The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Politics & RKBA => Topic started by: twyacht on January 10, 2011, 07:56:07 PM
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/the_left_not_the_right_owns_po.html
January 10, 2011
The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence
By Michael Filozof
It took less than 24 hours for the political left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political right for the shooting.
Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote, "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was." (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the "D.C. sniper" by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without "proof," eh?)
"[Giffords'] father says that 'the whole Tea Party' was her enemy," continued Krugman. "And yes, she was on Sarah Palin's infamous 'crosshairs' list." As if that was not enough, Krugman went on to invoke the specter of Tim McVeigh.
Well, we do have some proof now, and it's clear that the shooter was in no way connected to the Tea Party, the Republican Party, or any other movement on the political right. Law enforcement officials have revealed that suspect Jared Loughner was rejected by the Army and kicked out of college. He appeared to have mental health issues, and he was a reader of The Communist Manifesto.
But since Krugman and the other members of the leftist chattering classes have brought up the subject of politically inspired violence, maybe we ought to remind them of the left's protracted association with political violence.
We could begin over a century ago, when William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman (today a darling of the academic feminists). Goldman's lover, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick because Frick was a prominent capitalist.
But it wasn't until the 1960s (when Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh became idols of the American left) that the left really ramped up the violence. Who can forget Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam? Or Eldridge "rape is an insurrectionary act" Cleaver and his Black Panthers? What about the bombings perpetrated by the Weathermen? Former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers is, of course, a close associate of President Barack Obama. Ayers managed to escape prosecution (and proclaimed himself "[g]uilty as hell, free as a bird"), but his wife Bernadine Dohrn served jail time for her part in the violence. Black radicals seized Cornell University at gunpoint in 1969, the same year the SDS and the Weathermen staged the "Days of Rage" riots. Race riots took place in Watts in 1965 and nationwide in 1968; leftists rioted at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. John Kennedy was murdered by a communist, and Robert Kennedy was shot by a Palestinian -- hardly men of the right.
The 1970s weren't much calmer. The Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was bombed by leftist radicals in 1970. Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and took part in a series of armed bank robberies by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA inspired Sarah Jane Moore to try to assassinate Gerald Ford -- less than three weeks after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, tried to kill Ford also. And what about the shooting of FBI agents at Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1975?
Since we're taking about violence against members of Congress, how can we possibly fail to mention the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of nine hundred people by the leftist/Marxist Jonestown cult in 1978?
Does anyone recall that President Clinton pardoned members of the Marxist-Leninist-inspired Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN? Clinton also pardoned left-wing radical Susan Rosenberg, who was imprisoned for her role in the murder of two police officers and a security guard in a robbery in 1981. She was offered a teaching job at Hamilton College, but public outcry forced her to decline the position.
More recently, we've seen anarchist and communist riots against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and violent anti-Bush and antiwar protests. In 2007, leftist playwrights in New York created a stage performance about killing president Bush.
The politics of the contemporary left is absolutely intertwined with either tacit or overt support for violence. How dare the left-wing media attempt to pin the actions of a deranged individual in Tucson on the right! To do so is nothing less than a calumny, a slander, and a blatant hypocrisy.
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And I guess Bill Ayers, Francios Piven, Van Jones,.....are all darlings of the Right.....
What the hell are these people thinking.......
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This is why they will lay off guns, why go after guns when they have such a wonderful oppurtunity to attack the TEA Party by limiting free speech.
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The Left can believe their own BS because if all things were completely reversed they would support such actions. Several years ago I had the opportunity to have a long message board exchange with a die hard liberal about firearms. He felt that if he were mad enough at someone and owned a handgun he would shoot the person that angered him and he felt the rest of us would do the same thing. Their biggest delusion is that they think we are like them!
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The Left can believe their own BS because if all things were completely reversed they would support such actions. Several years ago I had the opportunity to have a long message board exchange with a die hard liberal about firearms. He felt that if he were mad enough at someone and owned a handgun he would shoot the person that angered him and he felt the rest of us would do the same thing. Their biggest delusion is that they think we are like them!
They don't follow that reasoning to the logical conclusion that if we were they would not be alive to say "I told you so". ::)
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Their biggest delusion is that they think feel we are like them!
Sorry, no thinking involved with these folks.
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Sorry, no thinking involved with these folks.
True, and I was silly enough to use that crazy "L" word in relation to them. ::)
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Just found this at Pajama's Media ;
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2011/01/11/the-sixties-were-violent-not-today/?singlepage=true
Hey, hey , LBJ…
How many kids did you kill today?
Remember that one? I certainly do because, as a young leftie, I shouted it at many demonstrations. I also shouted “Off the pig!” and even went so far as to support, at least from a distance, the “Days of Rage” as described by John Jacobs of the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society:
Weatherman would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people. In an all-out civil war over Vietnam and other fascist U.S. imperialism, we were going to bring the war home. “Turn the imperialists’ war into a civil war”, in Lenin’s words. And we were going to kick ass.
And kick ass they did, hurling Molotov cocktails, setting off fatal bombs, and shooting police. Well, it was the sixties and the early seventies and that was what we did and said then. Ask Bill Ayers and others of the time who remain unrepentant. I’m not one of them. I think it was crazy.
But I bring it all back now for one reason — to point out that what we are going through currently, this supposed period of extreme rhetoric bemoaned by so many pundits and politicians, is but a minute radar blip compared to that era.
And some of these pundits and pols are old enough to remember. Apparently, they choose not to. But to remind them, we were in an era then of genuine political assassination — RFK, MLK — not faux political assassination (actually the purposeless, near random act of a paranoid schizophrenic.) But as I recall few were calling for us to dial down the rhetoric. The anti-government forces had tons of supporters in the media, silent partners cheering on all but their most violent acts (and who knows about those). Norman Mailer, among many others, made his life and reputation in such a manner on the “steps of the Pentagon.” Hey, hey, LBJ, indeed.
In a very real way the media were the secret sharers of the radical left. As a young media member and novelist, I knew this well. The most radical of us were acting out our hidden dreams for the rest. We condemned them occasionally and ritually, but rarely vehemently. The Weather Underground and even later the execrable Symbionese Liberation Army were never treated in the press with quite the opprobrium they now reserve for the tea party movement. As Baudelaire put it, “Mon semblable, mon frère.” The worst of the radical left were just like the rest of us, but with a little extra edge.
Now, as we all know, everything is reversed. The right wing is the supposed source of all violence and violent rhetoric. Of course, we know that’s not true and of course there hasn’t been any real right-wing violence, none whatsoever associated with the tea party movement. It’s all a charade.
But the left persists in believing it. Well, not entirely. Some are following an Alinskyite trail of deception. But a good percentage — as this past few days have demonstrated as never before — are genuinely convinced they are surrounded by a bloodthirsty mob of semi-illiterate rednecks out to polarize the country.
This is one of the more clearcut demonstrations of mass projection I have seen in my lifetime.
The liberal intelligentsia of our society may not be as sick as Jared Loughner — that would be hard — but they are exhibiting a depth of neurosis that borders on a collective personality disorder. And, to play psychoanalyst, I think this disorder points straight back to unresolved issues related to the experiences of the sixties and seventies discussed above. The left’s confused and ambivalent attitude toward violence has never gone away and has now been projected out on their opponents.
Exacerbating the situation — and increasing the left’s anger — was their recent electoral defeat and the attendant failure of Keynesian economics to deal with the financial crisis. Their ideology is dissolving around them. The attempts to blame the behavior of a clinical paranoid schizophrenic on the words of right-wing politicians and pundits are the acts of desperate people.
This liberal intelligentsia with all its unresolved problem are seizing on a tragic event to change the narrative and distract the country from solving its problems, which are truly serious for all of us (even them). We shouldn’t let them.
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This was the daily trivia question I got in my e-mail today :
Question : True or False: The FBI listed Groucho Marx as "a potential threat to the life of Richard Nixon."
Answer : True. In 1971, Groucho was asked by a reporter, “Do you think there’s any hope for Nixon?” Groucho replied, “No, I think the only hope for this country is Nixon’s assassination.”The FBI promptly investigated him, and Groucho was officially listed in File No. CO 1297009207 as a potential threat to the life of the president.
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This was the daily trivia question I got in my e-mail today :
Question : True or False: The FBI listed Groucho Marx as "a potential threat to the life of Richard Nixon."
Answer : True. In 1971, Groucho was asked by a reporter, “Do you think there’s any hope for Nixon?” Groucho replied, “No, I think the only hope for this country is Nixon’s assassination.”The FBI promptly investigated him, and Groucho was officially listed in File No. CO 1297009207 as a potential threat to the life of the president.
"I once shot a president in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I'll never know". ;D
FQ13
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"I once shot a president in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I'll never know". ;D
FQ13
JE Hover had no sense of humor at all.
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JE Hover had no sense of humor at all.
To put it mildly.