe talk about how angry and guilty it must make you feel that someone committed such a horrible crime using the conservative banner that you yourself fly, you wouldn't be in this position of so much attention.

But go ahead, keep pulling out the victim card.

1) How in the hell can an attack in a church have little to do with religion?

2) this guy was sick - nobody in any mainstream conservative vain would ever think about condoning this. No conservative would spend one second under this guys banner.

3) ummm what hole is he in, and where did he pull a "victim card"?

So, guy with serious violent issues about Christian churches, liberals and gays walks into a church that is known for being liberal and open to gays. It seems that this shooter was trying to punch as many holes in his card at once. It sounds like he targeted this church specifically for its liberality and openness to gays (and that his ex-wife may have attended at some point). I gotta say, from the little known about the shooter, he was targeting the church becuase he hated christians, liberals who attended christian churches and gays who also attended christian churches. This isn't a guy looking to kill liberals or gays or Christians, he was gunning for liberal Christian gays.

Another classic example of why you closed comments on the prior post CY. The FACT is the first poster ignores the FACTS of the situation.

The perp hated liberals, gays, AND Christians (not necessarily in that order) - and probably a lot more than that. To absolutely ignore one of the groups in order to brand this perp as having acted

"...using the conservative banner..."

Allow me to point out a, to me, rather obvious problem with this myopia: the attack happened in a Christian CHURCH.

Ignore that context at your own peril.

PS: ibid - as Web and Penfold have both noted

I just loved the comment about the Mosque, it shows another liberal with their head placed firmly up their own rear end. First, let me say that violent attacks on people no matter their religious affiliations or lack thereof is morally wrong just so we're clear on that.

However what most liberals lack is a grasp of both the facts and reality. Islam (not radical but mainstream) would see homosexuals dead and non-Muslims dead, enslaved, or converted. So basically this guy's act falls right into their way of thinking. No I'm not implying he's a Muslim, just that his actions are in line with their ideology.

No all Muslims aren't bad, there are those that are liberal but they are sadly few and far between. Jamal Miftah is one and he has my support, as do the Bektashi Sufis in Macedonia. The practice of Taqqiya makes it difficult to sort the one bent on a global Caliphate from those who practice equality and tolerance. One way is to see which are persecuted by the Sunni and Shia majorities, but with deception ingrained into the religion I even this measure might become unreliable.

I think that you should let them rave (within the tasteful limits that you impose on all comments)

When liberals say what they really think, they lose the argument with the public.

Let's see, the guy hates Christians, liberals and gays............sounds like Fidel Castro to me, or Ahmadinejad..... or Adolph Hitler. In other words, the kind of guy with whom, if he were a head of state, Obama would really want to talk.

In what strange alternative universe is this guy operating under the banner of Rush Limbaugh?

He hated liberals and gays, a hatred fanned in the last 25 years by the Republican party and right wing nut jobs like Limbaugh and Coulter. If this were any other day, I'm sure Confederate Yankee would refer to the Unitarian Church as an "alleged" Christian Church, because they are the most LIBERAL church in America. They question patriarchy (ooh, feminazis), they wonder why your marriage is threatened by gays getting married and they are open to dialogue with anyone, Muslim, Wiccan, Episcopalian or Jew, without the starting point that the other's religion is flawed and their followers "corrected" by converting to Unitarianism.

Calling this an attack on Christians and ignoring the facts about this Christian church is an insult to the dead and pretty cheap spin. Its what you get when you equate liberals with Nazis and paint gay marriage as a threat to anybody outside of the 2 people getting married (if they made the wrong choice, like so many straight couples find out later when they divorce). All for cheap votes and to distract people from the fact that the rich people shipping our jobs overseas and busting unions are their real enemies. If it gets a few gays bashed or liberal Christians shot, what the heck, Karl Rove's team wins and backing a winner makes you feel better even if you're ignoring the game is rigged.

California Boy,

All CY did was point out that that church was hit for three reasons, not two, and that many people (like you) would have us believe otherwise.

The Liberals have a leg up on conservatives in the Nazzi name calling

"If it gets a few gays bashed or liberal Christians shot, what the heck"
Ummmmmm CYs post makes it clear that this act was unconscionable, and that through a series of small miracles significantly more bloodshed was avoided - that does not seem like an "what the heck" response to me.

And nice job pulling Carl Rove in, classy.

"Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state."

So, I guess all that guy down in Tennessee is guilty of is euthanasia, right? That liberal who put himself in harms way to protect his fellow church-goers was nothing but a vegetable anyway.

...Right?

When are you haters ever going to start taking responsibility for what you say?

NEWFOUND concern about domestic terrorism? Liberals haven't been complaining about the Klan for the past fifty years?

I'm glad to read that some of you are against violent attacks, no matter who it is getting attacked.

But what would the tone of this discussion be if the shooter was of arab or muslim descent? Would you still be so hesitant to call it terrorism?

It's not like we haven't read other comments here at this very blog about this liberal or that needing "two to the back of the head" or to be "taken out and shot".

I'm going to have to go with CY on this one.

I don't think this is quite as hilarious as Liberals do. They see it as a victory for "their side".

Maybe it was.

Brando:

Do I sound like I'm laughing?

I take political violence very seriously. Which is why I've never found right wing "jokes" about killing liberals very funny.

How exactly did this crime constitute political violence? This guys' actions were violent and deadly, but political? I think it is accurate to state that one of the reasons he selected the Church was because of its liberal policies, but i think it strains credulity to claim that this is political violence.
I posit that political violence is the sort used by a political party against another political party or the public in general to further their political agenda. I don't see that here.

Penfold:

You're trying to narrow the definition of the term "political violence" down to the point where it's practically meaningless.

"Political violence" is violence aimed at people because of their politics, whether engineered by a political party or not. The Klan murders of civil rights activists was "political violence." The Peekskill riot was "political violence." The murder of MLK was "political violence," as was the murder of the Goldmark family, the bombing of the Murrah building, and the attack on 9/11.

Given that the man targeted that church because he hated its politics, how do his actions NOT qualify as "political violence?"

Pamela, "Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state" is a tagline that came about by noticing that those on the far left are overly prone towards emoting instead of engaging logic when they speak, which I may note your disjointed and logically flawed association only goes to prove.

Vuoto asked:

But what would the tone of this discussion be if the shooter was of arab or muslim descent? Would you still be so hesitant to call it terrorism?

I think that is a very fair question, and after the better part of a decade where the most common acts of Muslim violence we see in the media are bona fide acts of Islamic terrorism, I think for some there will be a tendency to automatically equate such attacks with terrorism as a knee-jerk response, no doubt about it. At the same time, western media has done a decent job separating out other Muslim-caused crimes such as honor killings without describing it as terrorism, so I think that the record would get straight eventually.

I honestly don't know where the line is drawn between a hate crime and a terrorist attack as there is often overlap, and I don't think you can create an over-arching rule. I think you have to take these events on a case-by-case basis.

CY: "Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state" is a tagline that came about by noticing that those on the far left are overly prone towards emoting instead of engaging logic when they speak, which I may note your disjointed and logically flawed association only goes to prove."

You mean as opposed to such coherent and logical "arguments" as:

"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation." -- Michael Savage 7/11/2006

"We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." — Ann Coulter, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, January 2002

"We do detest you, we despise you and we hold you in complete and utter contempt…The day will come, the day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals, it’s going to be amusing to watch, very amusing to watch." -- Lee Rodgers, on liberals, KSFO radio, 6/30/06

"If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals?" -- State Sen. Mike Gunn (R-MS), quoted in the Atlanta Journal -Constitution, 12/31/96

How is the association I've pointed out between dehumanizing language and dehumanizing actions "logically flawed?"

Your reference to the Klan makes my point, the Klan was, at one point, a major political party in the US and its agenda was to limit the enfranchisement of blacks and other persons of color. They used violence as one of their tools to attempt to achieve that goal.
The shooter targeted the church, as i mentioned earlier, for its liberal beliefs, Christianity and acceptance of gays. Adkisson intentionally chose a church that was Christian and gay - it is more plausible that Adkisson was hoping to target Christians and gays.

Dehumanizing the 'enemy' has been a tried and true tactic that has gone on since the first caveman decided that he wanted/needed/had to have what another possessed.

Demonizing in the current political climate is an equal measure of evil, on both sides. Both have done it, and will continue to, much to the detriment to the overall body politic. The basic issue stands that, as Bob has stated before, that the majority of liberals these days write off violence on 'their side of the fence' as a 'neccessary evil'.. in and that the current 'groupthink' that the Democrats/Liberals/Socialists have is NOT necessarily in for the 'good of the nation' but for the 'good of the party' and endevour to promote anything that will allow them to retain power.

To bring in historical precedence... both the NAZIs (National Socialists) and Stalin ('Man of Steel') AKA the man of tyhe Communist Party put party ahead of nation, and ahead of their own people.

My question is, why say/do/perpetrate an issue that causes damage to the Republic as a whole? Is it the need to rebel against 'the man' so great and ingrained that you are willing to sacrifice what so many died to build? Its a sick thing and almost pathalogical for people to want to see America lessened in any way, especially since so many have died to make us what we are today... and before you can even say it, no matter who or what party is in power, you should remember that America should always come first...

The fact that the Klan used to have clout hardly refutes my point (especially since the murders I had in mind happened in the '60s, long after the Klan could be accurately described as a political party on a par with Democrats or Republicans.)

The man targeted the church because he perceived it as a hotbed of "liberalism." "Liberalism" is a political viewpoint.

Why are you so intent about redefining what he did in this manner? The fact remains that the right has, for the past couple of decades, gotten increasingly violent and dehumanizing when talking about liberals. Do you really imagine that dehumanizing and violent rhetoric is not going to lead to dehumanizing and violent actions?

Big Country, please cite for me some quotes from PROMINENT liberal commentators that compare to the quotes I've already cited from Ann Coulter and Michael Savage.

Michael Moore says of Americans that "They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet ... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks,"
Hillary Clinton says "This administration is waging war on poor children,"
Ramsey Clark stops says "Regime change! George Bush has to go and we have the power to do it. The officials of the [Bush] government shall be removed from office for crimes and misdemeanor; their crime against peace, and for use of torture in Iraq."
Patty Murray (Sen, D, WA) says "He's (Osama bin Laden) been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health-care facilities, and these people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that."
Jessica Lange says "I despise him [President George W. Bush]. I despise his administration and everything they stand for. It is an embarrassing time to be an American. It really is. It’s humiliating."
Julian Bond says "[Republicans] idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side."
Paul Begala says "The difference between Martin Sheen and George W. Bush is Martin Sheen is actually convincing when he acts like he's president."
Hillary Clinton says "the Bush administration is out to undo the accomplishments of seven Presidents - Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman and both Roosevelts".
Bill Moyers says that Republicans are planning "the deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America."

If there's one thing I know about conservatives, its that they don't default to physically attacking anyone they dislike. Every time I read about violence it's always someone other than "God and country" mom and apple pie baseball and the US Army Americans. Its either an angry young man who feels slighted or an older angry crank whose life hasn't worked out and who has to blame someone else so he doesn't feel like killing HIMSELF.

This guy hates the Christian church, says the bible is all wrong and contradictory, so he can't be the 'conservative Christian guy attacking the liberal gay loving Christian church" the left says he is... he hates christianity period!

The way actual conservative Christians react to things like the unitarian universalist church is to pray for them, not SHOOT them.

Deranged Anti-War protester, unable to find American soldier, murders civilian with an ax.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=cp_fc6h5g7n673&show_article=1

I breathless await your denouncement of Howard Zinn and Arianna Huffington, Pamela.

Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, Earth First, the SLA, the Unabomber, ELF/ALF, (Critical Mass at least hasn't killed anybody...........yet)

Bush voters, the lot of them.

Great response, Big Country. Pamela, those are just a small sample. The hatred, the violence, the repression, over and over again in this country comes from the left. The election cheating, the Canadians coming to Wisconsin to vote Dem, the homeless 'voting' for the current democrat governor of Oregon, thousands of votes listing city hall as their HOME address and they were COUNTED, the son of the Wisconsin democrat pol slashing the tires on a Republican party van trying to bring disabled people to the polling stations, the bullet holes through the windows of the Bush campaign HQ, the woman on the news who wished Clarence Thomas' wife would feed him lots of butter so he would have a heart attack and die, etc etc etc.

there is SO MUCH from the left, and almost NOTHING from the right. Abortion doctors shot? one in the past 15 years. And we always decry those people who do it.

But what would the tone of this discussion be if the shooter was of arab or muslim descent? Would you still be so hesitant to call it terrorism?

Of course, if the shooter were Muslim the right would not hesitate to call it terrorism, and the left would insist it was just a lone nut case and that religion and politics had nothing to do with it. Or that it was justified by Amerikkka's Islamophobia.

Though both Unitarianism and Universalism have their roots in Christian tradition, there are few of those under the present-day umbrella term of "Unitarian Universalist" who consider themselves Christians.

Of course UU churches welcome everyone, even presumably Trinitarian Christians who are open to dialog, but one does not have to call himself a Christian to be a member of the church, and I personally knew neopagans who participated in services of the particular UU church that was targeted.

We might know more when and if they release the contents of his letter, but I doubt the Christian element had anything to do with his selection of a target.

It's disingenuous to claim that his hatred of liberals was somehow not to blame for his actions. It's disingenuous in the same manner that trying to disconnect Islam from Islamic terrorism is.

On the other hand, don't miss the fact that this shooter is considered a criminal by the vast majority of our society, from the most liberal to the most conservative. In much the same way keep in mind how Timothy McVeigh was viewed and how he was put to death by our society.

On the other hand, OBL has approval ratings that orbit the 50% mark in many areas of the Umma.

BTW, the UU Church is not a "Christian" church, although individual members may be. There are no crosses on their churches, they do not believe in the divity of Jesus, etc. As the caveman said to the GEICO rep at the restaurant, "Next time do a little research".

Chris, you beat me to it!

Actually, I'd love to see the Democratic Party apologize for the Klan myself, being as they benefited heavily from their terror campaigns for decades.

You think blacks in the 1870s-1930s were voting for the Party of the Copperheads, or the Party of Lincoln?

Game Set and Match...

I think that my point was made to Pam now... Like I said, and which she failed to adress, is that under NO CICUMSTANCES should we as 'The American People' as a whole forget that "United we stand, divided, we fall" and that the current crop of 60s leftovers and their wannabes in college now have never understood or appreciated just how f'n lucky they are to be in a country that allows them to have the liencency and forthrightness to put up with their BS.

Someone mentioned John Walker Lindh... in my grandfathers time (1944) there would have been no trial, no nothin... his a$$ would have just been shot out of hand for the traitor that he is. And if by some miricle he made it back to stand trial, he would have been given a fair trial, found guilty of treason in time of war, and then hung by the neck until dead, and buried in an unmarked grave so REAL patriots wouldn't desecrate it.

Big Country, I'm not talking about celebrities badmouthing a president, or commentators expressing the hope that an administration gets voted out or even pundits accusing politicians of crimes and demanding that they get put on trial for them. Nor am I talking about vehement criticism of a political party.

I'm talking here about people from their bully pulpits accusing entire groups of ordinary Americans of treason and strongly implying violence. I'm talking here about someone like Ann Coulter saying that liberals like me and my family are only kept from treason out of fear of physical harm. I'm talking about someone like Michael Savage comparing us to vermin and disease. I'm talking about a nationally broadcast commentator not so obliquely expressing the hope that Al Qaida bomb the city where I live.

And I'm sorry, I'm not going to enter into this widespread fiction that such rhetoric is as common among well-known leftist pundits as it is among well-known right wing pundits. It isn't. Like actual political violence, violent rhetoric in this country tends to come from the right -- not the left.

White wash? White wash? Why is it that the left finds the term "black hole" a racist term, but "white wash" is okay? Just curious/

Sorry Techie, but the SLA and the Weathermen notwithstanding, political violence in this country tends to come from the right -- not the left.

The Peekskill riot, the Goldmark murders, the lynching epidemic, the Klan, the bombings of abortion clinics, the Oklahoma City bombing...

Would you like me to go into more detail?

Pamela,

Michael Moore famously remarked that the terrorists were stupid to hit NYC, when they could have killed more Republicans by choosing a different target.

Spare me the "I'm so oppressed" malarky.

Newsflash, there isn't a lot of "political violence" in this nation to begin with, Thank the Lord.

@ Pamela -
Just because the Klan was not on par with the Republicans or Democrats does not lessen their political motives. In fact, as a marginalized group, they are more likely to engage in violent behavior, not less, because they feel their message is not being heard.
I am not the one "re-defining" here, as I have continuously acknowledged that one of the reasons Adkisson selected the Church was because of its liberal agenda. You are the one seeking to redefine and limit the killing as "political" when it, based on all accounts, is more accurately described as religious and sexual orientation based. From what I have read, i don't think that the parishioner's political beliefs were the major factor in the shooting. I think it was religion and his hatred of gays. It seems you wish to completely ignore that Christians were victims. Why is that?
And your statement that the "Right" has become increasingly violent and dehumanizing is nothing should have been balanced out with the the rising vitriol from the Left and their willingness to engage in violent behavior and wanton destruction as a means of conveying their views. It's not the Right planning the "Recreate '68" at the DNC convention this summer. It was not the "Right" that attempted, and failed, to shut down the RNC and NYC in 2004. It is not the Right that store urine and feces to throw at police. If these are not signs of dehumanization, then nothing is.

So, ok, let's run with this a little. I'm on the left in most ways, but I'm with Confederate Yankee on the selective outrage thing. I know we do it. Every side does it. But right now, Confederate Yankee here is basically doing the same thing, but from the other side: selective non-outrage.

What I mean is that he says the shooter was basically a nutjob, a lone wacko, and that it's intellectually dishonest to use this as some indictment of 'the evil that lurks under the surface of the American right', or whatever. Fair enough.

But imagine the scenario being a little different: imagine the guy was a Muslim, also a lone wacko with deep psychological problems, with no connections to terrorist groups, no history of religious radicalism, etc etc. Just a lone crazy guy who happened to be Muslim.

I bet Confederate Yankee, suddenly, would most definitely want to talk about the 'environment' and the 'culture' that allowed hateful ideas to flourish - spew enough hate, and eventually someone is going to be unbalanced enough to act on it. It will be taken as proof that terrorism - and the shooting will be called terrorism if a Muslim does it - is an omnipresent threat, and action must be taken against 'those people'.

Basically, if your side winds up looking bad, it's a lone wacko. If someone else's side winds up looking bad, suddenly you'll find yourself believing, truly, that the guy really isn't so different from from the non-violent blowhards that you're just sure inspired this killing.

Demonstrate that the Klan is historically "Right-wing".

I was born and raised in GA. We had 130 years of uninterrupted Democrat governors. (1872 - 2002)

The foot soldiers of the "Solid South" weren't pulling the levers for Alf Landon or Wendell Willikie.

@Pamela
The words in the second line of my third paragraph "is nothing" were left in accidentally, the statement makes little sense as written and i want to acknowledge my error to avoid confusion.

So, ok, let's run with this a little. I'm on the left in most ways, but I'm with Confederate Yankee on the selective outrage thing. I know we do it. Every side does it. But right now, Confederate Yankee here is basically doing the same thing, but from the other side: selective non-outrage.

What I mean is that he says the shooter was basically a nutjob, a lone wacko, and that it's intellectually dishonest to use this as some indictment of 'the evil that lurks under the surface of the American right', or whatever. Fair enough.

But imagine the scenario being a little different: imagine the guy was a Muslim, also a lone wacko with deep psychological problems, with no connections to terrorist groups, no history of religious radicalism, etc etc. Just a lone crazy guy who happened to be Muslim.

I bet Confederate Yankee, suddenly, would most definitely want to talk about the 'environment' and the 'culture' that allowed hateful ideas to flourish - spew enough hate, and eventually someone is going to be unbalanced enough to act on it. It will be taken as proof that terrorism - and the shooting will be called terrorism if a Muslim does it - is an omnipresent threat, and action must be taken against 'those people'.

Basically, if your side winds up looking bad, it's a lone wacko. If someone else's side winds up looking bad, suddenly you'll find yourself believing, truly, that the guy really isn't so different from from the non-violent blowhards that you're just sure inspired this killing.

Sorry for the double-post. I thought the first one got blocked.

Please! Jeez!

A deranged, evil man chose his hatreds, one from Column A, two from Column B, packed and delivered them via shotgun to innocents souls.

That he's got both "sides" arguing over which type of ideological rhetoric can be blamed for cold-blooded murder must be the cause for much hilarity in Hell today.

This funny picture does a superb job of portraying the true difference between left-wing and pro-US worldviews.

For such staunch advocates of Darwinian evolution, leftists fail to see the irony of their own failure to adapt to Darwinian selection.

Moore isn't a 'pundit'? Moyers doesn't count? Just what do you want? Oh well... seeing that "AirAmerika" failed so miserably and that the concept of a 'liberal talkshow host' bombs 9 out od ten times, I guess we'll just have to roll with the punches.

And BTW: The thing I look forward to most is when and if (God Forbid) that the Democrats take over the White House, who are you going to blame then for your troubles? When this country goes marching off the deep end, y'all are going to still be screaming "It's all Bush's fault" like the mantra it has become.

Wake up. It's 2008, realize that the 60s was a drug induced stupidity-fest of false rebellion and out and out cowardice, realize you need to contribute to the world in a more tangible fashion (thank a troop for their service and volunteer at a nursing home) and above all, get over youself... liberalism is all about selfishness...this is why you act the way you do when confronted with reality, why its all about "me me me" 24-7-365... a little less about you you you and more about "we're all in this together, whether you or I like it or not."

Pamela Troy, Are people who are pro-life responsible for bombings at abortion clinics? Pro-life positions covet a rather large swath of American political opinion. Coleman McCarthy, Nat Hentoff just to name a few off the top of my head are most definetly not conservatives. Many people espousing left wing liberation theology are pro life as well.

Wow, the Peekskill Riots, all the way back in 1949, and with a body count of 0.

I can counter with the LA Riots of 1992 which killed 53 people, but now we're just doing tit-for-tat.

Point is, crazy sometimes is just crazy.

Sorry but this guy doesn't seem like you typical conservative. Sure we can parade out whackadoos from either side. However the Daily KoS (you are aware that KoS is "Kill on Sight" in the lingo of gamers) and the HuffPo are very representative of the liberal mindset.

The guy was bitter and angry over his life, probably mentally imbalanced and latched onto something. That thing was Conservatism. It reminds me of the " made me do it" types. Heavy Metal, Rock and Roll, Rap music, Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, Race, Parents, you name it and someone has blamed their crimes/shortcomings on it. However the liberal media is of course going to play up the "conservative" angle.

True irony would be that it comes out that this guy was really a liberal and all the conservative writings and such were to discredit conservatives and conservative candidates with a murderous rampage in hopes to get the Obamasiah anointed..er, elected. However he didn't die like he was supposed to so he can then confess the truth. If that were to happen you'd have liberals sorely wishing someone in the church had exercised their 2nd Amendment rights and silenced the guy.

As for killing liberals...I"m completely against such a thing. If that happened the Conservatives would then be stuck paying for all these entitlement programs they've saddled us with by ourselves.

Funny how these sort of news stories never come out about eco-terrorists. The authors of the books in their libraries are never blamed for the actions of those that read them.

Hannity issued an challenge today on his show, and I'd like to repeat it here (forgive me if someone else already has, I just skimmed the comments thus far): Show me any statement in Mr. Hannity's books that could reasonably be shown to condone or advocate things like this church shooting. I'll need specific references, including what chapter of what book it appears in, page number and edition of the book you found it in.

I'll even buy a copy of any lefty book--price not to exceed $25--to anyone who can show me such a reference. I am the one that will determine if it's been successfully accomplished, however.

Hey, Pam, here's a 'coarsening' quote for you...

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2008/06/14/obama-no-surrender-if-they-bring-a-knife-to-the-fight-we-bring-a-gun/

This one from the Messiah himself.

Your comments, please...

The guy was a nut ball, plain and simple.

"From what I have read, i don't think that the parishioner's political beliefs were the major factor in the shooting. I think it was religion and his hatred of gays. It seems you wish to completely ignore that Christians were victims. Why is that?"

They weren't Christian. Unitarian Universalism is not expressly Christian, though, as I pointed out in a previous post, they have their roots in Christian tradition -

[time out]

Let's give a little lesson on this. In an overly simplified nutshell, Universalists were Christians who came to believe that the entire human race was saved by Christ. Unitarians were
Christians who said "you know what? The Trinity doesn't make sense. I believe in god as a unique person, not three. That means God the Son doesn't exist as such, and Jesus was somehow less than God, though perhaps more than a man, who knows?"

Both traditions merged in Unitarian Universalism due to the fact that the theology led to the idea that if God is One, and God also saved the entire human race, then maybe those other religions have some share in the truth of God too. "Let's get together with Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Wiccans, etc, and talk."

[time in]

- it's impossible to consider UU as a Christian sect.

The shooter's wife attended the church, so he would (should?) have been well aware of the distinction.

I wouldn't be surprised if the shooter were a Christian Identity adherent. Those people often scoff at mainline Christians, who they think have been compromised by the Kenites (Satan's offspring via Eve and Cain), and their attitude might well be misinterpreted as antichristian by those uninitiated.

I think there is little doubt that the liberal politics of the UU congregation was the primary element that got them targeted.

And I'm sorry, I'm not going to enter into this widespread fiction that such rhetoric is as common among well-known leftist pundits as it is among well-known right wing pundits. It isn't. Like actual political violence, violent rhetoric in this country tends to come from the right -- not the left.

Fiction? Time for a history lesson.

As a matter of unquestioaned fact, the majority of political assassinations in America have come from the left.

John Wilkes Booth was a cross between Robert Byrd and Alec Baldwin, Charles J. Guiteau was a John Edwards-type lawyer who was told by the great beyond (perhaps channelling?) to murder President Garfield, Leon F. Czolgosz, who shot William McKinley was a leftwing anarchist. Guiseppe Zangara who tried to kill FDR was a whacked-out anti-capitalist, and we all know Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist sympathizer.

Wannabe white Black Panther Sam Byck got himself killed trying to take out Nixon, and a year later, loonie lefty cultist Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to take out President Ford, who was the target of lefty counterculture loser Sarah Jane Moore just 17 days later.

Andrew Mickel, an Indymedia contributor, carried out the latest purely poltical assassination I'm aware of on American soil. Not surprisingly, this guy was a graduate of far left Evergreen State College. He has been convicted of murder, and has been sentenced to death.

The evidence is pretty convincing that if there is a political assassination attempt in America, that either the left or the mentally ill are behind it.

Internationally? Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Castro, Che...

Shall I go on? Whether you prefer to discuss purely domestic political violence, or look at the international scene, the far left has a bloody, wide and deep track record of political killings.

Call it "fiction" if you want Pamela Troy. We know where the bodies are buried.

Leftists have already killed 30+ million Democratic voters. It is called abortion.

I just realized that there is no point in trying to argue with Pam... she's basically your dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco Baby Boomer... if she's not THE definition of liberal then I'm from Mars.

Here's my guess. A bunch of you right wing nuts have posted comments here posing as liberals in an attempt to make liberals look silly.

err..

not sure if someone pointed this out or not, but...

the Unitarian church is not a Christian Church - it's just a church, but holds no doctrinal beliefs that in any way resembles Christian beliefs, even the more liberal ones.

A friend of mine got married once in a Unitarian church, where the pastor was an avowed Atheist.

So lets be careful with our labels, kids...

David:
Why would we need to do that? No need to help, the libs are doing juuuuuuuuuuust peachy-fine on their own!

Back to the topic of 'political violence,' as raised above by Pamela. I think there's a significant difference between violence caused by a crazy person because he hates a particular political faction, versus violence caused in order to intimidate members of a faction and keep them from exercising their power. The former is insanity, and probably qualifies as a hate crime. The second involves the intent to coerce, which (IMHO) qualifies it as terrorism.

I don't believe that the perpetrator in this instance was out to intimidate people from attending this church or others like it. Nor do I believe that any of the pundits criticized and defended above are out to intimidate their political rivals and keep them from advocating as they will. It seems to me that this guy was deranged, and that he chose to fix his focus on a political combination that had meaning in his warped mind.

There's no telling what a deranged mind will decide to fixate on. In this case, we can blame the pundits on the Right for saying some inflammatory things in their pursuit of ratings. But this individual might just as easily have decided to listen to the words of a Randy Rhodes, or a Bill Ayers, or a Jeremiah Wright. It wouldn't make the person or the actions any better or worse; it would only have changed the location of the atrocity.

Any message can be fixated on by a madman and used to motivate him to horrible acts. There's no way to rid ourselves of such potential sources of 'inspiration' short of banning all inflammatory speech from anyone on any side of the political spectrum, which isn't a course I think any of us are interested in.

I have to get this off my chest as it has been bothering me for decades. The term "right wing" was used by Stalin. He used it to delegitimize Hitler and national socialism. Stalin was of course in favor of international socialism, wanting all socialism to be run through Moscow. Naturally any movement that didn't cede to his demands was "right wing". It his ignorant to equate a proponent of free market, small government philosophy to a socialist whether they be national or international. There was never a fascist who desired a smaller central government.It's by its very nature an oxymoron. Please forgive any errors as I am recovering from surgery and under the influence of pain killers.

Sometimes crazy is just crazy. I reject the notion that censorship of pundits will prevent sick people from being violent. Pamela is blathering on as though she is sure that at some time in his life, this man has even heard commentary by any of the named pundits or that he would be aroused to kill by same. Maybe she's the type who wants to kill someone when she hears them disagree with her. I certainly don't feel the same way when I hear Arianna Huffington. I just feel puzzled at her untenable belief system.

I respect people's freedom, but the criminally insane need to be institutionalized. It's been a blind spot for the left and right for different--and generally good--reasons. These crimes are, thankfully, a rare occurence, and I grieve for the victims.

The Unitarians aren't Christians, so the guy was an idiot in addition to whatever else he might be.

Goodness... reading some of the comments here I see that all too many people on the Leftosphere have completely abandoned any connection to reality. Being charitable, I guess you could say that they have begun to believe their own propaganda. They really seem to believe that Karl Rove, or George Bush, or Rush Limbaugh advocate the murder of liberals or gays. The only problem with this slab of paranoia (besides the fact that it is grotesque) is that there isn't a scrap of evidence to support it!

People can be opposed to, say, gay marriage, and still in no way support freaking murdering gay people (it's pathetic that I even have to point that out!). This is why the Left will never be a dominant force in American politics-- they traffic all too often in absurd caricatures, ad hominem attacks, and ridiculous strawmen. They don't address arguments. Instead they fantasize absurd accusations, and then demand that their opponents disprove them.

Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.

Pamela, you're a writer, right? You do realize that "liberalism is a persistent vegetative state" is meant to be taken metaphorically, right? Just like a liberal who accuses conservative of being "mindless zombies" isn't actually advocating cranial removal and mass reanimation of Republican corpses.

And if there's no hate on the left, why does HuffPo feel the need to close its comments section whenever a prominent conservative suffers something unfortunate?

In my view, left and right should stop attributing blame to one another. Given the limited facts, here's some observations which hopefully won't be too controversial.
1. The guy expressed hatred for liberals and gays.
2. The guy has in the past expressed animosity towards Christians.
[Note carefully that 1 and 2 aren't terribly logically consistent since most liberals are pro-gay, and most Christians will tell you homosexuality is wrong.]
3. The guy murdered 2 people in a church which does not profess Christian theology. (No offense or support implied; this is a simple statement of fact.)
I tend to lend more credence to #1 than #2 since the info in #1 is more recent history.

That said, it sounds to guy is right-leaning. Far more importantly, however, is that it appears the guy is MENTALLY ILL. Not right, not left.

In the '90s John Salvi murdered people at an abortion center under circumstances which suggested he was ill, rather than a right-wing foot soldier. He was summarily jailed for life, and he took his own life in jail. Justice was NOT done. It has always seemed to me that the cry for blood (from the left) was so great that this guy was treated as a criminal rather than a sick person. I understand that victims' loved ones want justice, but in cases of mental illness, there is not guilt to be judged. Think Mark Chapman.

With malice towards none, charity to all, and sympathies to the victims and their loved ones.

The purpose of the Klan was to drive Republicans out of the South by intimidation and violence.

So which political party did the Klan support? The Democrats. Did the Democrats disavow the Klan when the Klan was operating in their interest? Nope. Well some did. However, being anti-Klan was generally a Republican thing. And guess what. Being anti-slavery was generally a Republican thing - you might want to read up some on the history of our first Republican President.

Which political party in America was the first to support equal rights for blacks? Republicans.

Now I have to admit that there is significant Republican intolerance for gays. I'm against it. As is CY. And like the racism of the Democrat party it is slowly melting away under the force of social pressure.

Of course there is also the vile Fred Phelps - A Democrat.

A rage-filled nutball, no matter what political or religious beliefs he expresses, is still a rage-filled nutball, and if he decides he wants to kill other people, he really isn't going to care who's in the line of fire. And it doesn't really matter if he has access to guns, knives, or C4. I don't know why this is so hard for some people to understand.

Let us not forget Bill Clinton who blamed the OK City bombing on talk radio as well.

Former KKK member David Duke once ran as a Republican for Governor and Senator of Louisiana. The MSM and their Democrat pets loved to smear all Republicans with the Duke brush. Every GOP candidate was sooner or later compared to Duke.

But these days Duke is a disciple of Mother Cindy Sheehan. Funny how Duke disappeared from the MSM's radar as soon as he started parroting Democrat Party talking points.

This stroll down Memory Lane was brought to you as a public service announcement.

Just like a liberal who accuses conservative of being "mindless zombies" isn't actually advocating cranial removal and mass reanimation of Republican corpses.

I believe the reanimation of corpses for political purposes is a Chicago specialty. They have a Democratic machine designed especially for the purpose.

Techie:

"Michael Moore famously remarked that the terrorists were stupid to hit NYC, when they could have killed more Republicans by choosing a different target."

Never heard that one. Got a cite for that quote? Where did he say it? When?

Pamela,

I've rarely seen anyone call out their political opponents and be consequently paddled as badly as you have been.

I was going to join in and discuss some choice quotes from Al Franken, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and James Carville. And I was going to point out that Tim McVeigh was certainly far more leftist than not. Nevermind the Unabomber.

But this would just be overkill. You've been intellectually thumped.

Some aspirin might help.

-- TIA

"one of the reasons Adkisson selected the Church was because of its liberal agenda. You are the one seeking to redefine and limit the killing as "political" when it, based on all accounts, is more accurately described as religious and sexual orientation based."

LOL! If it was based on their "liberal agenda" it was based on their politics.

But again, I really have to wonder why you seem to have such a big emotional stake in avoiding the term "political murder."

Techie: It's not the Right planning the "Recreate '68" at the DNC convention this summer.

I've yet to meet a single person on the left, liberal or otherwise, who has any desire to see a replay of 1968 at the Democratic Convention. If there are leftists who are planning this, it's a VERY small minority.

Selective:What I mean is that he says the shooter was basically a nutjob, a lone wacko

It's those kind of wackos and nutjobs that make the rhetoric used by people like Coulter, Savage, and Rodgers so very, very irresponsible.

Techie: Demonstrate that the Klan is historically "Right-wing".

Well, aside from its fairly consistent opposition to racial and sexual equality, religious freedom and unions, what would you accept as a "demonstration" of the Klan as a right-wing organization?

Techie: I was born and raised in GA. We had 130 years of uninterrupted Democrat governors. (1872 - 2002) The foot soldiers of the "Solid South" weren't pulling the levers for Alf Landon or Wendell Willikie.

That's nice. I was born and raised in Louisiana.

Are you, in all seriousness, claiming that the Dixiecrats were liberals?

The man was more likely to kill a Buddhist, Agnostic, or Atheist with those shotgun rounds and just as likely to kill a Pagan as he was to kill a Christian in that UU church. He was either woefully ignorant about their lack of formal creed or he was far more motivated by the church's liberal social stances than his hatred of Christianity. UU churches typically don't even display Christian iconography.

Big Country:

Yes, Moore would qualify as a pundit. Yes, Moyers certainly counts. And I've not heard either of them make statements with the kind of borderline violence in the quotes I offered from Coulter and Savage.

I know too many liberals to accept your claim that we're all a bunch of selfish cowards. Liberals put their lives on the line in the 1960s working for black civil rights in the south. Some of them, like Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo, payed the ultimate price. I've known liberals who spent their lives working with the physically and mentally disabled, the poor, the sick. I've known liberals who fought in the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.

What makes you think you're entitled to insult thousands of people you've never even met merely because you dislike their politics?

Techie:

Did all the examples I cited date back to 1949 and have a body count of zero?

Here's one more, by the way. The 1979 Greensboro Massacre.

M. Simon.

You need to read more recent history.

Ever heard of something called "The Southern Strategy?"

Ignorant American:

I suppose "thumping" is in the eye of the beholder.

It does amaze me to see the sheer level of historical revisionism going on here. The Dixiecrats were LIBERALS? The Klan wasn't right wing? John Wilkes booth was a liberal?

Are you guys counting on your audience being very very young, or just very very ignorant?

“...accusing entire groups of ordinary Americans of treason and strongly implying violence” “...comparing us to vermin and disease.”

LOL

"Shoot him [Charlton Heston] with a .44 Bulldog." - Spike "there was not one black soldier in both of those films" Lee

"Hitler was a very great man" – Louis Farrakhan

"Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

- Robert Carlyle Byrd (D) incumbent US Senator and Exalted Cyclops in the "right wing" KKK

"I want to cut his [Obama’s] nuts off." Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown" in January 1984 during a conversation with Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman. Jackson at first denied the remarks, then accused Jews of conspiring to defeat him.

That’s just off the top of my head. There are plenty more.

Sorry CY, but while I am wildly curious about how southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth would qualify as a leftist, the fact remains that when it comes to political mayhem in this country, it's the right wing that's done the most damage and been most deadly. The reason is quite simple. Not many police departments or law are likely to look the other way in the same manner they do with right-wing crackpots. It's amazing what a sense of impunity can do.

There's the lynching epidemic that extended from the Reconstruction era well into the twentieth century. The death toll for that is pretty horrifying, as was the method of killing, which typically involved torture. And these lynch mobs operated with such freedom they frequently posed for pictures beneath some bleeding, castrated cinder that had once been a human being.

And of course, there's the Peekskill riot, another product of policemen not only looking the other way, but taking part -- terribly disappointing, I know, given that none of those people leaving a folk music concert were actually killed, but the mob did manage to bloody up a bunch of leftists (including their wives and children) by throwing rocks through the car windows. Imagine the salutory lesson those little nippers got, watching their dads get beaten up by mobs while the police looked the other way! And sometimes even took part!

I'm sure I don't need to got into too much detail about the mobs in the south that mistreated civil rights demonstrators. Should the firebombing of black churches be considered an extension of the lynching epidemic? Or should they be categorized along with the current bombings of clinics, the assassinations of physicians and clinic workers?

Then there's the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. "Only" five died there, but they were shot while television cameras rolled -- the footage of a desperate woman trying to comfort her dying Communist husband is sure to warm the cockles of Ann Coulter's heart -- and those of her fans. Who knows, maybe Ann has it on tape. Probably added a laugh track.

And let's not forget the Goldmarks. Ever hear of them? Charles Goldmark was exactly the kind of attorney you guys just love to hate -- civil rights, not corporate, and the child of a woman who'd been labeled a commie back in the day. Seems a local right-wing group called The Duck Club who told David Lewis Rice all about what a nasty ol' commie Goldmark was. So on Christmas Eve Rice forced his way into the Goldmark's house, tied up the family, Charles, his wife, and their sons, chloroformed them, and killed them, stabbing them in the heads with a knife.

And, of course, there's the rise of Militias in the '90s, the bombing of the Murrah Building...

Nope, when it comes to political violence in this country, the left must take a back seat to the right. For sheer brutality and body-count, we just can't compete.

"It's those kind of wackos and nutjobs that make the rhetoric used by people like Coulter, Savage, and Rodgers so very, very irresponsible."

I guess the same should also be said regarding Hollywood filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese. And the Bush assassination "jokes" of Randi Rhodes.

Pamela:
What makes you think you're entitled to insult thousands of people you've never even met merely because you dislike their politics?

A good point, in a sense. But by the same token, what entitles people to mock the populations of entire states because they vote "red?" There are double standards on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide, but when you insist that your double standard is better than the other sides' you just tend to loose credibility.

Malclave:

I hold no brief for Randi Rhodes, but what did Martin Scorsese do?

"I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for..." -- Howard Dean

"George W. Bush is evil. He is a terrorist. He is evil. He is arrogant. And he is out of control." -- Julianne Malveaux

"Until your daddy learns that it's not 'fun' to kill, keep your doggies and kitties away from him. He's so hooked on killing defenseless animals that they could be next!" -- From a PETA booklet called "Your Daddy Kills Animals," which was designed to be handed out to children

"This President is never gonna do the right thing. I think somewhere deep down inside him he takes a lot of joy about losing people, if he thinks they vote Democrat or if he thinks they're poor, or if he thinks they're in a blue state, whatever his reasons are not to rescue those people." -- Air America's Randi Rhodes speculates that Bush wanted Democrats to die in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina

"George Bush doesn't care about black people...They're giving the Army permission to go down and shoot us." -- Kayne West on the rescue efforts in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina

"For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who's already been inducted [and] in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal. But let me ask you this: Would you render the same support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?" -- University Professor Ward Churchill on supporting soldiers who frag their officers

"A spoiled child (Bush) is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little b*stard. [audio of gun being cocked]." -- A "humor bit" from the Randi Rhodes show

"Do our government's poorly paid contract killers deserve our "support" for blindly following orders?" -- Ted Rall shows his "support" for the troops

"Real freedom will come when [U.S.] soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors." -- Warren County Community College adjunct English professor, John Daly

There's more, Pam. Soooo so much more... It's the amazing power of google.

Vercingetorix:

Oh, I have no doubt you can find lots and lots of intemperate comments about Bush and his administration from various leftists and other radicals. But so far I haven't seen you quote calls for violence against conservatives from prominent liberals as there have been calls for violence against liberals from prominent conservatives.

You DO understand the difference between vehemently criticizing an administration and advocating violence against ones political opponent as Ann Coulter has done, right?

Tcobb:

I hold no double standard. I would object to calls for violence against conservatives from prominent leftists as I object to calls for violence against liberals from prominent conservatives. The fact is, however, I've seen no liberals with the exposure and influence of Ann Coulter who have been making comments similar to Ann Coulter's ugly comments about liberals. I've certainly yet to hear a widely televised liberal strongly suggest that Al Qaida bomb a US city, as Bill O'Reilly did.

Pointing out a double standard does not qualify as a double standard. The fact is that political violence in this country tends to come from the right side of the aisle, probably because law enforcement is more likely to look carefully away when conservatives commit political crimes than when leftists do. If you doubt this, I suggest you bone up on the history of lynching.

Pamela,

Martin Scorsese directed Taxi Driver, a film which helped inspire John Hinckley, Jr. to shoot President Reagan in 1981.

Now, obviously, Hinckley qualifies as a "wacko" and "nutjob"... just the type of person to whome you referred.

Malclave:

Oh come now -- you're telling me you don't see the difference between someone creating a work of fiction about political violence and a political commentator like Ann Coulter advocating it?

I'm going to lay this out nice and ugly for you on the Left.

First of all, I myself don't plan on copying this guy. I've got a life to live, and I don't intend to end it in police gunfire (or my own), or to spend the rest of my life behind bars. So no, I'm not a "future shooter."

Furthermore, it's possible that the people shot didn't deserve it. They were probably just typical lame but relatively harmless liberals.

This does not apply to you on the far Left, however. You are swine, and although I don't actually intend to kill you personally, I would not shed a tear if someone else did. I still remember that little girl you attacked at that 2004 John Edwards rally in West Virginia. I still remember Waco, and your gloating about the deaths of the babies there. I still remember the worm who forced an old Mexican woman off the road, with her child inside her car, because of her Bush bumper sticker. I still remember your ACORN cowards pushing an old woman down a flight of stairs. I hate you, and to quote one of your own, YOU ARE NOT HUMAN TO ME.

Let's lay this out nice and ugly. Somewhere out there is someone who hates you just as much as I do, except that he has terminal cancer. He can kill you, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you try to enact gun control, we will wipe the electoral floor with you, as we always do when gun control is the issue. Read the polls sometime. About twice as many love the NRA as hate it, and that's according to the left-leaning Pew poll. 75% (!) think guns are an individual right. So if you even touch this issue, down you go.

So basically what you're left with is hoping that we don't get cancer and turn you into hamburger. HA HA HA HA HA.

Thanks, Ken, for helping to prove my point.

Normally, I do.

However, I'm trying to use your definition of irresponsibility above... which seems to be based on how mentally unstable people interpret a message. I could just as easily have referenced Beatles music (Helter Skelter).

As far as Ann Coulter goes, I don't pay much attention to her unless she gets mentioned in one of the blogs I read. When I do see her mentioned, it's generally criticism for some stupid remark (or denouncing a particularly over-the-line comment). I don't read many left-leaning blogs... do they tend to criticize Rhodes the same way?

So, yes, there are conservative voices out there making comments which promote violence. And, those voices are criticized by even more conservative voices.

Malclave

Whether or not you, personally, listen to Ann Coulter regularly is beside the point. The fact is that she has repeatedly made statements that strongly imply violence against liberals is desirable, and yet she keeps getting invited to Conservative venues, nationally televised talkshows, etc.

Intemperate? Pam, give me a break.

You threw out 3-4 quotes offhand, the very worst one of which was clearly a joke, and I showed you a half-dozen which clearly weren't jokes.

I showed you a professor (by no means alone) who condoned 'fragging' officers. Another one wished for 'a million Mogadishus.' Neither were conservatives, both which preached violence. And still, you won't listen.

I pointed several quotes against Republicans and especially against G Dub, and you respond with the 'oh, that's intemperate' garbage. Hell, they've made movies about killing the President (not right-wing movies) such as Shooter and a British documentary. Screw the offhanded statements, now that's some pulpit.

You can't have it both ways. You cannot kvetch about Rush and dismiss Rhodes, and Dean, and Hollywood, etc. If that stuff right there isn't hateful, then nothing is.

Suck it up. You made the boneheaded universal assertion (All of the Right engages in hate speech, none of the Left ever does), and you got called on it.

One more for the road:

"America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process." -- George Soros

Guess who stands in for the "Nazis" here, and it ain't the Unitarians.

I gotta agree with Penfold. Calling this political violence is stretching it for the following reasons:

1. I'm sure the Unitarians don't think of their acceptance of gays and lesbians as their 'politics' but rather, their moral and doctrinal viewpoint.

My church has its own internal welfare system that is funded by contributions from members. However, I don't consider the adoption of this system a political stance (even though welfare is a highly polarized political topic) because it inception was not motivated by politics.

2. All the political assassinations I've heard of refer to politicians being killed or situations where the assassination has a calculated political consequence. It is simply the context in which the word 'political assassination' is used.

3. Killing someone from a group you hate is not endorsed nor accepted by any of the major political ideologies in the USA. There is not a single political party out there for whom the vast majority would not view the killings with disgust.

4. There are a lot of racially motivated killings of Latino gang members by black gang members and vice versa. I think we all agree that these should not be considered 'political killings' even though the motivation (often race) has a political connection.

I hope you're all making the connections on these points. Painting the republican party as a group with a large number of seething, bigoted potential murderers is misleading and itellectually lazy. It would be like saying that lots of liberals are drug using communists who secretly contribut money to FARC.

V: You threw out 3-4 quotes

You want more? I got 'em.

V: offhand, the very worst one of which was clearly a joke,

Which one was that?

V: and I showed you a half-dozen which clearly weren't jokes.

None of which included calls for violence from liberals with the same level of influence and coverage as Ann Coulter.

V> I showed you a professor (by no means alone)

A man who, again, does not enjoy the prominence of an Ann Coulter. And what do you mean by "by no means alone?"

V: Another one wished for 'a million Mogadishus.'

I can't find that quote. What radio show does this professor have? How often is he featured on cable talk-shows and invited to influential liberal gatherings? How many best-sellers has he written?

V> You made the boneheaded universal assertion (All of the Right engages in hate speech, none of the Left ever does), and you got called on it.

No, I did not say that "All the Right engages in hate speech, none of the Left ever does." I said that prominent conservatives like Ann Coulter are using violent rhetoric about liberals. I've seen no prominent liberals using similarly violent rhetoric about conservatives, and by "violent rhetoric" I mean language that implies that violence against conservatives is desirable.

And, oh, I couldn't resist. One more right-winger calling for a racist genocide who is ever-so clearly on the right it just hurts...

Kamau Kambon says "kill white people..."

Google it!

To put it more simply, when you use the phrase, ‘political killings’ you bring up images of violence perpetrated by a political group for a political end, because that is how the phrase is usually used in our country.

However, this killing was not perpetrated by a political group and would not be endorsed by any political group. It was probably not perpetrated for a political end and the guy certainly didn’t do the republican party any favors. The guy’s motivations were probably not that complicated.

Mark Green:

When you kill or assault somebody for their political viewpoint -- whether you do it because they are liberal or because they are conservative -- you are engaging in political violence.

I am not "painting the republican party as a group with a large number of seething, bigoted potential murderers." I'm saying that the kind of rhetoric used by people like Coulter, Savage, and O'Reilly is irresopnsible. It would also be irresponsible for a prominent liberal to announce that only threats of violence can prevent conservatives from committing treason, or to imply that terrorists should be allowed to bomb an American city.

Vercingetorix:

And who in the name of the Twelve Apostles is Kamau Kambon?

What was the last liberal or Democratic organization that invited this person to speak? How many attended?

I see that you ignored Shooter, by the way. I think that was a good move on your part: that way you can ignore the incitement to murder.

As you ignored George Soros' equivocation of conservatives with Nazis. Hell, right there we could spend hours with that subject.

Well, aside from its fairly consistent opposition to racial and sexual equality, religious freedom and unions, what would you accept as a "demonstration" of the Klan as a right-wing organization?

By that measure, France and the rest of Europe is deeply right wing. You need to stop thinking in tautologies, sister.

By all means, show me more quotes. Show me ONE quote, just a single one of a prominent conservative saying, "Kill all liberals." Just one. It should be easy.

Savage is an idiot and his diatribes are irresponsible.

I'm not familiar with a lot of what Ann Coulter says.

I've never once heard O'Reilly even come close to advocating violence. The only group for whom he has consistently shown real disgust are judges and politicians who let child molesters off easily and gang members. However, never once have I heard him advocate violence in against these people.

I’m sure you realize the danger of saying it is irresponsible to express disgust for that actions of a group that you find disgusting.

I am not "painting the republican party as a group with a large number of seething, bigoted potential murderers."
I appreciate this and I realize this was not your intent. However, because many people do not share the precise definition of ‘political killing’ that you do, when you call what happened a political killing, you do, in fact, reinforce the image in many people’s mind of the Republican party as a spawning ground for bigoted killers.

Obviously we republicans are going to object to this and insist that this is not a ‘political killing’ because we don’t want to suggest the image, which we don’t believe is true, of the Republican party as a spawning ground of bigoted killers.

Google it, Pam.

Seriously, you're retreating too fast. You went from strident conservatives-killed-these-church-goers to Bill-O'Reilly-killed-these-church-goers. That doesn't fly.

Might as well say that Tupac kills 300+ people/year in LA, because of the music, man.

Nobody's buying it. Stop trying to sell it.

Well done Pamela, you have totally pwned these guys. they just cant accept that the violent rhetoric comes from the right, not the left. Yes, intemperate statements are made now and again on our side, but I have still yet to see any comments from the liberal side that equates with Savage, Coulter & Steyn with ther violent, eliminationist rhetoric. And no, Taxi Driver, or an obscure professor's comments don't count, C-, must try harder.

Pamela Troy

Unless you have another quote, I don't see Ann Coulter advocating violence against political opponents but against traitors.

"We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." — Ann Coulter, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, January 2002

It's a bit rich for Pamela Troy to dismiss Kamau Kamdon as obscure while citing Lee Rodgers (?) and Mike Gunn (?) as proof of her thesis.

Since she's also unfamiliar with this newfangled Internet app called "google," here are cites to "a million Mogadishus" and the Michael Moore quote:

http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2003/03/let_a_million_mogadishus_bloom.html
"A Columbia University professor told an anti-war gathering that he would like to see "a million Mogadishus" -- referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that killed 18 American servicemen."

Michael Moore, right after 9-11:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/06/29/do2902.xml

"They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

Yeah, how dare they blame Ann Coulter for these murders? All she ever was call for the use of baseball bats. Sheesh.

LINDA VESTER (host): You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?

COULTER: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days.

[FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester]

@ Pamela - I go to bed and wake up and your laughing at me. Is that how you respond to criticism? I would also note that you have not meaningfully responded to my comments. And your response about 'Recreate 68' is just as applicable to the fringe right you decry as advocating violence and dehumanizing language who do not represent a vast majority of conservatives.
To quote you "If it was based on their "liberal agenda" it was based on their politics." A liberal agenda is not necessarily political in nature, nor has it been demonstrated that this Church was politically active. It was socially active and pursued liberal ideals, that is not the same as politics.

"But again, I really have to wonder why you seem to have such a big emotional stake in avoiding the term "political murder."" Unlike you, I don't have an emotional stake in avoiding the term "political murder", though i think you mean murdered for their political beliefs. Political violence happens all the time. Some horrific examples are occurring in Zimbabwe. I think that solely pigeon holing this particular incident as a political killing ignores the other factors in issue.

I wonder why you have such a large emotional stake in avoiding any other categorization of this shooting?

Here's a question for you, would Saddam Hussein's gassing and repression of the Kurds have constituted political violence (among other categories), given that the Kurds have been moving for political autonomy?

WOW! I mean how freakin' nuts and clueless do you have to be to be liberal? These people are deranged. It's funny to read their stupid rantings. Everything they love to claim others are and do is simply a projection of themselves. They have no clue and will never realize they are what they hate. Total hypocrisy! Their feeble little brains have to be complete mush by now. Hasn't anyone found a cure for this disease called liberalism yet? I wish i could find a way to box up a clue and common sense and then sell it to them. I'd have more money than Bill Gates. Hey libtards, i know you claim to use logic and reason and to be 'reality-based' but wake up, for real, just because you 'feel' something is so doesn't make it so, that is not logic or reason. Nor are your feelings facts, they are in fact, not facts but just the retarded paranoia of an idiot. Hello, I'm earth, have we met? Apparently not.

"When are you haters ever going to start taking responsibility for what you say?"
"you had to provide your own white wash and spin and ignore everything "
"If you had simply accepted and come to terms with this and maybe talk about how angry and guilty it must make you feel "
"But go ahead, keep pulling out the victim card."
yeah, masters of projection indeed!

See, in Pamela's mind, there's nothing wrong with dozens of pundits, entertainers, and political operatives repeating ad nauseum for eight years that one's political opponents are evil, stupid, criminal, uncaring, greedy, racist, sexist, heartless bastards who stole two elections, hate black people and want to see them suffer and die, and want nothing more than to screw over America for the sake of their rich friends. That's all perfectly fine.

But let one skinny blonde make a smart-ass comment about using a clue-by-four? Well, that's just beyond the pale.

Listen, Pamela -- crazy people will grab ANYTHING to fixate on. It's impossible to tell what will trigger them, because they're crazy, and each one is crazy in a different way. As I mentioned above, the only way to prevent the unhinged from finding a motivational trigger is to ban "irresponsible" speech across the board. Until I see you criticizing fantasy "documentaries" about killing the President, and until I see you advocating that left-wing loons like Rhodes be banned from the airwaves, it's simply impossible to take you seriously.

Not that I'd agree with you in any case. Rhodes and Coulter have equal liberty to say what they will. We don't live in a country that forces us to tailor our speech and our behavior to conform with somebody's idea of what's "acceptable" or "responsible," and I'm happy to keep it that way.

V, are you ever going to get around to answering any of my questions? Or is it more your style to just throw out a lot of only vaguely connected text and hope it hits some target or other?

v> I see that you ignored Shooter, by the way. I think that was a good move on your part: that way you can ignore the incitement to murder.

In what way is Shooter more of an incitement to murder than any other boring action film?

PT: Well, aside from its fairly consistent opposition to racial and sexual equality, religious freedom and unions, what would you accept as a "demonstration" of the Klan as a right-wing organization?

V: By that measure, France and the rest of Europe is deeply right wing.

How do you figure? Unions are much stronger in France and Europe than here and while no country is perfect when it comes to wiping out racial prejudice, the governments of France and most other European countries don’t approach the Klan’s venomous attitude towards race.

Are you ever going to explain what you would accept as a “demonstration” of the Klan as a right wing organization?

Since I never claimed that prominent rightwingers were advocating mass genocide of liberals, I’m not sure why I’m suddenly required to produce such a quote. Limbaugh has said:
“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough around so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.” Rush Limbaugh

More quotes? You betcha!

From Michael Savage

“If I ran this country, I'd hang the lawyer. I would try her for aiding and abetting terrorism -- I'd hang her and I'd hang every lawyer who went down to Guantánamo to defend those murderers." (on the lawyers for two Muslim students accused of providing aid to terrorists.")

"If I had the power by executive order, I would round up every member of the ACLU and of the National Lawyers Guild, and I'd put them in a prison in Guantánamo and I'd throw the key away."

Michael Savage on Madeline Albright: “I want to direct you to a traitor. In my opinion, she should be tried for treason, and when she's found guilty, she should be hung. And when she is hung, maybe the other quislings in our government will get the message that we're going to crack down on them, and that our safety and the safety our children mean something to us.”

Ann Coulter:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building,''

"We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens's créme brulée.''

On John Murtha: “The reason soldiers invented ‘fragging.’”

''(Liberals) are always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. ... Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment,''

Chris Green:

I've never once heard O'Reilly even come close to advocating violence.

November 8, 2006:

Bill O’Reilly: “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Chris Green: I've never once heard O'Reilly even come close to advocating violence.

November 8, 2006:

Bill O’Reilly: “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Chris Green: I've never once heard O'Reilly even come close to advocating violence.

November 8, 2006:

Bill O’Reilly: “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

V:Google it, Pam.

In other words, you got nothing.

I thought not.

Chris Green:

Sorry about the dupes. It was unintentional.

Penfold: Here's a question for you, would Saddam Hussein's gassing and repression of the Kurds have constituted political violence (among other categories), given that the Kurds have been moving for political autonomy?

Yes.

Squid: But let one skinny blonde make a smart-ass comment about using a clue-by-four? Well, that's just beyond the pale.

As you know, Squid, it's not just "one skinny blonde mak[ing] a smart-ass comment about using a two-by-four." It's Coulter, among others, making numerous statements strongly implying violence towards their political opponents, and being given a bully pulpit from which to do it.

Josh:

Is there an actual argument anywhere in that diatribe?

Or does venting like that just make you feel better when you've read something that upsets you?

Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, yadda yadda ad infinitum. And when has Ann Coulter and Michael Savage got the gang together and lynched anyone?

If your entire thesis is that Ann Coulter and Michael Savage killed these people (vicariously, through their scary mind-power which only you can see), then you must accept the logic that gangster rap kills people, violent movies kill people, etc. Of course, that glosses over the actual people doing the killing, but whatever.

Admit that gangsta rap kills people and I might nod that Rush Limbaugh kills people.

And you're a big girl, make a case that the Klan is rightist and I might bite. I'd be interested in seeing you tie imperialism, papism, racism, capitalism, fascism, militarism, anarchism, etc into a huge self-contradictory mess.

PS, I'm done with the quotes. You have ignored - and will continue to ignore - every quote I put out. I could fill a river with paper quotes and you would just huff and wave your hand at those 'intemperate' comments. Show some good faith and it will be returned.

WOW! I mean how freakin' nuts and clueless do you have to be to be liberal? These people are deranged. It's funny to read their stupid rantings. Everything they love to claim others are and do is simply a projection of themselves. They have no clue and will never realize they are what they hate. Total hypocrisy! Their feeble little brains have to be complete mush by now. Hasn't anyone found a cure for this disease called liberalism yet? I wish i could find a way to box up a clue and common sense and then sell it to them. I'd have more money than Bill Gates. Hey libtards, i know you claim to use logic and reason and to be 'reality-based' but wake up, for real, just because you 'feel' something is so doesn't make it so, that is not logic or reason. Nor are your feelings facts, they are in fact, not facts but just the retarded paranoia of an idiot. Hello, I'm earth, have we met? Apparently not.

"When are you haters ever going to start taking responsibility for what you say?"
"you had to provide your own white wash and spin and ignore everything "
"If you had simply accepted and come to terms with this and maybe talk about how angry and guilty it must make you feel "
"But go ahead, keep pulling out the victim card."
"The fact remains that the right has, for the past couple of decades, gotten increasingly violent and dehumanizing when talking about liberals. Do you really imagine that dehumanizing and violent rhetoric is not going to lead to dehumanizing and violent actions?"
yeah, masters of projection indeed!

v: make a case that the Klan is rightist and I might bite.

But what would you accept as "making a case?" What kind of evidence would I need to present?

I'm sorry, but denying that the Klan is right wing really has to be the last word in revisionism. If you don't accept the Klan's historical record on racial and sexual equality, etc., I have to wonder what you WOULD accept. Give me a clue and I'll take a stab at responding.

And by the way -- there are still LOTS of questions I asked that you haven't addressed. You going to give it a shot?

Josh:

I'll take this as a "no."

And by the way -- there are still LOTS of questions I asked that you haven't addressed. You going to give it a shot?

No, you've begged the questions many times, but haven't actually made an inquiry into anything. For instance, In what way is Shooter more of an incitement to murder than any other boring action film? is an evasion, not a question.

But what would you accept as "making a case?" What kind of evidence would I need to present?

Alot more than an empty assertion. I'm not going to do it for you.

So why should I make the effort to answer your questions when you are unwilling to make the effort to answer mine?

Then don't, Pam. If the KKK was on the right in 1864 of the Democratic South (and the whole country was likely - almost assuredly - on the right of today's mainstream), well, whoop-dee-do! Hell, Bakunin would probably a political moderate - even a conservative - in San Fransisco today. The times, they are a-changing. And so does the seating.

But none of that has anything to do with the politics of myself nor today's GOP. If you are somehow making the point that the GOP = KKK, go ahead and make that point.

The one single point you need to make is Ann Coulter is a murderer. This guy murdered people because Ann Coulter played his Jodi Foster and told him to do so.

Vercingetorix:

My premise is not that the KKK "was on the right in 1864 etc..." My premise is that it is STILL on the right side of the political aisle, as it was in its beginnings, as it was in its heyday, as it was in the 1960s. I'm simply responding to your bizarre demand that I "demonstrate" that the Klan was and remains a right-wing organization.

Plainly you've figured out that implying (as you did) that the Klan is NOT right-wing is a losing proposition. I suppose that's progress.

No, I do not think, nor have I said that GOP=KKK. No, I do not think Ann Coulter is a murderer. Nor do I think she should be held legally liable for the killings in Tennessee. That does not absolve her and others like her, who casually label political opponents "traitors" and talk lightly of killing them, of some measure of moral responsibility. She, Savage, Limbaugh and many others of that stripe have helped create the kind of poisonous political environment that makes the kind of senseless violence we say in Tennessee more likely.

Ever heard of a man named Julius Streicher?

If I were you, Pam, I would not try to hold the line of the Left's virtue on the issue of anti-Semitism. Nor on anything about the National Socialists.

OK Time for the gloves to come off.

“What makes you think you're entitled to insult thousands of people you've never even met merely because you dislike their politics?”

Unlike you, I’ve shed blood for this country. I still serve this country and will continue to be a proud American til the day I die. Good enough reason to be disgusted by the likes of you and your ilk… a self loathing liberal who, without the protections offered by the Constitution and reinforced and protected me and ‘my kind’, would be fodder for some of the real sickos out there.

“I've known liberals who fought in the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.”

Ah yes… the fallback position of one who has no real position… “well I know a guy who knows a guy…” Well guess what? I know a guy who fought in WW2 and Korea and served under guys who were in Nam... And during the Gulf Part 1 and I’m still over here for Gulf Part 2. All of them ‘liberals’. Hell, I’m a New Hampshire born and raised Democrat. Why is it always a thing for a liberal to have to claim that because you know and empathize with someone who as Kipling called it “..has seen the Elephant” and yet try and claim it as your own? YOU have NEVER Been-There-Done-That so don’t pontificate to me the realities of war… war sucks but if asked to do it again, and to keep my children from having to do it, I’ll do it again, and again and again.

Also, to end your rather weak condemnation of Coulter, Savage, Limbaugh and the like, the majority of cases you note are without merit. NONE of them could be traced to any sort of “right wing media hype towards violence.” Lets examine your so called “recent events”

The Goldman Case: “David Lewis Rice (born 1958) is a follower of the Christian Identity movement who, on Christmas Eve 1985, forced his way into the Seattle home of civil rights attorney Charles Goldmark with a toy pistol and stabbed Goldmark, his wife, and two children to death.”
A sick bastard. I’d kill him myself given a chance. But to add an interesting point on it, and why he didn’t get the most deserved death penalty: “A sticking point of Rice's case throughout the trial process was the psychotic symptoms that he sometimes displayed, and his attorney's lack of emphasis on them.”
Another sick individual…but old news… circa 1985. 23 years ago… A tragedy, but nonetheless again, nothing new.

Your line: “…current bombings of clinics, the assassinations of physicians and clinic workers”

To whit I offer from MSNBC: “There were 1,700 acts of violence against abortion providers between 1977 and 1994, with four people killed in 1994 and one in 1993, according to statistics from the National Abortion Federation.”

I believe Limbaugh >might bombings” leads the uneducated reader to think this is current events… somehow I don’t think that an event over 14 years ago counts as ‘current events’, even in a Government school.

And for the ‘Peekskill Riots’ I offer this from Wiki:
“The so-called Peekskill Riots were anti-communist riots (with anti-black and anti-Semitic undertones) that took place at Van Cortlandtville, Westchester County, New York in 1949.”
Jeez… yer reaching when you have to bring up something from before when My MOM was born… That’s what I call a reach. And to burst your bubble on media influence, even wiki states: …”The local paper, The Peekskill Evening Star, condemned the concert and encouraged people to make their position on communism felt, but fell short of espousing violence.”

Also: “Should the firebombing of black churches be considered an extension of the lynching epidemic?”
According to digitalhistory dot com: “The last officially recorded lynching in the United States occurred in 1968.”
Again… dredging old news and repackaging it.
Try again.

All of these cases mind you, disgust me. What makes me even more disgusted is a sick self loathing Leftist like you repackaging it and using an average of 25 year old events to justify a twisted agenda. I know all of the civil right issues sucked, and the violence that went along with it doubly so. But what I cant get past is that you are all so quick to “forgive and forget” the Twin Towers and the rise of radical Islam, but can’t get past something from 30 years +/- ago because it went against YOU and YOURS. Again the specter of Selfishness Self Gratification and Pity that marks a Leftist.

Your condemnation of the “Right Wing Media” has more to do with a dislike of
A) Their Popularity among the “Great Unwashed”
B) Their Message, which is “Be Proud of America, Love it or get the hell out”
C) The innate failure of Anti-Americans like Randi Rhodes and the Failure of “Leftist Media” on the airwaves.

The left has always consisted of individuals who believe that “they know best” because of the privilege and ‘social stratification’ that they themselves adhere to. In the basic run of things, the reason people like me get so mad is that you inherently reject that which ultimately protects you. You dump on us, you make fun of us, and you manipulate and twist things so that you get the most enjoyment out of life while taking the ‘wind out of others sails.’ I have said it once, and I will say it again. Leftists suffer from the delusion that YOU know best, that YOU are the center of the universe, that YOU deserve anything and everything that YOU should get. Is it any wonder that the country is going down the crapper? And just to prove a point: All of those Leftist Actors who publically stated that they were going to move to Canada, France or wherever when Bush got re-elected? Why are they still here?

Because it’s the BEST DAMNED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT.

In short Pamela, sit down, take a break and realize that you are outnumbered, outthought and reduced to a shell when it comes to this particular thread.

Here endeth the Lesson.

If we leave aside the rhetoric and just count the bodies we see that modern history is an almost unbroken series of mass murders committed by leftists, ( or "progressives" if you prefer, Pamela.) More than 100 million murders by leftists occurred during the 20th century, and that is not counting the ones killed by the Nazis, who were leftists also. The only times the killings stop is when some benign power, usually the US, stops the spread of violence by force or threat of force.

A common thread of these mass murders is the attempt to remake society according to some utopian plan or ideology. Which groups are trying to remake US society today to conform to their utopian schemes?

Pamela, I hold you personally responsible for each and every one of those murders.

V:

You are aware, right, that the Nazis used the term "Socialist" strictly as a ploy to bring in working class Germans?

That was the consensus of pretty much every contemporary observer, whether a diarist, reporter, or, since that time, historians. Which is why so many wealthy right wing industrialists and members of the military were such ardent supporters of Hitler.

Sorry, but the Nazis were no more "socialists" than Saddam Hussein's REPUBLICAN Guard was a branch of the GOP.

Zangara was a lefty who tried to kill a lefty President?

I know, it's almost as crazy as a communist (ie, not a man of the right) killing a lefty president. Oh, damnit, Lee Harvey and JFK. My bust.

You are aware, right, that the Nazis used the term "Socialist" strictly as a ploy to bring in working class Germans?

Oh, of course. Besides the whole industrial model, economic thing, political thing, etc, I totally know that the Nazis were nothing like socialists.

You are aware, right, that the Nazis used the term "Socialist" strictly as a ploy to bring in working class Germans?

Oh, of course. In fact, besides the whole economic and political thing, the Nazis were nothing like socialists. I think both social philosophies liked kittens.

Pam, don't even start that weak stuff with me. I don't care about the KKK, but I will gladly nail you to this particular cross.

BC: OK Time for the gloves to come off.

Ooooooo! SCAREY!

BC: Unlike you, I’ve shed blood for this country.

And no liberal ever has? No liberal fought in the Second World War? The Korean War? The Vietnam War? The First Gulf War?

Sorry, but being a veteran does not give you carte-blanch to insult me, my friends, or members of my family – who by the way include liberals who shed blood for this country.

BC: Ah yes… the fallback position of one who has no real position… “well I know a guy who knows a guy…”

No, I didn’t say “I know a guy who knows a guy…”

I said, I know liberals who have shed blood for this country. Some of them are more liberal than I am.

BC: The Goldman Case: “David Lewis Rice (born 1958) is a follower of the Christian Identity movement who, on Christmas Eve 1985, forced his way into the Seattle home of civil rights attorney Charles Goldmark with a toy pistol and stabbed Goldmark, his wife, and two children to death…

And most who have followed the Rice case trace his targeting of the Goldmarks to the vitriolic nonsense fed to him by an ultra right wing group called The Duck Club.

No, as you observed, the connection between dehumanizing language and dehumanizing actions is “nothing new.” The career of Streicher during the Third Reich taught us all a great deal about it.


BC: And for the ‘Peekskill Riots’ I offer this from Wiki:
“The so-called Peekskill Riots were anti-communist riots (with anti-black and anti-Semitic undertones) that took place at Van Cortlandtville, Westchester County, New York in 1949.”
Jeez… yer reaching when you have to bring up something from before when My MOM was born… That’s what I call a reach. And to burst your bubble on media influence, even wiki states: …”The local paper, The Peekskill Evening Star, condemned the concert and encouraged people to make their position on communism felt, but fell short of espousing violence.”

The Peekskill Evening Star didn’t have to directly espouse violence. They just pointed at the concert, called Paul Robeson a traitor, and trusted their readers to get the message. They did.

When the concert was re-scheduled, the local American Legion boasted of having run “that n*gger Robeson” out of town and vowed they would do it again. After the September 4th riot, the paper compared the American Legion “patriots” who’d joined in throwing rocks at cars filled with families to the Americans at the Boston Tea Party.”

BC: “The last officially recorded lynching in the United States occurred in 1968.”
Again… dredging old news and repackaging it. 
Try again.

“Old news?” Sorry, but to some of us, 1968 isn’t all that long ago. It’s well within living memory. As I said, the Lynching epidemic went from the late 19th well into the 20th century.

BC: What makes me even more disgusted is a sick self loathing Leftist like you repackaging it and using an average of 25 year old events to justify a twisted agenda.

What makes you think I’m “self loathing?”

BC: you are all so quick to “forgive and forget” the Twin Towers
Who’s calling us to “forgive and forget” 9/11?

BC: The left has always consisted of individuals who believe that “they know best” because of the privilege and ‘social stratification’ that they themselves adhere to.

Plainly you know very little about the left. The most liberal to leftist people I know come from poor to working class backgrounds – not affluence.

You know, you really need to use something other than right-wing blogs and wikipedia to draw your conclusions about the left.

The most liberal to leftist people I know come from poor to working class backgrounds – not affluence.

You need to meet more people.

Leftists certainly earn less income than conservatives. The data shows this.

They may come from spoilt upbringings, but earn less. Think of the rich man's daughter who attends an Ivy League school to study 'Women's Studies' or some other nonsense, and then graduates and earns only $25K.

“I said, I know liberals who have shed blood for this country. Some of them are more liberal than I am. “
Good for them. I have to say, maybe they can teach you something about patriotism.
“The Peekskill Evening Star didn’t have to directly espouse violence. They just pointed at the concert, called Paul Robeson a traitor, and trusted their readers to get the message. They did.”
Really? Are you sure? Were you there? Please.
“Sorry, but to some of us, 1968 isn’t all that long ago. It’s well within living memory.”
Glad it’s not within mine. Then again, you retreads who were part of the “Summer of Love” still wish you were back there.
“What makes you think I’m “self loathing?”
Your inability to see beyond the fact that you present a thesis that political violence is strictly a media creation of the “Right Wing” and your diehard inability to see anything beyond your rose-colored myopic vision of “what shoulda-coulda-outghta been” rather than face the truth that as I stated before, (and by not touching it you avoided) “I still serve this country and will continue to be a proud American til the day I die. Good enough reason to be disgusted by the likes of you and your ilk… a self loathing liberal who, without the protections offered by the Constitution and reinforced and protected me and ‘my kind’, would be fodder for some of the real sickos out there.” You assiduously avoid any possibility that the rest of “us” find both your position and opinion to be counter productive and even treasonous. You try to find nuggets that allow you to wave the bloody flag of self righteousness and thereby inflame the rhetoric until ‘something’ can break in your favor. Sorry, but ad-hominem attacks are not my way. Cold Logic is my preferred debating tool.
As stated before and in response to your “Plainly you know very little about the left. The most liberal to leftist people I know come from poor to working class backgrounds – not affluence. “
“You know, you really need to use something other than right-wing blogs and wikipedia to draw your conclusions about the left.”
What part of “Hell, I’m a New Hampshire born and raised Democrat.” do you NOT understand? My father was a Professor at a well known Liberal Bastion and so was my Mother. I know liberalism to the Nth Degree. I also feel I’m rather Liberal myself, but I find that my definition of liberal is far removed from the neo-socialist damned near communist Democratic Daily KoS type of liberalism. In fact, I’m offended by those who claim the mantel of “liberalism” and cloak their “we know best” neo-fascist leanings in the guise of “for the children” or any of the other pithy feel good crap you espouse. I draw my conclusions from having to listen to the tripe served up on a self serving Leftist mainstream media that cares less about the actual state of the Country and the effects that they have on it, and how those effects will effect me and mine. I’ve been dealing with it for the past 5 years and will be for the next few.
In closing… I will just throw out there. You live in San Francisco (lovely town despite its rhetorical hate of anything American)… How long before you would be a rabid hawk if Kim Il-Jong launched a Taepdong II missile loaded with VX at your city? (Mind you he hasn't... yet. and you ARE within range)

As they say, “A Liberal is a Conservative-in-waiting who hasn’t been mugged yet.”

"Besides the whole industrial model, economic thing, political thing, etc, I totally know that the Nazis were nothing like socialists."
Stop, please, stop this stupid line of argument.

Good grief.

"German communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism[108] and were also among the first to be sent to concentration camps. "

"Hitler and the Nazis also hated German leftists because of their resistance to the party's racism. Many leaders of German leftist groups were Jews, and Jews were especially prominent among the leaders of the Spartacist Uprising in 1919. Hitler already referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as a means of "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity" and survival of the Nordics or Aryans (sometimes of all white Europeans), as well to stir up socioeconomic class tension and labor unions against the government or state-owned businesses."

Do you want to really get into this? I can back all of this up.

Do you really think you're "nailing" anyone to the cross with your revisionist claptrap??

Stop it, please.

Fact is the right is happy to see dead liberals. Period.

And the left is not happy to see dead conservatives? Extremists, on either side wish for the death of those not in alliance with their beliefs.

Fact is the right is happy to see dead liberals. Period.

If you really, honestly believe that, I truly pity the small life you lead and the people you know.

George Bruce:

In what manner was Hitler a leftist? He rolled back pretty much every liberal reform of the Weimar Republic, turned the clock back on the emancipation of women, burned avant-garde literature and art, and was the darling of wealthy industrialists and the military. By what measure was he “leftist?” And how do you account for the fact that every contemporary observer, no matter what their politics, described the Nazis as right wingers?

As a liberal I am no more responsible for the murders by Pol Pot and Stalin than you, as a conservative, are responsible for the murders by Hitler and Pinochet.

How does this obscene arithmatic of yours work, by the way? Is it a way of rationalizing the murders of leftists in Chile, Guatemala, etc?

angryflower, fascism was progressive, it was lauded by progressives, admired by progressives.

The sooner you snap out of your head-in-the-sand tropism, the better you'll feel!

v: Oh, of course. Besides the whole industrial model, economic thing, political thing, etc, I totally know that the Nazis were nothing like socialists.

No, they weren't. The workers in the Third Reich did not control the means of production. None of their contemporaries, whether on the right or the left, mistook the Nazis for leftists. Certainly the wealthy industrialists who supported them -- among them Henry Ford -- did not consider them socialists.

What exactly have you read about the Third Reich? I mean aside from Jonah Goldberg's recent novel?

Pt: The most liberal to leftist people I know come from poor to working class backgrounds – not affluence.
V: You need to meet more people.

I suspect I have a wider range of acquaintance among liberals and leftists than you do.

Don't forget Iraq, Pam! Eleventy billion killed there, according to this week's Lancet.

Or the Native Americans! Bless Gaia, don't forget them!

Tweed: They may come from spoilt upbringings, but earn less.

Not the liberals and leftists I know. They're a pretty mixed bag.

You really do believe the stereotypes, don't you? I guess this is what comes of getting most of your information from talk radio and right-wing blogs.

I suspect I have a wider range of acquaintance among liberals and leftists than you do.

Praise be to Gaia.

V: angryflower, fascism was progressive, it was lauded by progressives, admired by progressives.

No, V, it was not. There may have been the very occasional leftist who had nice things to say about Hitler and Mussolini, but these were not the rule. Most leftists were early opponents of fascism. There were many, many more admirers of fascism on the right.

Anyone who has actually taken the trouble to read contemporary accounts of the rise of the Third Reich knows this.

PT: I suspect I have a wider range of acquaintance among liberals and leftists than you do.
V: Praise be to Gaia.

Your above comment is why I suspect you're just a tad sheltered when it comes to actually knowing and interacting with liberals. People who think in terms of stereotypes are rarely very familiar with the groups they generalize about.

Pam: Whats with the facination of the "Third Reich" and just what does it have to do with the current and concurrent running of this arguement/debate?

AHHHH I forgot... when in doubt or without meaningful argument, the Left falls back on it's "point the finger at the Nazis" and refer any and all arguements towards this, as seeing that the "Third Reich" was the most brutal regime to have ever existed, and thereby invoking it's hostile imagery, you win through default, inasmuch as I've "tooled and schooled" you to the point of no return nor recovery, you are left to the dialectic of GOP = "Third Reich"

Nicely, but poorly played. We are on to you. Just surrender now. Unlike leftists, we try to rehabilitate those who need deprogramming.

I am always amazed at the hate from people who claim to stand for love. Especially with Obama, who rarely makes insults (though he does), whose whole campaign is about changing the rhetoric and way we treat each other. To here the filth and hate and venom from his "followers" is just the most ironic thing ever.

I'm sure Obama would chastise many of the comments here.

The past 16 years of hate hate hate has not helped either party, or helped our government. Maybe it's time for the name calling to stop? that's what Obama says at least. It's what I believe.

BC:

The Third Reich is interesting because it provides an example of a formerly open, cultured society descending into utter barbarism in a matter of just a few years. In the years following the second world war, one of the primary questions asked was how it could have happened. The consensus of those who studied that era was that the rhetoric of propagandists like Streicher and Goebbels had a lot to do with it.

That is also probably why so many right-wingers today are either trying to recast the Nazis as leftists or simply forget the lessons about dehumanizing language we presumably learned from the horrors of the Third Reich.

Your above comment is why I suspect you're just a tad sheltered when it comes to actually knowing and interacting with liberals.

Keep your day job. Detective work isn't in your future.

The workers in the Third Reich did not control the means of production.

Well, so fascists weren't communists. Amazing.

Certainly the wealthy industrialists who supported them -- among them Henry Ford -- did not consider them socialists.

Sweden is the most socialist country in perhaps the world. They have companies, and those companies have CEOs, wealthy industrialists. Doesn't make them less socialist.

Moreover, the internationalist communists were an opposing camp. Stalin followed the same path to much worse results, even against the Jews. Doesn't make him any less to the left.

If your definition of right/left is simply racist/internationalist, communist/not, then you need to step away from the computer and go to the library.

BC: maybe they can teach you something about patriotism.

Yes, they have taught me that true patriotism does not consist of merely impugning the patriotism of those who disagree with you.

BC: They did. Really? Are you sure? Were you there? Please.

Yes really. No, I was not there. I was not born then, but the record of the Peekskill Evening Star speaks for itself. It's not like Peekskill was, as a community, ashamed of what had happened. They had bumperstickers boasting about it for God's sake.

BC: Then again, you retreads who were part of the “Summer of Love” still wish you were back there.

LOL! The Summer of Love was in 1967 San Francisco, BC, not 68. And I was in fourth grade in Louisiana. Hardly a part of it.

Why do you kids persist in think thinking in stereotypes? And If the fact that I was not at Peekskill means I can't comment on what happened here, what are you doing spouting nonsense about the Summer of Love?

BC: Your inability to see beyond the fact that you present a thesis that political violence is strictly a media creation of the “Right Wing”

That is not my thesis, and any rational person who has actually read what I've written here knows it.

BC: You assiduously avoid any possibility that the rest of “us” find both your position and opinion to be counter productive and even treasonous.

"Treasonous?"

How is what I've said here treasonous?

BC: Sorry, but ad-hominem attacks are not my way.

Do you even known what an "ad-hominem attack" is? You've been engaging in them practically nonstop, throwing out some pretty staggering assumptions about me simply because you dislike my politics.

BC: Cold Logic is my preferred debating tool.

Then let's see some. So far you've not offered a single example.

BC: What part of “Hell, I’m a New Hampshire born and raised Democrat.” do you NOT understand?

I understand it fine. Those facts don't make you knowledgeable about liberalism.

BC: My father was a Professor at a well known Liberal Bastion and so was my Mother. I know liberalism to the Nth Degree.

No, I'm sorry, but you don't. You are in fact pretty naive about liberalism. All you've offered so far are not very smart pop culture stereotypes about liberals.

BC: You live in San Francisco (lovely town despite its rhetorical hate of anything American)… How long before you would be a rabid hawk if Kim Il-Jong launched a Taepdong II missile loaded with VX at your city? (Mind you he hasn't... yet. and you ARE within range)

You bet I'd be a "rabid hawk" if a foreign power bombed our city. I'm not a pacifist. Nor are most liberals. And if you actually knew about liberalism, you'd know that.

BC: As they say, “A Liberal is a Conservative-in-waiting who hasn’t been mugged yet.”

I've been mugged. I'm still a liberal.

Sorry kiddo, but you're one of the most unconvincing "experts" on liberalism I've ever encountered.

“The Third Reich is interesting because it provides an example of a formerly open, cultured society descending into utter barbarism in a matter of just a few years. In the years following the Second World War, one of the primary questions asked was how it could have happened.”

Well Pam, I agree that it was fascinating to a certain degree, but historically, it was due and proven to be a combination of outrageous punishments instilled by the Treaty of Versailles and the open licentiousness of the Weimar Republic. The Germans are, as a people a very “Alles en Ordenun” sort of volk, and they found themselves economically stifled through insane war treaty induced debt. I lived in Germany for 2 years (West Germany actually) and know the German mindset. They were quite easily led by as you said “The consensus of those who studied that era was that the rhetoric of propagandists like Streicher and Goebbels had a lot to do with it.”

I agree on that 100%. Goebbels who was a failed Chicken Rancher and looked nothing like the “Master Race” he so vociferously proposed as the “perfect German.”

My problem with you is as you state: “That is also probably why so many right-wingers today are either trying to recast the Nazis as leftists or simply forget the lessons about dehumanizing language we presumably learned from the horrors of the Third Reich.”

YOU state that it’s the ‘right wingers’ who keep “trying to recast the Nazis”… Uh last I looked, YOU brought them to the table as the uninvited bastard children of this argument. Not I. It’s the neo-socialist-leftists who have for the past 7 years compared the Bush Administration to Hitler et al. I maintain it is the leftists who utilize the Nazi imagery as the “Final Solution” (pardon the pun) to dealing with unpleasant realities and when confronted with a losing argument. Much as Hitler ordered a plan of ‘scorched earth’ during Operation Barbarossa, a Liberal needs to decimate a Conservative with your version of a bomb, thereby retreating behind catcalls of “Fascists” and “Nazis.”

Anything else? ;) (this’s getting good!)

@PT My early post was blocked due to spamming concerns.

I was wondering what you defined "right wingers" and "liberals" as? I ask because the terms have been bandied around by everyone and I suspect that there are differences on what people believe/define these groups to be or premised upon.

Penfold, I believe Pam's definition of liberal/conservative is everything good/everything bad.

Hope that helps!

I'm a UU and, guess what? We're not Christian, at least not by definition. Our church welcomes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Wiccans, Humanists, Atheists, and anyone else who has faith in a higher power- or simply faith in one another.

Stop trying to tie this tragedy into your own rhetoric. It's offensive in general, and more specifically considering many UUs represent everything the (small c) christians on the right spew these days.

Darn, I mean "resent" not represent.

“Ad-Hominem Attack: An ad hominem attack is a personal attack in the form of an ad hominem argument.
Ad hominem attacks are often used in a debate or discussion where the speaker wishes to avoid the substance of the discussion and instead resorts to smearing the character of their opponent.
It is considered a logical fallacy and is one of the modes of spreading propaganda.”

Somehow, I don’t see ANYTHING of what I’ve posted today as such. Then again, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Thusfar, my assumptions about you have been that primarily, you’re an older, (over 50) female of the Left Wing Democratic Persuasion and you live in San Francisco. Forgive the assumption, but the majority of us out there consider your choice of cities to be one of the “more insane” politically speaking. It’s fine if you were to keep your politics local, but for some reason, every lunatic with a left wing axe to grind takes their cases to your 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and subsequently tries to ram it down the rest of our throats.

This in essence is my issue.

I, despite you referring to me multiple times as “kid” or “kiddo”… I take that as a weak attempt to make me angry, and thereby leaving me open to actual accusations of childishness. In reality, I’m a combat vet who’s not much younger than you, however, judging from your attempts here, my maturity is much more progressed than yours. ;)

“Sorry kiddo, but you're one of the most unconvincing "experts" on liberalism I've ever encountered.”

Never having claimed to be an expert on liberals, nor wanting to. As I stated before, and which you AGAIN sidestepped I consider modern day liberalism as preached by you and yours to be “neo-socialist damned near communist Democratic Daily KoS type of liberalism. In fact, I’m offended by those who claim the mantel of “liberalism” and cloak their “we know best” neo-fascist leanings in the guise of “for the children” or any of the other pithy feel good crap you espouse. I draw my conclusions from having to listen to the tripe served up on a self serving Leftist mainstream media that cares less about the actual state of the Country and the effects that they have on it, and how those effects will effect me and mine. I’ve been dealing with it for the past 5 years and will be for the next few.” I find by going out to the web and the Princeton Webdictionary that Liberal is defined as:

“having political or social views favoring reform and progress
tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition
a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of
civil liberties”

In this, my tolerance for the neo-liberalism that infests this country like a plague leaves me cold. You have been and are by demonstration been wholly unwilling to
“have political or social views favoring reform and progress (as long as it’s a Democrat in charge)
Been “ tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition” in that you throw the KKK and the Third Reich out there with gleeful abandon when it come to close verbal combat.
Nor have you been “a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties.” If anything, by being as anti-right wing and again making the claim of your original argument :

“When are you haters ever going to start taking responsibility for what you say?

and

“I take political violence very seriously. Which is why I've never found right wing "jokes" about killing liberals very funny.”

You have YET to admit that it’s a two way street, nor will you. It’s completely against the grain for a person such as yourself to admit that you are incorrect and that your arguments hold no water.

ken says:

it's possible that the people shot didn't deserve it. They were probably just typical lame but relatively harmless liberals.

Hey, it's real generous of you to allow for the possibility that they didn't deserve to die just for being liberals. Still, I don't know if "lame and harmless" are the words I would use to describe a person who would block a shotgun blast with his body to save others from this psycho freak. Or for the unarmed people who took his gun away from him after he had just murdered two people before their eyes.

Your choice of adjectives aside, you shouldn't be fantasizing about people getting murdered. It's a sign that there's something wrong with you. You need help.

Vercingetorix,

Re. "Hey, Pam, here's a 'coarsening' quote for you...

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

This one from the Messiah himself."

I'm not sure you understand the context of this quotation from "The Untouchables." It's basically referring to the need to understand the opponent, particularly as one who takes no prisoners, and fight fire with fire. NOT, it must be said, in the sense of actual violence, but in the sense of understanding the tactics of the enemy and incorporating them into one's own actions in an even more effective way.

This does not in any way condone actual violence.

Your comments?

I would hope we can all agree that the advocation of violence in speech is wrong and immoral. Note, I did not say "ILLEGAL", but not something that conscientious people would accept as legitimate. It would or SHOULD weaken/cheapen the argument of those who use it. Rap lyrics, Marilyn Manson songs, and political pundits of any stripe who use such language should be admonished, whether we agree with their basic argument or not. I am an elementary school teacher, and it sickens me to see adults engaging in the kind of attacks which would merit discipline or even counseling for a student. Words can hurt, and as we have seen time and again, words can even KILL. Please think carefully, and urge others to do the same. Surely we can disagree without being disagreeable.

Vercingetorix also quoted George Soros: '"America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."
Guess who stands in for the "Nazis" here, and it ain't the Unitarians.'

Vercingetorix, what exactly do you think was entailed in the "de-Nazification" process? The dismantling of a political system which employed wide-scale surveillance of the population, for one thing, and the TRIALS of those accused of committing atrocities. In what way is that damaging? If our country were under the control of the same kind of partisans/system, I would hope we would have the self-control to handle matters in a similar fashion.

Nicely put Laura.

However, vis-a-vis your attibution of Obamas comments, he himself (to my research thusfar) didn't sufficiently attribute the comment to that scene in "The Untouchables" per se, and therefor becomes "grist for the mill" for those of us who have been stating since the get go, that strictly speaking that conservatives are the 'force majeur (sp?)' behind political violence and calls to political violence.

BOTH sides have been equally repellant in recent history, and BOTH sides have taken each other to task over this, albeit not without a certain amount of shall we say "exuberance" on the part of Liberals who can bash Savage, Coulter, et al.

Big Country, I agree with you that Obama's remarks may have been ill-chosen, taken as they were from a twenty-year-old (at least?) movie. I'm guessing he assumed it was a cultural touchpoint that people would remember. It's too bad if it was lost on many, and he'll suffer for it, I'm sure. It reminds me of the public official (I think) in D.C. who was pilloried for using the word "niggardly", which of course has nothing to do with African-Americans. Both of these might come down to cultural or general illiteracy/ignorance.

Cheers!

Big Country,

P.S. Can you tell I'm an English teacher? ;)

Sorry, have to add this: Commenters like Ken really frighten me. I've known my fair share of both left-wing and right-wing nuts, and when they say something outrageous, I think people of conscience should stand up and say something. Why haven't everyone on this board who read his comment told him it's unacceptable? Ken, what you said was inflammatory, insensitive, and offensive.

It is the responsibility of "good" people to take a stand when wrong is done/said. Does anyone disagree with me?

Oh, I understand, Laura. Just like when I get cut off in traffic, I don't beat the blue-haired granny with my arm rest even though I might even string together expletives in sailor-English.

Pam, on the other hand, would take that as evidence of a coming pogrom on liberals if it came from a conservative. Meanwhile ignoring comparable statements from her side. And that's high comedy (or low tragedy, take your pick).

I think in this case Ken stated right from the beginning: “I'm going to lay this out nice and ugly for you on the Left.”

There is no quibbling about it. He pretty much warned everyone from the get go that his comments were going to be ‘ugly’ and therefore, as reprehensible as one may find them, they are what they are.

As you so said: “It is the responsibility of "good" people to take a stand when wrong is done/said. Does anyone disagree with me?”

It is the responsibility of ‘good people’ everywhere to stand up and shout down that which is wrong. However wrong Ken may be, his commentary comes after several pages worth of diatribe and circular logic with Pamela Troy and her leftist screed. I fully understand where Ken is coming from, and that sometimes one gets out of line within the boundaries of good taste and emotive discussion.

It is also the responsibility of ‘good people’ to realize that when their opinions are NOT the majority, (especially on a conservative blog such as Bobs) and they persist in fanning the flames of open blog-word-warfare, that eventually, courtesy breaks down, and you want to tell someone to “eff” off in the worst way possible. I’ve been dancing with Pam on this pretty much all day and a good portion of last night (I like to think I’m ahead on points and substance ;) ) and it will be what it will be.

Is there an off chance for anyone to change their basic systems of beliefs? I doubt it. Both sides are firmly entrenched much like the Germans and the Brits during the Battle of the Somme. There is no real excuse for it, and your calling Ken out for it is good and defines you well, but realize, it’s only going to continue.

And that's high comedy (or low tragedy, take your pick).

It's high comedy to me.

The tragedy is that Pam's probably convinced that she won the argument.

I ignore the florid maniacs, Laura, so I saw and avoided Ken.

Anyways, your point with the de-Nazification quote, or rather my point was that it was way over the line. Not only did it compare the Republican party to Nazis, it threatened trials for nonexistent crimes. Capital crimes, by the way; they were hung until dead.

There is absolutely no world in which that would be acceptable speech. While I wouldn't ban Soros, or his speech, it does make him a scumbag.

The tragedy is that Pam's probably convinced that she won the argument.

Yeah, she declared victory and boarded the Great Winnebago for the promised Obamatopia.

BC: Well Pam, I agree that it was fascinating to a certain degree, but historically, it was due and proven to be a combination of outrageous punishments instilled by the Treaty of Versailles and the open licentiousness of the Weimar Republic.

How did this "licentiousness" cause the rise of the Nazis? And what respected historian has cited this "licentiousness" as a cause?

BC: . Goebbels who was a failed Chicken Rancher and looked nothing like the “Master Race” he so vociferously proposed as the “perfect German.”

Goebbels was not a failed chicken farmer. He'd been a novelist. You're obviously confusing him with Heinrich Himmler.

BC: YOU state that it’s the ‘right wingers’ who keep “trying to recast the Nazis”…

Yes, right wingers are trying to sell the notion that HItler was a leftist.

Do you know what the word "recast" means here?

Vercingetorix, if I believe that officials of an American administration have committed "war crimes", "torture", or other serious crimes, I would expect them to be tried and, depending on the severity of their crimes, punished accordingly. I might assume too much, but I'm guessing most commenters here would feel the same. From that standpoint, I think I understand Soros' point -- whether I agree with it or not. I'm actually not sure why some people despise Soros so much; I know he's given money to some charities that have helped people in serious need. Can you fill me in on the other side?

Vercingetorix, I know I'm just arguing political philosophy, but I suppose if the majority of the American people thought government officials had committed capital crimes, I would rather we would push for fair trials for the accused. So in that sense, I suppose de-Nazification or a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" would be preferable to mass executions a la the French Revolution.

Big Country, I understand why people get frustrated when they are discussing/arguing a point they feel strongly about. But isn't that part of the point of political/current events blogs? I would rather not follow discussions where everyone has the same opinion. Debate is more interesting to me, with new information or ideas. Do other people participate in these forums for another reason?

And even if someone is frustrated, I don't see how name-calling helps.

Sorry if I sounded sanctimonious, though.

“Ad-Hominem Attack: An ad hominem attack is a personal attack in the form of an ad hominem argument.
Ad hominem attacks are often used in a debate or discussion where the speaker wishes to avoid the substance of the discussion and instead resorts to smearing the character of their opponent.
It is considered a logical fallacy and is one of the modes of spreading propaganda.”

Somehow, I don’t see ANYTHING of what I’ve posted today as such. I’m sure you don’t. Like many people who use ad hominems, you don’t recognize them for what they are. In your case, they’ve tended to be assumptions about me based on little more than the fact that I describe myself as a “liberal.”

This for instance:

“Realize that the 60s was a drug induced stupidity-fest of false rebellion and out and out cowardice, realize you need to contribute to the world in a more tangible fashion (thank a troop for their service and volunteer at a nursing home) and above all, get over youself... liberalism is all about selfishness...this is why you act the way you do when confronted with reality, why its all about "me me me" 24-7-365... a little less about you you you and more about "we're all in this together, whether you or I like it or not."

So let’s see now, in this little chunk of words you imply that I’m not contributing to the world that it’s all about ‘me, me, me,’ that I’m selfish, that I’m cowardly. Looks like an ad hominem to me, especially when you then go on to refer to “the likes of you and your ilk,” and call me a “sick, self-loathing leftist,”

All of this renders your claim that “ad-hominem attacks are not my way” pretty comic.

BC: Never having claimed to be an expert on liberals, nor wanting to.

You claimed “I know liberals to the Nth degree.” Sorry, but you don’t, and you’ve made that obvious.

BC: I consider modern day liberalism as preached by you and yours to be “neo-socialist damned near communist Democratic Daily KoS type of liberalism.”

Modern day liberalism is even further away from Communism than the liberalism of most of the twentieth century. And do point out how you imagine my liberalism qualifies as “neo-socialist” or “damned near communist.”

BC: You have been and are by demonstration been wholly unwilling to 
“have political or social views favoring reform and progress (as long as it’s a Democrat in charge)
Been “ tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition” in that you throw the KKK and the Third Reich out there with gleeful abandon when it come to close verbal combat

You’re not even making sense here. My bringing up the KKK and the Third Reich in a discussion involving domestic terrorism and dehumanizing language somehow means that I’m unwilling to
“have political or social views favoring reform and progress (as long as it’s a Democrat in charge)” am intolerant of change and am bound by orthodoxy and tradition?

How for heavens sake?

This grows somewhat tiresome. Each time we’ve danced, you keep changing the music. In this case “How did this "licentiousness" cause the rise of the Nazis? And what respected historian has cited this "licentiousness" as a cause?”

OK… I love doing this. Is Dagmar Herzog good enough? Her tome, ‘Sex after Fascism:
Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany’ discusses the loose sexuality and its lead in to Nazism. A extract quote stating: “…if we set sex aside as irrelevant, we lose opportunities to comprehend the extraordinary appeal of Nazism both to those Germans who sought the restoration of conservative family values and to those who benefited from Nazism's loosening of conventional mores.”

Hows that? And for the record: Dagmar Herzog is Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton). The book that I quote from was an Honorable Mention in 2005 for the Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, an award given by Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Somehow, I don’t think that even you’ll be able to spin that one up as a “Den O’ Conservatives.’

“Goebbels was not a failed chicken farmer. He'd been a novelist. You're obviously confusing him with Heinrich Himmler.”

Dead on. As far as my own failure vis-avis Goebbels/Himmler… sorry to have mixed that one up. Exhaustion is rarely a fair excuse for poor academia. Point to you

Lastly, “YOU state that it’s the ‘right wingers’ who keep “trying to recast the Nazis”…
Yes, right wingers are trying to sell the notion that HItler was a leftist.
Do you know what the word "recast" means here?”

Why yes, yes I do. And in this case what you are selling is crap. The OFFICIAL NAME for them Hitler Loving Goons was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP - commonly known as the Nazi Party) Do we need a translation? Why yes, I think we do… word for word…

National Socialist German Workers Party

Now does that sound remotely Republican or Conservative to you?

Nope. Me either.

It’s people like you who bring out the worst in people like me. My ability to face this properly leaves me tired every time you post because, like some bad joke, you keep cropping up and changing the direction to the angle that suites you and your belief system. Not bad for a former grunt huh? ;)

Set and Match. Whaddya think Bob?

DC: Each time we’ve danced, you keep changing the music. In this case “How did this "licentiousness" cause the rise of the Nazis? And what respected historian has cited this "licentiousness" as a cause?”

No, I’m simply asking you to clarify your points and expand on them. We’re not “dancing.” It’s called “discussion.”

BC: Is Dagmar Herzog good enough? Her tome, ‘Sex after Fascism:
Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany’ discusses the loose sexuality and its lead in to Nazism. A extract quote stating: “…if we set sex aside as irrelevant, we lose opportunities to comprehend the extraordinary appeal of Nazism both to those Germans who sought the restoration of conservative family values and to those who benefited from Nazism's loosening of conventional mores.”

Herzog is saying here that Nazism appealed to some extent both to the “licentious” and the sexually conservative. That’s hardly the same as saying that the Weimar Republic’s sexual licentiousness actually led to Nazism.

BC: National Socialist German Workers Party

And are you familiar with why the word “socialist” was included in the party name? Can you explain why the Nazis were regarded by all their contemporaries on both the left and the right as right-wingers?

Do you consider Saddam Hussein’s “Republican Guard” to have been a branch of the GOP? Does the term “Republican Guard” sound Muslim or fascist to you?

BC: It’s people like you who bring out the worst in people like me.

Don’t blame me for your own ad hominems in this exchange.

Laura:
S’all Good. I’ve been on a 12 hour shift and sometimes forget that seeing the Target for What it is and What it’s Worth are two entirely different thing. PT had crafted a response that now, on reflection, isn’t even worth carrying the fight over. Simply put: Bob’s Issue tonight/yesterday was dealing with the continual propaganda-oriented spin on this to paint what now appears to be a sad and deranged individual with a broader brush that dips any and all conservatives as potential terrorists… or something to that effect… the brain is getting hazy at this point… ;)

This is the bare facts: Some friggin lunatic with a 12 Gauge goes into a church and kills two people. He spouts off >something

That’s where it gets us, to the point where Pam can’t raise or speak an argument without injecting some ‘crime’ or other into the mix, as well as alluding to Nazis, the KKK and other such dreadful and hate filled groups that a normal person would recoil in horror to being linked to. And each time I get accused of engaging in Ad Hominem attacks…. Please, because you don’t like what I have to say doesn’t mean I’m attacking you. If I was attacking you, you’d know it, and Bob would ban me… I’m NOT what one would call a ‘shirker’ nor do I tolerate B.S. when I’ve invested so much in my support of the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Coasties and even the Zoomies to have someone try to define me and my beliefs system as “irrelevant and outmoded.” Even ‘barbaric.’ Has been bandied about, but I for one prefer to be a barbarian… it’s kept me alive for a long time.

I have personally experienced “anti-war” protestors, and I have experienced people making blanket statements about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq when they just have NO CLUE as to what it’s really like there. THAT’S when my knickers get in a bunch. And just to really throw some gas on the fire, I used to work in Baghdad for CACI as Facilities and Operations. I also was in Guantanamo Bay working in the Operations Center as well. I’ve spent the past 4 years now, (well, 4 and some change) living in the Middle East experiencing up close and personal the “Religion of Peace” and seeing what it has to offer. I make only this: We’re in this together, whether we like it or not. America is unique, and no amount of Liberal Vitriol can erase that. Best realize that when push comes to shove, as Ben Franklin said “We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

A pleasure blogging with you!

the second paragraph keeps dumping on me... try #3
This is the bare facts: Some friggin lunatic with a 12 Gauge goes into a church and kills two people. He spouts off >something

This is the bare facts: Some friggin lunatic with a 12 Gauge goes into a church and kills two people. He spouts off -something- (no word yet but it had to be pretty profane) as he’s committing these crimes. He then makes statements derogatory of Liberals, Gay and who the hell knows what else. The Mass Media, by it’s own admittance a left leaning institution, then goes into “Anti-Conservative Spin Mode” and then piles on speaking in the newest and greatest Politically Correct buzzwords and attempt to link this crime to Talk Radio and the like. Then on being calle don it, the ‘usual suspects’ attempt to justify it with old excuses, older crimes, and shame us into believing they and only they are right.

BC: PT had crafted a response that now, on reflection, isn’t even worth carrying the fight over.

LOL! So I guess your confident assertion "game, set and match" was just a little premature, eh?

You asked: In this case “How did this "licentiousness" cause the rise of the Nazis? And what respected historian has cited this "licentiousness" as a cause?”

I answered.

"Is Dagmar Herzog good enough? Her tome, ‘Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany’ discusses the loose sexuality and its lead in to Nazism. A extract quote stating: “…if we set sex aside as irrelevant, we lose opportunities to comprehend the extraordinary appeal of Nazism both to those Germans who sought the restoration of conservative family values and to those who benefited from Nazism's loosening of conventional mores.”

You then change the angle and say "Herzog is saying here that Nazism appealed to some extent both to the “licentious” and the sexually conservative. That’s hardly the same as saying that the Weimar Republic’s sexual licentiousness actually led to Nazism."

I never knew how finely a hair can be cut.

Guess I'll just have to chalk this one up to go to bed... No matter how well thought out or how good the angle or research that's performed, "you keep changing the music." (literary license was allowed I thought and a rather good metaphor to this 'discussion' despite you thinking otherwise.)

No matter what I say or do, you're going to attack it from yet again another angle to justify your belief system. Just realize that it does become tiresome. And so on that note: I'm off to bed.

BTW: I do have to thank you however, it's been fun doing the research and forcing my otherwise unused cortex in an academic and scholarly fashion. Far too often do I not get to flex the grey matter.

"LOL! So I guess your confident assertion "game, set and match" was just a little premature, eh?"

Pam, I'm tired. If you want to score this one up because I'm tired, knock yourself out. Feel free to, but I'll say this... thusfar you have provided no decent proof, either written or otherwise that can show me any differently.

I've pulled some pretty good rabbits outta the old Hat, but hey, we all know who won this particular match.

Gnite and Best Regards...

Big Country, thanks for the insight and the interesting discussion. Pamela, I enjoyed reading your posts, as well. The whole "Nazism" topic was such an amazing segue; I had to reread the whole discussion twice to discover how it even came up in the course of the conversation.

Does anyone recall that it arose because people were comparing body counts -- liberal or conservative death tolls?! Doesn't that seem ridiculous, in hindsight?!

For the record, though, Pamela's reading of Weimar and Nazi German history mirrors my own research. The Nazis were NOT liberals or true Socialists; their name was another inspired piece of propaganda. There are many parallels to be drawn between the current climate in the U.S. and events in the 1930s in Germany and Italy. And I'm not even discussing the government, but the social climate, cultural mores, etc. And in a related note, I'd argue that totalitarianism is neither a "liberal" nor a "conservative" construct.

Laura, in case you are stilling lurking about, understand that (granting the point for sake of argument, not in fact) if wrong-doing was committed, the guilty deserve punishment, what Soros is suggesting is beyond the pale.

Neither are the neocons Nazis nor the Marines (of which I have been for nine years) SS. To suggest so is moronic, but also evil, because it trivializes true evil. Even Pvt England, the worst of the Abu Ghraib bunch, isn't on the same playing field as the Nazis. To suggest so, equates panty-helmets and naked pyramids with Zyklon-B chambers and human furnaces. That is an evil quite well and above anything the US is capable of.

While I can agree with the sentiment that wrong-doing deserves punishment, I won't cut that man any slack for equating the US with Nazis, just as I wouldn't go with lunatics that equate sexual harassment with rape. There is no common ground there.

Hi, Vercingetorix. Thanks for bringing up the Soros quotation; I really wanted to find a transcript of the whole discussion at Davos, but I had to settle for a synopsis instead, which was published by the NY Post, NY Times, and enough other outlets that I'm pretty sure it's accurate. What is really interesting to me is that Soros apparently WASN'T comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany, but to a variety of countries that have dealt with "dark" episodes in their history.

'The United States is now recognizing the errors it had made in Iraq, he said, adding, “To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future.” Mr. Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history, and contrasted that reluctance to Germany’s rejection of its Nazi-era past.

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”'

I think he's actually saying that we helped Germany find ways to come back from a very terrible point in their history, and we could use those same methods to bring our country back to reconciliation. Whether I think the Bush administration was wrong or you think it was right, if we all come together to examine things objectively, decide that we do or do not need trials, investigations, whatever methods to sort things out and start fresh, that is preferable to trying to ignore that bad things may or may not have happened. I don't think he's saying we're as bad as or bad in the same ways as the Japanese, the Turks, or the Germans. But rather that there are ways to handle difficult parts of a country's history, and openness is preferable to shame and hiding.

I'm not trying to defend Soros as a person, but I'm just not sure he's making the actual comparison you're seeing. Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse.

Laura, while I understand that you might shy away from equating Nazism with socialism, and it is undoubtedly true that neither conservatism nor current progressivism are heirs to Nazism (it was destroyed, after all, and the dead don't breed this side of George Romero), Nazism was certainly not a laize-faire open market system.

The economy was as centrally-planned as the political system (and had to be, the country hit war-time posture almost immediately upon Hitler's election). You do not have to have pure-phenotype communism to have socialism. Again, even though Sweden has corporations, CEOs, stocks and dividends, it can be honestly called a socialist country, because it is.

I'm comfortable letting this conversation, rousing as it has been, peter out. If you believe that German or Italian fascists idolized Adam Smith and the American model of capitalism, well, good for you. But their system was socialist to the core (as in Mussolini's "Everything within the state, nothing outside," which is as pure a socialist credo as I can imagine).

Laura, we don't need trials.

Ever heard of something called "The Southern Strategy?"

Yep. An effort to make the Republicans viable again in the South after over a century of political violence against them.

And who started turning the tide in the South? Who sent troops to Little Rock? Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a Republican. So what kind of people from the South would flock to the Republican banner after something like that (sending Federal troops to the South to enforce equality re-opened old wounds from the Civil War Reconstruction period)?

I wasn't born yesterday.

Pam,

And are you familiar with why the word “socialist” was included in the party name? Can you explain why the Nazis were regarded by all their contemporaries on both the left and the right as right-wingers?

I guess you haven't read Hayek "The Road To Serfdom" published in 1944.

he did not hate christians. he was just an atheist and thoguht it was stupid to think such a thing as "god" was real. In fact, he told me once that christian conservative values was what he thought held the country together and made it great 50 years ago. maybe he is right. David is not a stupid man. he is by far one of the smartest men I have ever known, and regardless of what he did I would love to remember him in a good light (however hard that may be to do)I have known him all my life and i can promise you 100% what he did was politically motivated and had nothing to do with religion. David went there because of these people being liberals and supporting gay rights and destroying what he grew up in the 1950's. if you ever talked with the man once about poitics you would understand. I love the news papers "it was because he ran out of food stamps". this is something that has been in him for a good while churning. not just a snap from lack of food stamps.
David was at a low point in his life. not many real friends if any. he had cut himself off from what little family he had left. he was bipolar and i think maybe a few other mental problems as well. we talked about it once or 2ice but he wouldnt get treatment or go to a doctor for anything, maybe that would have prevented this event from happening if he had. he got a lot of money from his parents death, but went through it all like water and i am sure that added to the depression.
i feel sorry for david, and for the people at the church that will be forever hurt from this "thing" he has done.
funny, reading the news this morning i saw that someone was talking about a class action law suit against Rush and Savage, and Bill whatever. the hard right conservatives that david was reading books from when he did this. I am sorry but in some ways david adkisson is right. we are going to hell in a fast and quick way. he just found his quicker than most. I wish he had been killed in the church. it would be easier for many people and over a lot quicker in many respects.
"get out while you still can"

BC:Pam, I'm tired. If you want to score this one up because I'm tired, knock yourself out.

I've not been the one in this conversation who has consistently framed this in terms of a "game."

BC: You asked: In this case “How did this "licentiousness" cause the rise of the Nazis? And what respected historian has cited this "licentiousness" as a cause?”
I answered.
"Is Dagmar Herzog good enough? Her tome, ‘Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany’ discusses the loose sexuality and its lead in to Nazism. A extract quote stating: “…if we set sex aside as irrelevant, we lose opportunities to comprehend the extraordinary appeal of Nazism both to those Germans who sought the restoration of conservative family values and to those who benefited from Nazism's loosening of conventional mores.”

I'm sorry, but your answer does not support your claim. It's not "changing the angle" to point this out.

Laura:Does anyone recall that it arose because people were comparing body counts -- liberal or conservative death tolls?! Doesn't that seem ridiculous, in hindsight?!

Well, unfortunately, one of the current right-wing mantras being trotted out these days is what I call "The Numbers Game." Its premise is, "Leftists in the 20th Century killed more people than right-wingers - ergo, leftists are more evil and we must use any means necessary to stop them." It's part of what drives the current effort to recast the Nazis (and in this very thread, the Klan and even John Wilkes Booth!) as liberals or leftists.

It's used to justify horrific crimes committed by right wing regimes.

For instance, in the minds of those who play the numbers game, Pinochet's mass murders are understandable, even necessary, because leftists are so murderous and evil. In the long run, the reasoning goes, Pinochet SAVED lives by crowding thousands of Chilean citizens into a football stadium and torturing and killing them. Because even though Allende had not treated his opponents that way, and even though there's no strong evidence he was planning to, Allende was a leftist and therefore, inherently violent and murderous. It is an article of faith that he would have killed more than Pinochet, no matter how strongly the evidence points the other way.

Of course, give them a few years, and these same right wingers will figure out a way to claim that PINOCHET was a leftist...

For instance, in the minds of those who play the numbers game, Pinochet's mass murders are understandable, even necessary, because leftists are so murderous and evil.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Pam, whenever a lightweight like Pinochet is trotted out by a leftist, we like to point out the dead silence around the Left's perennial favorite mass murderers. We don't even have to get into the Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia: Castro, the blossom in the hair of every San Fran hippie, is quite comparable to the worst of Pinochet, but still wins the Left's praise.

Who's playing games, Pam? Own Lenin. Own Stalin. Own Mao. Everywhere your political ideals have been tried, it has failed horrifically. And you never learn.

For instance, in the minds of those who play the numbers game, Pinochet's mass murders are understandable, even necessary, because leftists are so murderous and evil.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Pam, whenever a lightweight like Pinochet is trotted out by a leftist, we like to point out the dead silence around the Left's perennial favorite mass murderers. We don't even have to get into the Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia: Castro, the blossom in the hair of every San Fran hippie, is quite comparable to the worst of Pinochet, but still wins the Left's praise.

Who's playing games, Pam? Own Lenin. Own Stalin. Own Mao. Everywhere your political ideals have been tried, it has failed horrifically. And you never learn.

...Vercingetorix, it's no use in even trying to deal with the pathology that Pam presents and represents. I literally buried her over the past 2 days and yet again, she pops up again and again and again, and not with any sort of depth or intellect, but utilizing her somewhat emotive and outmoded "The Right will Murder us all" logic that brings to mind Chicken Little and other fantasists.

It WAS entertaining for a while. What really gets to me is that those who, like Pammy, claim "Bush = Hitler" and other such tripe and her feeble attempts to bring the other 'bastard children' of 'hate speech' to the table... well now, if it REALLY was that Bush = Hitler, doncha think that we wouldn't have to deal with people on the left, seeing that they'd all be killed out of hand, IF that in fact was what we on the right were planning?

Again, circular logic and changing of tunes, lifting of 'bars' and stereotyping by utilizing 'buzzwords' all hallmarks of the patetic left.

Yep, BC, she's self-recursive. I've had it with her on the last bit: you get people like Chomsky who lauds the deaths of millions with an open hand, "just give the little dears a little more time..." and the promised dreamland will come. Then they try to saddle Pinnochio around our necks.

The Left, whenever given free reign, has failed epically. Deal with it, Pam.

Interesting the back-and-forth, but I think the main point is the trick Pam plays with calling her own assholes "intemperate" but ours "violent."

She actually believes that her own side is Simon-pure and Simon-simple. No bile from any noted lefty will convince her otherwise.

Me, I'm not under any such blinders. O'Reilly is a blowhard and a bit of a clown. Hannity is the boring man's Limbaugh. And Coulter is a one-note provacateur who's not half as smart as she thinks she is.

That said, O'Reilly's line about San Francisco was not an advocation of violence, merely an illustration on the responsibilities of defense, and what should lie in wait for those determined to undermine it. A thought experiment, if you will, though perhaps a touch "intemperate."

Compare this to Markos "Screw them" Moulitas, who decided that defense contractors in Iraq deserved to be murdered by a mob and have their bodies burned for television. Same situation, except the big Kos wasn't speaking hypothetically.

Now if Pam is willing to say "Moulitas is an asshole, and everyone who agrees with that sentiment is an asshole," then I'll be willing to believe she's intellectually honest. 'Till then, she's no different from the clown who pulled the same routine at Ace of Spades: she has the news cycle, and she is playing it.

She actually believes that her own side is Simon-pure and Simon-simple. No bile from any noted lefty will convince her otherwise.

Yep, she's self-referential. To her, all racism is on the right, therefore all racists are rightists. I bet she believes Stalin to be actually a rightist.

True communism never having been tried out and all. Disgusting.

AtN: Well said. I hadn’t heard that statement about Moulitas and the contractors. It’s a damned shame we have (courtesy of the Left) become such a litigious society. Because of that, I’m forced to restrain myself when I come across such people and their attitudes. I’ve lost count of both friends killed, friends wounded and shrapnel accumulated over the past 4 and a half years and when I hear an asshole making a comment like that, to hell with civility. I think if people were more free to exercise their ‘right to be offended’ by schooling some of these poseurs who hide behind a blog behind the woodshed, and that we physically take them to task for their attitudes, then America might get back on track. The elimination of corporal punishment in school and church started it, and then throwing in two cents of ‘psychoanalysis’ and how someone’s ‘self esteem’ was injured and allowing damages to be awarded pretty much caused the ‘pussification’ of the US… When I’m home on R&R I’m not allowed to go out unless I have a ‘minder’ or a sedative as my wife knows the chances of me taking someone apart physically is great… and to the likes of Pam and her crowd, that just proves to them the ‘barbarity’ of my kind, even though its my kind that PROTECT and DEFEND her right to say foolish and insulting things. Quite the mindblower huh? It’s no wonder I stay overseas…

V: Nazism was certainly not a laize-faire open market system.

Nor was it a socialist system. Nor was it mistaken by most observers for a socialist system. Using your definition of "socialism" most of 19th century Europe, including Prussia, were left-wing socialist countries. I suspect the Prussians would have objected strongly to such a drastically revised definition of their system.

Why do you think the overwhelming majority of contemporary observers put the Nazis on the right side of the political spectrum rather than the left. Journalists, travel writers, diarists, letter writers, pundits, and historians, both conservative and liberal, described the Nazis as right wing.

Was it all some sort of dastardly liberal conspiracy?

It was right before First Fallujah, which I'm guessing you were in-country for, BC.

I think the fact that some folk are willing to say "Man, I'd like to kick the ass of the next fargin' hippie I see," is the sort of thing that sets Pam and her ilk off. Now, you aren't going to do it, BC, because you know consequences lie in wait, and those consequences are good thing to the extent that they restrain people from ass-kickings. Although I agree that sometimes a good ass-kicking, so long as it doesn't leave lasting damage, is a healthy thing.

There's been way too much fury and not enough sobriety on both sides of the aisle for as long as I've been an observer. For the Left, its the rage of sins past and the persistent refusal of reality to conform to their wishes. For the Right, it's the reaction to the above and the fear of things getting worse, along with the thrill at the ability to say what they want to a national audience after being marginalized from the 60's to the 90's.

Coulter gets 50% of her audience from people still excited about this last (the other 50% are lefties looking to get their adrenaline fix). That doesn't make anything she says worth paying attention to, and I've never seen a single quote from her that wasn't specifically designed to provoke people. Unimpressive in the extreme.

That said, the exchange with the baseball bats, I'm pretty sure was meant to be taken as wearied snark, not serious advocacy. YMMV.

No more so than Hillary’s “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”

AtN:
Yep Dead on (pardon the pun). And yeah, it’s the whole “Kumbay-ya” Leftist “we’re such good friends and we can hug your cares away” attitude that the majority of the Far Reaching Left has that shows both an incredibly sheltered and naïve view of the world. I WISH I could have such a pleasant “wrapped in a snuggy blanket/no harm will come to me” kind of world.

Unfortunately, it ain’t like that, and by looking at Pam’s newest self serving dialectic, you can see she either passes over or bypasses any and all sharp edges. When I stated that a Liberal was a conservative in waiting who hadn’t been mugged, she then claimed to have been mugged. Not that I doubt her, and not knowing her, I feel poorly for her, but in the respect that HAVING been mugged, what has she done to prevent it in the future? Does she carry a gun? Answer: Nope… She can’t… she lives in San Francisco, which doesn’t offer that option. To her, that’s fine, but to me, I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6, (or 8 actually I’m a big guy) but in her Leftist State of Mind and Leftist Run Town, she doesn’t HAVE that option to defend herself. To me, it’s a mindscramble (to utilize the polite term)

And I also agree… The popularity of the conservative radio movement is that they have FINALLY gotten the bully pulpit, and will be damned if they are giving it up… lets face it… we’re talking real $$$ here. Myself, I don’t get to listen to ANY of the talking heads on the radio. I get Al-Jazeera. And if you think Limbaugh Savage and Coulter are hardcore, you ought to listen in on THAT station in English. That in itself is another issue that can be dealt with later… Vocal Denunciation of (unproven) Right Wing violence and those who perpetrate it in Pam’s World, yet her silence for the subjugation and enslavement of Islamic women, forced circumcision, and honor killings for some supposed ‘family dishonor,’ ALL of which are current events WITHIN THE BORDERS OF THE UNITED STATES RIGHT NOW.

M. Simon: Yep. An effort to make the Republicans viable again in the South after over a century of political violence against them.

No, the Southern Strategy wasn't an effort to end southern violence against Republicans. It was an effort by the GOP to cash in on the racism of the Dixiecrats who were upset over the Democratic Party's support for black Civil Rights.

M. Simon: And who started turning the tide in the South?
Who sent troops to Little Rock? Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a Republican. So what kind of people from the South would flock to the Republican banner after something like that (sending Federal troops to the South to enforce equality re-opened old wounds from the Civil War Reconstruction period)?

There was no need for democrats who supported black civil right at that time to "flock to the Republican banner." The Democratic party was split between FDR style liberal Democrats and the Dixiecrats -- who, were not, by any stretch of the imagination, liberal.

Actual defection to the Republican party began with Nixon in the 1970s, though even before then Southern Democrats were turning out in droves to vote for Republicans. I can remember that most of our neighbors in Louisiana were going for Goldwater in the '64 election, and in '68 those we knew who weren't voting for Nixon went for Wallace -- an independent. By 1972 the Southern Strategy had been so effective that the south was quite solidly for Nixon.

M. Simon: I wasn't born yesterday.

But you're plainly not old enough to remember the era of the southern strategy. I am. I vas dere, sharlie, and I can tell you that the Republican party's appeal to the racism of the Dixiecrats was wildly successful.

Pamela, the next time you want to limit "Socialism" to a particular set of beliefs, try reading some Marx. In section IV of the Communist Manifesto, ol' Karl specifically lays out the numerous varieties of Socialism, and how Communism is superior to them all. Among these he notes: Feudal Socialism, Petty-Bourgeois Socialism, German, or "True" Socialism, and Conservative, or Bourgeois Socialism.

In other words, there are many different Socialisms, espoused by many different people for different reasons. If you want to be ideologically pure, then all of these must fall by the wayside as false socialisms, unless you're a Communist. But that begs the question of whether you have to be a Communist to be a Socialist, and its just a bad scene all around.

In point of fact, I think 19th-Century Prussian socialism laid the seed for National Socialism. Certainly Bismarck was a feudalist, but he could see that a state that provides a certain level of economic security could command much loyalty, and grow powerful apparati that would serve it well in times of need. Bismarck was trying to head off workers-party socialism, as Hitler was trying to head of the Reds, but just as the German Socialists voted the Kaiser all the War funds he needed in 1914, so many German Reds turned black when they saw the writing on the wall.

The point is not that Nazis were socialists that Progressive Democrats of the present day have any affinity for; but that the socialism they practised was more than mere feigning. It was war-socialism, blood-and-iron socialism, mystic-race-grandeur socialism, which yes, served State and Party more than it served the workers (See also, Soviet Union). Or, if you prefer, National Socialism.

In a nutshell, Socialism contains multitudes, and some of them goose-step.

Journalists, travel writers...
Like Duranty, perhaps? You really aren't helping your case here.

...diarists, letter writers

What in the name of Almighty Satan's left nipple is this?

...pundits, and historians, both conservative and liberal, described the Nazis as right wing.

This of course is an appeal to authority. Cite the authorities or go home. Nor do I really care whether everyone believed or everyone knows, etc. Doesn't make everyone correct.

And as M.Simon noted above, not everyone agreed. Moreover Hayek carries more water with me than any hundreds of local fishwrap delivery services.

PT: And are you familiar with why the word “socialist” was included in the party name? Can you explain why the Nazis were regarded by all their contemporaries on both the left and the right as right-wingers?
M. Simon: I guess you haven't read Hayek "The Road To Serfdom" published in 1944.

I'm familiar with Hayek. Sorry, but one single book does not make a consensus, and the consensus by observers on both the right and the left was that the Nazis were right wingers.

How do you account for this? Was it all some leftist plot? And again, are you familiar with why the word "socialist" was added to the Nazi party name?

Vercingetorix:

V: Or, maybe, just maybe, Pam, whenever a lightweight like Pinochet is trotted out by a leftist,

A LIGHTWEIGHT?

What does that mean? Pincochet tortured and murdered thousands. Think the elderly people still wondering what mass grave their daughter or son is buried in, still agonizing over the suffering their children probably went through, consider Pinochet to have been a "lightweight" when it came to mayhem? Think Victor Jara's widow thought so after collecting her husband's maimed, bullet-ridden body?

Who else is a "lightweight?" How high does the stack of bodies have to get? And once they reach a certain level, will someone on the right blow a whistle and say, "now we're even! We don't need to kill any more leftists." Is that how you think mass murder works?

V: we like to point out the dead silence around the Left's perennial favorite mass murderers.

Ah yes, more rightwing, "I get all my news from Fox, Talk Radio, and the right-wing blogosphere" naivete about liberals. In the course of my life, I've only met one leftist who didn't revile Stalin and consider the term "Stalinist" a gross insult, and that was a single rather wild-eyed Communist whom the other Communists considered an embarrassment.

V: Castro, the blossom in the hair of every San Fran hippie..

Another case in point. I've lived here for twenty years. I've not met any liberals, or for that matter leftists here, who were fans of Castro. Quite the contrary.

If there is a dearth of indignant liberal essays denouncing Pol Pot or Stalin, etc., it's because there's also a great dearth of essays defending these thugs. Do tell, Vercingetorix, how many pieces can you find in prominent liberal magazines talking about how badly misunderstood poor ol' Pol Pot was? Or how, really, it was NECESSARY for Stalin to wipe out countless dissidents?

Own Stalin? Own Lenin? Own Pol Pot? Own Castro? The left already has. Back during the bad old days of the USSR, when that chapter on Soviet torture from Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO was published in Harpers, there was no outcry from the liberal press saying that it was all lies, or that the stress positions, sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation Solzhenitsyn described wasn't torture. Quite possibly you can find, if you look hard enough, some leftist who said or published such things, but they were drowned out in a sea of anger and revulsion from both sides of the political equation.

No, it's right wingers who are writing pieces about what a great guy poor ol' Pinochet was, right wingers who are denying that the very tactics the right was denouncing back when the GULAG came out qualify as torture at all.

Big Country;

I have not said anywhere that "Bush=Hitler."

Why are you misrepresenting me?

V;Journalists, travel writers...
Like Duranty, perhaps? You really aren't helping your case here.

How does the career of Stalin apologist Walter Duranty weaken my case?

Pt: diarists, letter writers
V: What in the name of Almighty Satan's left nipple is this?

A diarist, V, is someone who keeps a diary. They were these squarish, papery things that people used before blogs. Quite a few famous diaries came out of that era aside from Ann Frank's -- Victor Klemperer, William Shirer, Hannah Senesh, Emmanuel Ringelblum, Josef Goebbels...

A letter writer is kind of like a diarist. They write emails, except the emails are on square pieces of paper that get physically sent to recipients in things called "envelopes." In the days before email, people wrote quite a lot of them, often commenting on the politics of the day.

Hope this clears things up for you.

V: This of course is an appeal to authority. Cite the authorities or go home.

No, it's not an "appeal to authority." It's an appeal to common usage. The language in question comes from pretty much every historian of the Third Reich, like William Shirer (who saw its rise from his post in Berlin as a journalist) Hugh Trevor-Roper, Peter Padfield, and Martin Gilbert, commentators on the Third Reich in the years after the war, like Milton Meyer, and contemporary editors and journalists -- like Henry Luce.

You know, Big Country, if you have questions about how I reacted to being mugged, you can always ask me. I'm right here.

Or is there something about that prospect that frightens you?

I dunno, Pam. Is there something about the prospect of engaging my comments that frightens you?

I mean, I'm working hard over here. You could send some of that snark my way.

Like, for example, when I say that your "consensus" includes chaps like Duranty who were more than willing to parrot any line coming out of Moscow, which is, I believe, where the meme about Nazis being right-wing emerged. In June of 1941, IIRC.

Snark… a perfect definition of her attitude.

Pam, you neither frighten nor intimidate, however, I will bequeath you the title of “Biggest Burr in my Butt” that I’ve had in a long time. I offer sincere condolences in my commentary vis-à-vis your mugging, and yet you reply without substance, nor with anything that could be remotely construed as a well thought out argument, within the exception of utilizing terminology in a crass attempt to get me to drop to your level of “Snark-itude” and yes, you are trying to provoke me. It’s transparent. The comment “Or is there something about that prospect that frightens you?” could be construed, based on your knowledge of me (freely admitted to and given mind you) as an attempt to “push my buttons.”

No Pam, inasmuch as it may disappoint you and sadden you that your somewhat lame attempt failed, know that the only thing I fear in truth is that we as a people leave a poorer world for my Children and others children to inherit. In that you don’t appear to have stated that you have children, perhaps I’m ‘yelling down an empty well’ and you just wouldn’t understand that, now could you?

After all, it’s the Leftists of this world who, for all their care ‘for the children’ who have introduced abortion, population control measures, the ‘Green Movements’, eliminated DDT (thereby causing untold deaths of millions of children to malaria) and yet it’s always done ”for the children”

Please stop wasting our time and go back the Daily Kos.

Andrew:

No, but as of a few minutes ago, I am not home and I dislike posting lengthy messages from here.

I've already noted your message and will be sending you a reply either later this evening or tomorrow morning. Sorry it can't be sooner, but it looks like I'm going to have a long day.

I've lived here for twenty years. I've not met any liberals, or for that matter leftists here, who were fans of Castro. Quite the contrary.

Great! I don't care. I don't know - or care to know, frankly - anyone you do.

But don't try to put this garbage over on me that the Left hates Castro and Guevara. Oh, please. That's beneath contemptible.

Quite possibly you can find, if you look hard enough, some leftist who said or published such things, but they were drowned out in a sea of anger and revulsion from both sides of the political equation.

That's revisionism, pure and simple. But, okay, back up that statement. If there was so much revulsion and anger over the Soviet Union, it should be quite easy, though so far you've been extraordinarily lazy.

Fair enough, Pamela. I will keep my powder dry until I see your response.

Andrew:

NA: "Like, for example, when I say that your "consensus" includes chaps like Duranty who were more than willing to parrot any line coming out of Moscow, which is, I believe, where the meme about Nazis being right-wing emerged. In June of 1941, IIRC."

Duranty was no doubt also part of that consensus that states the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That does not make the sun rising in the east and setting in the west some sort of Stalinist meme. And this notion that the Nazis being described as "right wing" was a "meme" that "emerged in June of 1941" is absolute nonsense. Where in the world did you hear this? The Nazis had been recognized as right wing and widely referred to as such long before the second world war broke out:

"There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." -- From Time Magazine (August 8, 1932)

Believing that the Nazis were leftist, requires you to believe that almost the entire body of work written about the Nazis before, during, and since the Third Reich is a massive left-wing conspiracy to make the right look bad. Is it really your premise that Henry Luce was a leftiist propagandist? Is pretty much every historian who has written about the Third Reich?

The fact that Marx refers disparagingly in the third section of his manifesto to what he plainly considers to have been pseudo socialist movements, most of which took place primarily on paper does not transform the Nazis into a leftist rather than a right-wing movement. On the contrary, if you read that section of Marx, it’s obvious Marx viewed “Feudal Socialism” and “Conservative Socialism” to have ultimately been in the service of the ruling classes and not genuine “socialism” at all.

Pamela, I did read the section (it's the fourth, not the third), and you haven't contradicted anything I said. If you want to call it right-wing socialism, false socialism, whatever you wish, that still puts it to the left of even the modern-day Democratic party, to say nothing of the GOP.

Even if you accept Shirer's view that much of the "Workers" part of the NazionalSozialismus Deutche Arbeiten Partei was calculated to bring in the votes, even if you accept that the industrialists profited much more than the workers and farmers from the Nazi Regime, their remained enough welfare-state, command-economy elements to make it more than pretend.

Here's Shirer, pg. 365:

"Finally, the take-home pay of the German worker shrank. Besides stiff income taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemployment and disability insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker -- like everyone else in Nazi Germany -- was constantly pressured to make increasingly large gifts to an assortment of Nazi charities, the chief of which was Winterhilfe (Winter Relief)."

You can't tell me that this nickel-and-diming does not bear striking resemblance to the cradle-to-grave welfare states of modern Europe, which the Democrats would like to implement in this country. Now a modern Democrat, having absorbed enough Keynes and Friedman to know that take-home pay is a good thing for the economy, would not desire to set up so Spartan a regime. But that just means a modern Democrat is less left-wing than a Nazi.

Shirer goes on to write that failure to contribute sufficiently to Winterhilfe could result in dismissal by order of a labor court for "conduct hostile to the community of the people...to be most strongly condemned." If you cannot see the Soviet-ness of this practice, this language, you're making an effort not to see it.

And besides, how well did the workers and peasants profit from Lenin? Sure, the Soviets had no official capitalists, but the state industrial concerns were always given the greater care (to the point of starving the individual workers if enough was not produced). Trotsky called this "state capitalism", which would be a fitting description for both the Third Reich and Fascist Italy.

So Hitler reneged on destroyed "interest slavery." And Lenin reneged on "Peace, Bread, and Land." Ultimately, the Bolsheviks were about serving the ruling class -- themselves-- above the interests of the workers. Are we now to pretend that the USSR was right-wing?

I think perhaps you underestimate the degree to which socialism, the corporate state, the command economy, was deemed by the sizable majority of the intelligensia of Western Civilization in the first three-quarters of the 20th century to be the inevitable wave of the future. The Nazis and Fascists were called "right-wing" because they appealed to militaristic national mysticism, to blood and iron, not because of their economic policies, under which, even in the perverted form that they took in the Third Reich, were well to the left of FDR or even the British Labour party. That the historians of the 40's and 50's called them righties is not, in itself, proof of the assertion. Widely-held views are not immune from being misconcieved.

You're quite right: from Marx's point of view, bourgeois socialism was false and incomplete. That doesn't make it not to the left of free-market capitalism. As a bourgeois socialist (Democrat), you're free to argue that the Nazis were not pure socialists. But then, neither are you. And Nazi economics resembles Communist economics far more than it resembles Democrat economics. A right-wing socialist is still to the left of a left-wing capitalist.

Believing that the Nazis were leftist, requires you to believe that almost the entire body of work written about the Nazis before, during, and since the Third Reich is a massive left-wing conspiracy to make the right look bad.

Or it could mean that the entire body of those writers was farther to the left then today (which was almost certainly the case). No conspiracy needed.

Vercingetorix: That's revisionism, pure and simple. But, okay, back up that statement. If there was so much revulsion and anger over the Soviet Union, it should be quite easy, though so far you've been extraordinarily lazy.

V, the most damning excerpt from the Solzhenitsyn's book, the chapter on torture that describes things like sleep deprivation, stress positions, and sexual humiliation as torture, was printed in July, 1974 in HARPER'S MAGAZINE -- a left-wing publication that had also published Seymour Hersh's account of the My Lai Massacre. I assure you the framing of Solzheistyn's account was not sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and I invite you to visit a library, take a look at that issue of HARPERS in the bound periodicals, and see for yourself.

...as printed in July, 1974 in HARPER'S MAGAZINE

Wow. Really? And what did they do for the fifty years before that?

Hint: It involved knee-pads and Bianca.

Color me very, very unimpressed. Especially because they didn't learn from their mistakes (socialism is/was/will always be a disaster, communism is/was/will always be impossible, much less desirable even in theory).

Acknowledging Solzhenitsyn (and the Secret Speech twenty years prior) was an honorable thing for the left to do, given the decades they had spent calling the right fools for believing that anything bad happened in the USSR. If they had made the next logical step and supported a robust anti-Soviet foreign policy, I would have truly been impressed. As it happened, they found it easier to call Reagan a brainless cowboy.

I'll await your rebuttal on my previous note.

Okay - how about we add up how many incidents, or how many individual victims, can be attributed to rightwing or leftwing violence since, say, the Civil Rights era (during which time the rightwing outscored the leftwing by an order of magnitude or so - or was there some massacre of Klansmen that we've never heard about?).

I think there would be no contest. No poliical philosophy has a monopoly on violence, or an immunity to attracting lunatics, but I do think that the conservate worldview is more amenable to eliminationism than liberalism is.

Andrew:

AN: Pamela, I did read the section (it's the fourth, not the third), and you haven't contradicted anything I said. If you want to call it right-wing socialism, false socialism, whatever you wish, that still puts it to the left of even the modern-day Democratic party, to say nothing of the GOP.

Only if you completely alter the conception of the political "right" and "left" in place before, during and after the Third Reich. Quite aside from the fact that Hitler loathed socialism and made that plain (which is why people like Emil Kirdorf, Fritz Thyssen, and Henry Ford were so crazy about him) the Nazi party's stance on Communism, race, art, women, etc. puts them quite firmly on the right side of the aisle.

Do you consider Henry Ford to have been a socialist, or someone in sympathy with socialism?

Citing the German Winterhilfe Program as an example of dyed in the wool "socialism" is ridiculous. It shifts the definition of "socialism" from the state controlling the means of production to "any government aid program using tax dollars." Using this definition, anything other than a completely laissez-faire economic system qualifies as "socialist." You're drastically expanding the definition of "socialist" in a false and self-serving manner.

I find it ironic that I've been called on, as a liberal, to own the crimes of leftists like Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, etc., while this revisionist effort is going on by right wingers to avoid "owning" Hitler.

AN: , and you haven't contradicted anything I said.

Argument does not consist entirely of "contradiction." No, I have not contradicted the quotes you offered from Marx in that I have not denied he wrote a section of the Manifesto on what he plainly considered to be false socialism. What I have said is that these quotes from Marx do not back up your revisionist premise that the Nazis were leftists.

The quote I posted from TIME does contradict your bizarre claim that the premise of the Nazis being Right Wing started with Duranty in about 1941.

I asked you where you heard such a thing, and really, I'd like to know. Where did you hear this or read it?

Vercingetorix:

V: Or it could mean that the entire body of those writers was farther to the left then today (which was almost certainly the case). No conspiracy needed.

Then you need to own up to what you and other right wingers are attempting to do -- that is, you are engaging in drastic historical revisionism.

And that would prove, what exactly?

I mean, let's say the victims of the Klan outweigh those of the Weather Underground, and the Black Panthers, and the other left-wing revolutionary groups (personally, I doubt it, since we're only talking about the 1950's on, and most of the Klan's lynchings were from the 1880's to the 1920's, but who knows?)

What does that prove? That the Klan are a right-wing terror group with a high level of lethality? Sure, and they're no friends of anybody associated with modern Conservatism.

[Ah, but the Southern Strategy, the Southern Strategy! Please. Nixon won no higher share of the vote in 1968 than he did in 1960. The difference was that Wallace and the Dixiecrats had enough support to give the states to Nixon.

And why did those Dixiecrats start voting Republican from 1972 on? Was it because Republicans became segregationists? No. It's because after 1968, segregation was dead, and they knew it. They could either vote for racial preferences for minorities (affirmative action, busing, et. al) or they could vote for race-neutrality, which had been and remains the Republican philosophy since 1865.]

After fifteen to twenty years of the Right Wing Noise Machine, you take one guy's actions and make him the poster boy for "eliminationism". Three, if you count McVeigh and the Olympic bomber. All of whom have been, you know, completely lionized on the right, as have the handful of abortion bombers.

If that's eliminationism, we're the sorriest fascists since Franco. Now, do you want to tone down the rhetoric back off of eleven so we can all agree that shooting a bunch of people in a church is a bad thing?

Okay - how about we add up how many incidents, or how many individual victims, can be attributed to rightwing or leftwing violence since, say, the Civil Rights era (during which time the rightwing outscored the leftwing by an order of magnitude or so - or was there some massacre of Klansmen that we've never heard about?).

Sure. The Chinese Communists killed and tortured almost as many (300-2000 killed) as Pammy's favorite dictator, Pinochet, (3200 killed) during just Tiananmen Square alone. Add in the Cultural Revolution, that's another million dead, tortured, starved, the North Korea, and Cuba, we still have the Gulag, Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and don't forget the Baathists! (Their motto? "Unity, Freedom, Socialism") Don't forget Zimbabwe or Burma!

Seriously, whatcha got, kid?

Vercingetorix:

PT:...as printed in July, 1974 in HARPER'S MAGAZINE

V: Wow. Really? And what did they do for the fifty years before that? Hint: It involved knee-pads and Bianca.

You need to actually read some history and literature rather than relying on the Internet and talk radio for your information about liberals. New York Post editor Joseph Wechsler was a liberal anti-Communist who was quite vocal in his criticism of the Soviet Union and deeply concerned about Soviet espionage. Edward Michael Harrington was not just a liberal, but a socialist anti-Communist, who once observed that hearing a roll call of Stalin's murder victims: "like hearing the roll call of revolutionary martyrs who were bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh."

Sinclair Lewis' IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, published in 1935, offers in its hero, Doremus Jessup a good portrait of the average liberal's attitude towards the Soviet Union at that time:

"Democracy--here and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a sniveling slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic materialism as Russia.."

"When Doremus, back in the 1920's, had advocated the recognition of Russia, Fort Beulah had fretted that he was turning out-and-out Communist. He, who understood himself abnormally well, knew that far from being a left-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal..."

"He was, and he knew it, a small-town bourgeois Intellectual. Russia forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring: privacy, the right to think and to criticize as he freakishly pleased. To have his mind policed by peasants in uniform--rather than that he would live in an Alaska cabin, with beans and a hundred books and a new pair of pants every three years."

"Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who extended this boon to China."

Now, do you want to tone down the rhetoric back off of eleven so we can all agree that shooting a bunch of people in a church is a bad thing?

Yep. But Pammy still won't drop her Rush/Coulter/Bush/KKK/the-right-is-responsible!!1!1!!-schtick, so we'll go around in circles for another week.

Andrew:

AN: Acknowledging Solzhenitsyn (and the Secret Speech twenty years prior) was an honorable thing for the left to do, given the decades they had spent calling the right fools for believing that anything bad happened in the USSR.

No. I've already posted to Vercingetorix examples of prominent liberals and even leftists who strongly opposed the Soviet Union. I've cited James Wechsler, Edward Michael Harrington, and various quotes from Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, which reflect the average liberal's attitude towards Stalin's Russia at that time. I dislike repeating myself, but if you insist, I'll repost these in a direct reply to you.

The attitude you are describing is a description of the more die-hard members of the American Communist Party -- an organization not popular with liberals and leftists in most of 20th century America.

Smedler:

S: No poliical philosophy has a monopoly on violence, or an immunity to attracting lunatics, but I do think that the conservate worldview is more amenable to eliminationism than liberalism is.

Only inasmuch as conservatives are more likely to get away with eliminationist attitudes and actions than leftists. Conservatism tends to appeal to people who already wield a great deal of power, like those in law enforcement and finance. As a result, these institutions will wink at actions from right-wing groups that would prompt investigations if the same actions were taken by leftists. To attract the attention of the FBI and the police, right-wingers typically have to start actually stockpiling weapons and threatening their neighbors. Frequently all leftists have had to do to prompt investigation is open schools or write books and screenplays.

Stalin's Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia indicate that if the tables are turned and leftists seize the apparatus of powerful institutions like law enforcement and government, they are just as capable of committing heinous crimes.

I don't like this business of toting up bodies and using the resulting sum to assign a greater or lesser level of immorality to the perps. There is, in my opinion, no significant moral difference between a government that succeeds in terrifying dissenters into silence by murdering three thousand, and a government that is still not certain it's succeeded even after killing a hundred thousand.

The question is not how high the bodies are actually stacked, but whether dissenters in that society end up with a well-founded fear of being murdered, tortured or imprisoned for merely voicing their beliefs.

Vercingetorix:

V:Yep. But Pammy still won't drop her Rush/Coulter/Bush/KKK/the-right-is-responsible!!1!1!!-schtick, so we'll go around in circles for another week.

Gosh, isn't it awful of me to post all those icky ol' facts here?

Yes, Pam, I know that there were some leftists against the USSR. One of them happened to be named George Orwell. Another off the top of my head was Arthur Koestler. Another toss-up would be Aldous Huxley.

For every Orwell, there's a May Day parade of thousands, a Paris riot, forty warmed-over Maoists handing out pamphlets, dozens of journalists and professors whitewashing the unthinkable.

Again, I'm not impressed. But, let's try this experiment. You, in San Fran or wherever, try organizing your leftist friends against Cuba and North Korea, and I'll believe the 'outrage' of the left against the worst of communism. Send us pictures.

Vercingetorix:

V: For every Orwell, there's a May Day parade of thousands,

You're assuming that every person who takes part in a May Day Parade is a Stalin Apologist?

Are you even familiar with the origins of May Day as a celebration of labor? it didn't start in the Soviet Union.

V: a Paris riot,

Every Paris riot involves Stalinists?

You plainly haven't thought this through.

V: forty warmed-over Maoists handing out pamphlets,

Maoists hardly qualify as "liberals" and they are a tiny minority among American leftists.

V: dozens of journalists and professors whitewashing the unthinkable.

In this country journalists are more likely to do that "whitewashing" when it comes to right-wing regimes than with left-wing regimes.

Maoists hardly qualify as "liberals" and they are a tiny minority among American leftists.

Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Trotskites, Liberals, leftists, luddites, libertines, whatever, if you add up all these tiny minorities very soon you have a pretty sizable majority.

"Only if you completely alter the conception of the political "right" and "left" in place before, during and after the Third Reich. Quite aside from the fact that Hitler loathed socialism and made that plain (which is why people like Emil Kirdorf, Fritz Thyssen, and Henry Ford were so crazy about him) the Nazi party's stance on Communism, race, art, women, etc. puts them quite firmly on the right side of the aisle."

Heaven forfend I alter conceptions. That could lead to dancing.

You don't seem to be listening. Hitler can say all he wants about how much he loathed "socialism," what matters is what he did when he was in power. And what he did to the economy of Germany, though hardly in league with Proudhon or Marx, is still more socialist than anybody still around, save the Green Party and other fringe players.

And I don't know why you're bringing up art, and culture, and whatnot, because I already said that on these matters the Nazis were indeed right-wing, though perhaps not as much as you might think. The Nazis wanted to preserve traditional modes of cultural expression and mores, but they also wanted to shift them to their new and exciting ethos, and had a level of contempt for "bourgeois morality" that would do any member of the Internationale proud.

And the Nazis dislike of Communists is completely irrelevant to the question of whether they qualify as socialists. Communists hated and killed other socialists with great regularity. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks despised one another, as did "right" Socialist Revolutionaries and "left" Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin exterminated the Mensheviks and SR's with extreme prejudice. Are they "right-wing" now?

For that matter, you have yourself stated that you and every other good leftie in SF hates Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Does that make YOU right-wing?

20th century socialists slaughtered each other with the same purblind blinkered passion as 16th-17th century Christians. The fact that Pope Paul III did not consider Martin Luther a Christian did not mean he wasn't one. So, with that in mind, how do you know that when Hitler said "I hate socialists" he didn't mean "I hate those other kinds of socialists, who have failed to uncover and absorb the truth about race."

"Citing the German Winterhilfe Program as an example of dyed in the wool "socialism" is ridiculous. It shifts the definition of "socialism" from the state controlling the means of production to "any government aid program using tax dollars." Using this definition, anything other than a completely laissez-faire economic system qualifies as "socialist." You're drastically expanding the definition of "socialist" in a false and self-serving manner."

Forgive me, but the system of using government aid, paid for by taxes, leading to expansion of bureaucracy and government control over greater and greater aspects of society, to make them just, this idea came from who, exactly? There's a word for them. I believe back in the day they were called Progressives, yes? And they took their cue and influence from 19th century Radicals and Marxists, isn't that the accepted story? Are you actually trying to persuade me that the Progressives were right-wing, and completely non-socialist in their thinking and goals?

Once again, socialism contains a vast multitude of schemes, projects, and understandings of social justice. The most extreme of these were the Communists. Others existed. Marx noted them, and held them in contempt because they failed to go far enough. If you wish to insist that this means, ipso facto, that they were not socialists, then you must be prepared to admit that Martin Luther was not a Christian, that Shi'ites are not Muslims, that Zen are not Buddhists, etc.

You may sneer at a compulsory aid program, failure to contribute to which could result in dismissal by a "labor court", as a mere charity, but the expanse of Winterhilfe combined with the high-tax burden of the Third Reich, the protection against loss of land by farmers, the mammoth public programs designed to provide Germans with job security, is still an achievement above and beyond what the major left-wing party of the United States has been able to accomplish or even seriously propose.

Yet, I am to take seriously the notion that it is I who is attempting to change the definition, and not you who is attempting to narrow it for your own purposes.

Which brings us to:

"The quote I posted from TIME does contradict your bizarre claim that the premise of the Nazis being Right Wing started with Duranty in about 1941.

I asked you where you heard such a thing, and really, I'd like to know. Where did you hear this or read it?"

First of all, Time Magazine saying the Nazis were right-wing is not clear about what they were right-wing on. As I have said repeatedley, The Nazis were right-wing on cultural issues, left on economic ones.

As to June 1941, I was first told this when young, by my grandfather, who grew up in brooklyn before and during the war. My great-grandfather was an out-and-out socialist and thus, grandfather remembered the attitudes of the lefties and reds, who before Barbarossa would permit no one to speak ill of Hitler and condemned the British and French for "starting" the war (Stalin made a clear statement to this effect at the October 1939 Party Congress), and changed their minds overnight when the Germans invaded. He told me how sudden it all was, and how vociferously they argued the opposite of what they had said before.

Sure, anecdotal. But Stalin toasted Hitler as "This great-hearted man," at the final session of the Nazi-Soviet Pact negotiations, and in his book "1941: Hitler and Stalin" John Lukacs makes it plain that there was more than short-term advantage which brought the totalitarians together. They shared a contempt for the West, and for bourgeois liberalism. When the pact was signed, the Comintern forced the Socialists of Britain and France to become anti-war. After Barbarossa, suddenly Fascism was the most Right-Wing of Right-Wing, the Final Degenerate Stage of Capitalism, and all that rot. And again, the Western Intelligensia made every move required of them to take all this in.

Orwell noted a similar phenomenon in his essay "England, Your England": "Many Intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist until 1935, shrieked for war with Germany during 1935-39, and cooled off when the war started." It is to be noted that 1935-39 was when Litvinov was actively seeking a military alliance with Britain and France. He was replaced by Molotov in 1939, because Molotov believed in an agreement with Germany.

More Orwell: "All through the critical years the left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-English." But then, since he is so critical, Orwell must be a right-winger.

So yes, others may have called the Nazis "right-wing" in the 1930's, which may not mean what you think it means. But the placement of the Nazis as the final phase of capitalism has less to do with reality and more to do with the tactical rhetoric of the U.S.S.R. who were nothing if not willing to throw opinions down the memory hole when it suited them.

The Nazis wanted to preserve traditional modes of cultural expression and mores, but they also wanted to shift them to their new and exciting ethos, and had a level of contempt for "bourgeois morality" that would do any member of the Internationale proud.

The Nazi ethos was also pagan, not traditional Christian. Even on culture, the Nazis were radicals.

Gosh, isn't it awful of me to post all those icky ol' facts here?

Cobalt has an atomic weight of 58.93, there are 4 quarts to a gallon, an unladen swallow cannot carry a coconut from Africa to England, and the human head weighs ten pounds. All facts. All about as pointless and tangential as any 'facts' you've put on the table.

The issues are/were:

Is Rush/Ann Coulter responsible in any way for this tragedy? No.

Are there left wing figures as incendiary as Rush/Coulter/Savage? Yes.

And then we discussed the utter failure of the Left to govern and their genocides. Which, even if we magnanimously ceded the Nazis as the right's dirt - and I will certainly not be that generous, then the Left's record is nothing short of disastrous.

Andrew:

AN: Heaven forfend I alter conceptions. That could lead to dancing.

The term is not "dancing." It's "revisionism."

A: You don't seem to be listening. Hitler can say all he wants about how much he loathed "socialism," what matters is what he did when he was in power.

And very shortly after taking power, he closed down the trade unions and arrested their leaders. Communists and socialists were rounded up and carted off to concentration camps.

AN: And I don't know why you're bringing up art, and culture, and whatnot, because I already said that on these matters the Nazis were indeed right-wing, though perhaps not as much as you might think. The Nazis wanted to preserve traditional modes of cultural expression and mores, but they also wanted to shift them to their new and exciting ethos, and had a level of contempt for "bourgeois morality" that would do any member of the Internationale proud.

"These matters" cover a tremendous amount of German life. Libraries were purged of "objectionable books," which included “The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new German,” “The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism,” “Pacifist literature,” and “Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writing supporting the Weimar Republic.”

And the notorious "degenerate art exhibit" was a classic example of the Nazi's war on modernism. The fact that they were willing to tolerate extra-marital sex in the cause of turning "racially acceptable" German women into baby-making machines does not transform them into leftists.

AN: the Nazis dislike of Communists is completely irrelevant to the question of whether they qualify as socialists. Communists hated and killed other socialists with great regularity. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks despised one another, as did "right" Socialist Revolutionaries and "left" Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin exterminated the Mensheviks and SR's with extreme prejudice. Are they "right-wing" now?

No. Unlike The Third Reich, the Soviets eliminated private property and turned ownership of industry and factories over to the state. Hitler, who loved entrepreneurs, had no interest in doing such a thing, which is why families like the Krupps maintained control of their factories. When he was asked whether he planned for the state to take over German industry replied in the negative. "Do you think I am so senseless as to destroy Germany's economy? Only if people should fail to act in the interests of the nation then -- and only then -- would the State intervene."

AN: For that matter, you have yourself stated that you and every other good leftie in SF hates Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Does that make YOU right-wing?

Only if, at the same time, we advocated turning the clock back on sexual, racial and religious equality, suppressed avant garde art and literature, and promoted a social darwinist approach to dealing with the poor and the disabled in which gaining any kind of aid involved first "proving" that you were racially and/or morally "fit" to be given such aid.

AN: how do you know that when Hitler said "I hate socialists" he didn't mean "I hate those other kinds of socialists, who have failed to uncover and absorb the truth about race."

Because Hitler's actions following his rise to power indicate his hatred of socialists.

AN: Forgive me, but the system of using government aid, paid for by taxes, leading to expansion of bureaucracy and government control over greater and greater aspects of society, to make them just, this idea came from who, exactly?

Probably someone predating the Romans.

AN: There's a word for them. I believe back in the day they were called Progressives, yes? And they took their cue and influence from 19th century Radicals and Marxists, isn't that the accepted story?

No. Are you unfamiliar with the concept of state control over public granaries and grain distribution that dates back to the ancient world?

AN: Yet, I am to take seriously the notion that it is I who is attempting to change the definition, and not you who is attempting to narrow it for your own purposes.

Yes. A reading of history bears me out.

PT: The quote I posted from TIME does contradict your bizarre claim that the premise of the Nazis being Right Wing started with Duranty in about 1941. I asked you where you heard such a thing, and really, I'd like to know. Where did you hear this or read it?"
AN: First of all, Time Magazine saying the Nazis were right-wing is not clear about what they were right-wing on.

The excerpt I posted plainly has Time referring to the Nazis as a whole as being on the right.

AN: As to June 1941, I was first told this when young, by my grandfather, who grew up in brooklyn before and during the war.

Your grandfather was mistaken.

AN: So yes, others may have called the Nazis "right-wing" in the 1930's, which may not mean what you think it means.

Most people called the Nazis "right wing" in the 1930s.

AN: The Nazi ethos was also pagan, not traditional Christian. Even on culture, the Nazis were radicals.

That does not make them leftists.

When he was asked whether he planned for the state to take over German industry replied in the negative. "Do you think I am so senseless as to destroy Germany's economy? Only if people should fail to act in the interests of the nation then -- and only then -- would the State intervene."

Heh, that's a utilitarian argument, not an ideological argument. As Germany was among the most industrialized nations in the world, it's also a good one: ain't broke, don't fix it.

Hugo Chavez is a socialist and he hasn't nationalized everything either. And of course, Hitler left the option to nationalize wide open. In other words, again, it's a utilitarian argument, not an ideological one.

Because Hitler's actions following his rise to power indicate his hatred of socialists.

As Andy said, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed, imprisoned and tortured more socialists than anyone. They aren't exactly right-wing.

Just because they hate each other, doesn't make them polar opposites. Socialists never needed much encouragement to slaughter each other.

Most people called the Nazis "right wing" in the 1930s.

They were wrong.

That does not make them leftists.

Doesn't make them conservative or right-wing, either.

Missed this telling 'gem.' Beneath all that trash, here's Pam's ideal of 'right-wing.'

Only if, at the same time, we advocated turning the clock back on sexual, racial and religious equality (the communists, again, were not peaches here either), suppressed avant garde art and literature (maybe they had good enough taste to avoid stuff like this?), and promoted a social darwinist approach to dealing with the poor and the disabled in which gaining any kind of aid involved first "proving" that you were racially and/or morally "fit" to be given such aid.(for your sake, I would leave eugenics out of this, it is very bad for the Left).

At least there is some substance there. But nothing about economics and the political systems which define left and right.

Of course, by this measure, if there were two "dictatorships of the proletariat," in the Stalinist phrasing, one could be right wing if it didn't provide affirmative action and welfare, and didn't subsidize bad art.

You're absolutely right, Pam, by that measure, the Nazis certainly are not left wing.

It's only the complete control of the economy, their social religion, unfettered power of the government, radical restructuring of German society, views of fundamental rights (speech, religion, press, property, etc) as conditional rather than absolute that does it.

Gee, who else supports unlimited government, penalties for unpopular speech, confiscation of property for public "use", and radical restructuring of society?

It's just there at the tip of my tongue, hmmm, some sort of movement so I should perhaps use the royal "The," but what could it be? The...Capitalists? No. Is it The Evangelicals? Hmmm, no, nothing in the Bible about "Thou shalt form a union between man and man, deli clerk and cashier..."

I don't know what's left that fits that description. There's nothing left. Oh, I got it! THE LEFT. That's who believes all that stuff.

Vercingetorix:

PT: Maoists hardly qualify as "liberals" and they are a tiny minority among American leftists.
V: Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Trotskites, Liberals, leftists, luddites, libertines, whatever, if you add up all these tiny minorities very soon you have a pretty sizable majority.

You're not even making sense any more. Have you completely lost track of your own arguments?

Vercingetorix:

PT: When he was asked whether he planned for the state to take over German industry replied in the negative. "Do you think I am so senseless as to destroy Germany's economy? Only if people should fail to act in the interests of the nation then -- and only then -- would the State intervene."
V: that's a utilitarian argument, not an ideological argument.

It's certainly not a socialist argument.

B> As Andy said, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed, imprisoned and tortured more socialists than anyone. They aren't exactly right-wing.

They were advocates of Marxism. Hitler was not.

PT: Most people called the Nazis "right wing" in the 1930s.
V: They were wrong.

Suurrre, Vercingetorix. All those people who actually lived in that time, understood its politics and its nuances, and all their children who followed, were wrong. You and others here, who can't tell Goebbels from Himmler and who don't know enough about American political history to discuss liberalism with any credibility, know more than THEY do about it.

Why should I take your word over the word of almost every contemporary observer and historian of Nazism?

PT: That does not make them leftists.
V: Doesn't make them conservative or right-wing, either.

No, what makes the Nazis right wing is their reactionary policies towards race, women, art, and literature, along with their virulent anti-Communism and their hatred of socialists and liberals.

Vercingetorix

PT: Only if, at the same time, we advocated turning the clock back on sexual, racial and religious equality
V: (the communists, again, were not peaches here either),

Never said they were.

PT: suppressed avant garde art and literature
V: maybe they had good enough taste to avoid stuff like this?

No doubt you would have loved the House of German Art.

PT: and promoted a social darwinist approach to dealing with the poor and the disabled in which gaining any kind of aid involved first "proving" that you were racially and/or morally "fit" to be given such aid.
V: for your sake, I would leave eugenics out of this, it is very bad for the Left).

I doubt you know much more about the Eugenics movement than what you picked up skimming the right-wing blogs.

No, what makes the Nazis right wing is their reactionary policies towards race, women, art, and literature, along with their virulent anti-Communism and their hatred of socialists and liberals.

Six days. Six days we've been talking. Six days before actually made your own point instead of appealing to others to do it for you.

That's actually a strong point, too. See, that’s how people talk. They say one thing and someone either disagrees, agrees, or asks for clarification.

Now we can go over the Nazi policies regarding race and women and art, literature, their anti-communism and hatred of socialists and liberals. Which are all weak markers, by the way, as communists also hated other socialists and liberals, and vice versa, for one point, and art and literature in general suffers from the scalding acid bath of totalitarianism. Show me a single novel from North Korea, Maoist China or Soviet Russia, or name a single painter; if you can name just one artist in the past fifty years, you’re ahead of the game. Even so, there are no masters or masterpieces.

On race and women, this is the gem of your argument and all things being equal, it is the most persuasive. Leave aside the failings of the Communists, the eugenics movement, the general racism of even the most ‘liberal’ observers at that time, surely the Nazis took race and sexism to an extreme? Maybe so.

But is racism/sexism markers of the right? That would make sexual and racial equality the province of the left, which, if you’ll forgive my skepticism, is pretty self-serving. Nor is it accurate, either in results of policies nor even in intention.

They were advocates of Marxism. Hitler was not.

Neither was FDR as he rolled out the New Deal, Johnson with his Great Society, the advocates of socialized medicine, etc, and it would be difficult to describe those programs as anything other than socialist planks. Being an open advocate (or closed, or a virulent hater of) of Marx is hardly necessary nor sufficient to be a socialist; it matters what you do.

Nor was Marx the sole intellectual – the only individual in history – who advocated a social policy of collectivism and powerful states over weak individuals. The Nazis could and did disregard a foundation of Marx for other founding authors.

It's certainly not a socialist argument.

A socialist can make no other kind? That must make a socialist marriage the most extraordinary torture...

Vercingetorix:

PT No, what makes the Nazis right wing is their reactionary policies towards race, women, art, and literature, along with their virulent anti-Communism and their hatred of socialists and liberals.
v: Six days. Six days we've been talking. Six days before actually made your own point instead of appealing to others to do it for you.

I first brought up this issue five days ago, when I observed:

“In what manner was Hitler a leftist? He rolled back pretty much every liberal reform of the Weimar Republic, turned the clock back on the emancipation of women, burned avant-garde literature and art…”

V: communists also hated other socialists and liberals, and vice versa, for one

Not for being “communists” or for being adherents of Karl Marx.

V: art and literature in general suffers from the scalding acid bath of totalitarianism.

Yep. Extremists on both the right and the left tend to distrust innovations in art. It's liberals who generally support the avant-garde.

Given the comment you made here, you apparently see eye to eye with totalitarians on avant garde art. Are you a communist? A socialist?

V: Show me a single novel from North Korea, Maoist China or Soviet Russia, or name a single painter; if you can name just one artist in the past fifty years, you’re ahead of the game. Even so, there are no masters or masterpieces.

Well, I don’t know much about Asian art or literature, whether from Communist or non-Communist countries, but for the record, there’s Soviet Artist Mikhail Anikushin, and Soviet novelists Fazil Iskander, Yuri Olesha, and Danil Granin.

I’m not sure how you would define “masters” or “masterpieces,” but Yuri Olesha is seen by many as a remarkable satirist, and Stalinslaw Lem is widely considered an important science fiction writer.

V: But is racism/sexism markers of the right? That would make sexual and racial equality the province of the left, which, if you’ll forgive my skepticism, is pretty self-serving.

Sexual and racial equality HAS historically been the province of the left. The American Communist party, for all its faults, was agitating for racial equality in this country well before most other organized groups in the 20th century. For all the American Communist Party’s faults, Communist union organizers in this country tended to be emphatic about unions admitting not just white workers but black workers – often a serious obstacle when they attempted to organize in the south. And while there may have been some exceptions, the white Americans who traveled south to work for black civil rights in the sixties were almost entirely liberal to leftist in their outlook.

PT: They were advocates of Marxism. Hitler was not.
V: Neither was FDR as he rolled out the New Deal, Johnson with his Great Society, the advocates of socialized medicine, etc, and it would be difficult to describe those programs as anything other than socialist planks.

Neither FDR nor Johnson were socialists. They were liberals. Neither FDR nor Johnson advocated the complete takeover of industry by the state.

The right wingers: "We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too" = feed your husband (Clarence Thomas) butter.

Silly Pamela, can't you see how these are TOTALLY THE SAME THING? Aw, you got sooo "paddled"! Your use of "reason," "logic" and "proof" just makes me more afraid of your violent liberal ways! Please stop killing children (unless they're gay or Muslim --that's fine then.)

Heh, Sarah. I think you need to tune in your snark. After all, the original question was on the 'eliminationist' theory, that conservatives are both culpable for murder and want to see more. On that point, the lefties failed miserably.

On the alternate point, that lefties never, never ever ever celebrate or encourage murder or destruction of their political rivals. Heh. Here's Ted Rall's greatest hit: “Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.” And there's more, much more, to rebut that idiot argument.

On the latter point, Nazis left or right? Pamela is unpersuasive, to say the least.

But this thread is officially toast. If you ladies want to keep on talking, go here.

Heh, Sarah, you need to tune in your snark. You idiots failed utterly to describe how this 'eliminationist' method makes any conservative, from Rush or anyone else either culpable or enthusiastic about violence against their political enemies.

As for the fallback position, that liberals never ever urge hate and celebrate violence, here's Ted Rall: “Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.” Among other 'inconsiderate' remarks.

But this thread is toast. If you want to discuss more right wing hate, feel free to discuss the racist attempt by eliminationist rightwingers comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton.

"The term is not "dancing." It's "revisionism.""

Yes, teacher. Sorry teacher. And revisionism is bad...when righties try to do it, right?

"And very shortly after taking power, he closed down the trade unions and arrested their leaders. Communists and socialists were rounded up and carted off to concentration camps."

Which is pretty well identical to what Lenin did when he took power, except that the only Communists he carted off to concentration camps were those who had committed the crime of descent, whether inadvertent or not. Stalin, of course, increased the scale of this, but not the main features.

""These matters" cover a tremendous amount of German life. Libraries were purged of "objectionable books," which included “The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new German,” “The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism,” “Pacifist literature,” and “Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writing supporting the Weimar Republic.”

And the notorious "degenerate art exhibit" was a classic example of the Nazi's war on modernism. The fact that they were willing to tolerate extra-marital sex in the cause of turning "racially acceptable" German women into baby-making machines does not transform them into leftists."

Uh-huh. And no one ever heard the word "degenerate" in the Soviet Union. No one ever censored books because they supported democracy or liberal thought in the Soviet Union. No one ever punished anyone else for advocating or even suggesting an interpretation of Marxism at odds with the Politburo's current take in the Soviet Union. Women in the Soviet Union were never encouraged by the various carrots and sticks of the state to make good, strong, healthy Socialist Babies of the Future!

I can do this all month. So why not try arguing about features of the Third Reich that were markedly different from the USSR? I admit it's not an easy task.

"No. Unlike The Third Reich, the Soviets eliminated private property and turned ownership of industry and factories over to the state. Hitler, who loved entrepreneurs, had no interest in doing such a thing, which is why families like the Krupps maintained control of their factories. When he was asked whether he planned for the state to take over German industry replied in the negative. "Do you think I am so senseless as to destroy Germany's economy? Only if people should fail to act in the interests of the nation then -- and only then -- would the State intervene.""

Wait, you found it...good for you. This is indeed, the main difference between Fascism and Communism, and the main reason that Fascists did not like Communists, and that Communists did not like Fascists. So what, exactly, does this mean? Among other things, it means that the Third Reich's relationship with the major corporations of Germany was not unlike the relationship America's major coporations had with the adminstration of Woodrow Wilson, the darling of the Progressive Left in his day, during World War One. It means that the Krupps and the Junkers could keep their money, as long as they built what the Reich said was okay to build. To make a point that you have yet to respond to, this is far more radical and socialist than the modern-day Democrats dare to propose.

It has nothing to do, however, with whether the Nazis are leftist or socialists unless one accepts that everyone who does not advocate the total elimination of private property -- in other words, everyone who is not a Communist -- is a socialist or leftist. If that is your argument, we can return to the discussion of whether Martin Luther was a Christian.

"Only if, at the same time, we advocated turning the clock back on sexual, racial and religious equality, suppressed avant garde art and literature, and promoted a social darwinist approach to dealing with the poor and the disabled in which gaining any kind of aid involved first "proving" that you were racially and/or morally "fit" to be given such aid."

Gee, I've never done any of those things. I guess I'm not a right-winger. Who knew?

But emotional flailing about a host of bogies not germaine to the
point under discussion is always fun. I look forward to you next outburst.

But let's try again.

You said "Nazis hated Communists, therefore they are not leftists or socialists."

I said "Communists hated other Socialists, and Other Socialists hated Communists. You also claimed to hate various Communist dictators. Are you right-wing?"

You said "Robert Bork's America is a land where blacks have to sit at segregated lunch counters, where women have to go to back-alley abortionists...."

Wait, sorry. That was Ted Kennedy. I got confused.

Here's the question: Can one dislike Communism and still be a leftist or socialist? If yes, will you admit that the socialism or leftism of Nazis cannot be argued on the basis of whether or not they hated and hurt Communists? If not, why not?

"Because Hitler's actions following his rise to power indicate his hatred of socialists."

See point above.

"Probably someone predating the Romans."

Niiiiiice dodge. And this unknown thinker, whose beliefs were noted by Aristotle, would he be a friend of the conservative elements in his society?

"No. Are you unfamiliar with the concept of state control over public granaries and grain distribution that dates back to the ancient world?"

I sure am. The Chinese loved them, when the dynasties could be bothered to keep them in good repair. The Egyptians too, when the pharoahs could keep the nomarchs in line.

In Rome, interestingly enough, their growth had to do with the agitation of the Populares, who were, shall we say, NOT the best pals of the patrician and knight classes, and who were the darlings of Gaius Marius and Julius Caeser. The latter was very much interested in striking a third way between the competing classes, under which the Roman state would oversee, forcefully when necessary and without excessive regard to precedent and tradition, the interests of both to maintain the greatness of ROME. Sound familiar?

"Yes. A reading of history bears me out."

Your reading does. My reading doesn't. Hence the discussion.

(This is your cue for an ad hominem. I know you know what that means).

"The excerpt I posted plainly has Time referring to the Nazis as a whole as being on the right."

It does? Really? What in the text indicates that?

So the fact that the article dates from the time when socialism was at its intellectual high point, when all the cool kids knew and expected as a matter of course that everybody, from Mussolini to FDR to Stalin to Chamberlain to yes, Hitler, would be bringing in command economy elements to each of their states is not relevant to a discussion about what exactly they meant when they said "right-wing".

Did I just see a leftie argue that societal and historical circumstances have no bearing on the reading of a text? It's a funny old world.

"Your grandfather was mistaken."

Ah. Just like that, then? End of discussion? Should I assume that you were around in early 1940's Brooklyn or that you have copies of the CPUSA - New York Section's meeting minutes to back your claim up?

"AN: So yes, others may have called the Nazis "right-wing" in the 1930's, which may not mean what you think it means.

Most people called the Nazis "right wing" in the 1930s."

Which may not mean what you think it means. Back to that discussion of the politics of the 1930's and the High Tide of Socialism. You know, so we can delve more deeply.

"AN: The Nazi ethos was also pagan, not traditional Christian. Even on culture, the Nazis were radicals.

That does not make them leftists."

That was Vercingetorix, not me, but I'll respond anyway:

Actually, Kato, that's exactly what it means. "Radical" means desiring to bring about immediate, forward-looking change in a society, and breaking with the past.

The term for those seeking to "turn back the clock" is Reactionary. Thus, to suggest that one can be a "Radical" and not a "Leftist", when by definition Radical is the extreme of Leftism, is to engage in (Wait for it, Wait for it) Revisionism.

Have a pleasant day.

Correction:

"the only Communists he carted off to concentration camps were those who had committed the crime of descent, whether inadvertent or not."

that should be "dissent," not "descent." My bad.

Vercingetorix:

No. Your argument is toast.

No. Your argument is toast.

That's sweet, but you don't have to make me breakfast, princess!

Anyways, life is too short. If you want to make your vacuous pleadings to Andrew, be my guest.