Thugs. Vicious, Reprehensible, Violent Terrorist Thugs.
I have commented before on how over-the-top right-wing rhetoric can lead to violence, and how conservative intimidation tactics of publishing the addresses of “targets” of “criticism” are an incitation to vandalism or worse, and this week we have seen first-hand evidence of this. Teabaggers, who have insisted on their right to “visit” the open halls of Congress and political offices everywhere as a pretext for harassment, and who vilify anyone who even suggests they not be allowed their right to do so, have shown exactly how much they abuse this freedom as a thuggish means of terrorizing their political opponents. Offices of Democratic legislators across the country have been vandalized–windows broken, doors smashed, and the traditional trademark of home-grown violent persecution, the cowardly anonymous letter tied to a brick hurled through shattered glass.
This is what the right-wing opposition has proven itself to be: goons bent on tactics of bullying and terror. If they can’t win an election, then lie and cheat and call the other side vile epithets; if they can’t win a vote, then vandalize and intimidate.
But it doesn’t stop there. Showing the worst of all wingnut stripes, Lynchburg, Virginia Tea Party organizer Mike Troxel posted the home address of Democratic congressman Tom Perriello, and slyly suggested that angry teabaggers should “drop by” the house. Any suggestion that this is outright incitement to violence that it so obviously is would be pooh-poohed by right-wingers, of course. But reality proved that Troxel was, in fact, instigating an act of violence: someone came by the address and cut the propane gas line, something that could have led to serious property damage and even injury or death of the family which lived inside. Even more frightening, Troxel had posted the wrong address–it was the home of the congressman’s brother.
This is what it has come down to: the home of a relative of a congressman vandalized, his family’s lives put in danger because some scumbag right-winger thought it’d be fun to terrorize the politician personally.
And that’s not the end of it. Several other Democrats have received death threats, not just to them, but to their children. One politician found that reform opponents published a photo of his children in a public advertisement, and another Democrat received a call from someone who claimed they would send “snipers” to “kill the children of the members who voted yes.”
It started with John McCain and Sarah Palin calling Obama a terrorist and stirring up crowds who started shouting out death threats against Obama. It continued with tea party activists swarming all over Democratic town hall meetings with the sole intent of disrupting and intimidating, shouting hysterically to silence anyone who disagreed with them. Then we had right-wingers showing up with guns and rifles outside of events Obama with signs advocating presidential assassination. We’ve had right-wing bloggers publishing home and school addresses of children who spoke publicly about how insurance programs helped their families, and right-wing activists and talking heads stirring up the nutjobs leading to assassinations of doctors. And now, nationwide violence and threats of violence against lawmakers who voted to give health care to Americans.
What is this, 1930’s Europe?
It scares me that you do not understand how fundamental a line was crossed yesterday.
I fear that this will get far, far uglier than than you are speaking of. And I hope I am wrong. We have until November, maybe the lid will stay on.
Jon: I fear that you are not talking about the crossed line of death threats against children. Forgive me if I am wrong, but do you mean the line of using reconciliation? And if so, how does it substantially differ from welfare reform or other reconciliation used in the past? Specifics always help. What is the line, and what will go so wrong as opposed to before because it was passed?
Lynchburg VA is home to Falwell’s Liberty University.
When polled, 25% of Republicans say Obama “may” be the antichrist.
Right now we’re spending $700B/yr on defense. That is (theoretically) 14M jobs at $50K per.
Each $100B we cut from defense will theoretically throw 2M people out of work.
Clinton got the Defense Budget down to $300B, but with inflation and whatnot $500B is the most we can expect Obama to pare down to. That’s still 4M jobs to be lost into 11M people on unemployment plus god-knows how many under-employed.
Then again, Congress has taken DOD cuts off the table this year so there’s that. Part of the saving grace of Japan’s government spending is that it is all “supposed” to be wealth-enhancing — more concrete on a hillside to prevent the next landslide, a new dam for power generation or whatnot, a new community center for people to have something to do in their community. 100% of what the US spends on Defense is just pissed away with no tangible result other than producing ex-military types with chips on their shoulders.
The military, especially the USAF, has been penetrated by christianist cells as pernicious as any communist cell. Doing what they think is their “Lord’s” work might just trump their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Their lunacy is fully exposed in the recent Texas textbook bullshit.
The South is a) overly dependent on the military-industrial sector, b) Republican, c) racist, d) chauvinist, e) poor, and f) disproportionately believes in religious bullshit, and their manufacturing economy directly competes with China’s with its $160/mo wages.
I feel like Sarah Connor at the end of Terminator, with the storm coming.
Troy: I have faith that it won’t all fall apart, but am more and more disturbed by the signs of violence and separatism on the right wing. We just had a lecture at my school recently on the Spanish Civil War, and reviewing some of the history of the 1930’s, I saw frightening parallels with what is happening today. Of course, we’re more stable than 1930’s Spain, but with how our economy was crushed under the Bush years, another economic free-fall could be in the future–and if that comes, one or two assassinations could send the country spinning into anarchy. Fifteen years ago, had anyone suggested that, I would have disbelieved it, strongly. Today, I can actually see it happening. I hope it doesn’t, I don’t think it will happen… but now, with how the right wing is acting–the hysterical extremism, the thuggish tactics, the open talk of assassinating a sitting president and seceding from the union–now the idea of the nation splitting apart is a viable scenario.
When liberals were aghast at the stolen election of 2000 and the lie-based war that followed, we did not act like this. Some may have talked about moving to another country–usually just empty threats–and many spoke of the illegitimacy of the Bush administration, but we acted civilly, legally, and patriotically. We did not threaten or resort to violence, we did not harass and spit and throw bricks and send death threats, we did not threaten secession; with far, far more provocation, we nevertheless opined and rallied and voted and won back control honestly.
Not so with the right wing. What they are doing is truly frightening.
We have crossed the line of government telling people what to do, of one portion of the electorate being able to dictate to another. We have violated what a non-trivial portion of Americans view as a sacred right; the right to be left alone.
You can argue that it is not that/i> different from some existing laws, and that there are precedents; you would be correct on both counts. But that is not what matters for the issue at hand, the straw that breaks the camels back is not different from the other straws.
If the threepers start hitting back (and make no mistake, in their minds it is “hitting back”), the near certain response from many will be to tighten down on civil liberties to contain it. You may or may not realize it, but your post here is laying the groundwork for that.
And when that happens, a lot of people who are a lot saner than the threepers will react. Badly. And they will hit back much harder than anything we have seen yet.
I am past worrying about specific individuals.
@Jon
We have violated what a non-trivial portion of Americans view as a sacred right; the right to be left alone.
Pure bullshit conservative framing. That line (the lost libertopia of the 19th century) was crossed in the 1930s with the establishment of required FICA and federal unemployment contributions from wage-earners. The conservatives opposed it but lost that battle with Steward Machine Company v. Davis in 1937 which reaffirmed the principal that Congress has taxation and spending powers from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce clauses.
And they will hit back much harder than anything we have seen yet.
yeah, the sane people in the US have historically had to deal with the insane on occasion, cf 1860-65. That was a very ugly chapter in our history. Surely we can both hope the nation won’t have to undergo a similar violent insurrection?
I am past worrying about specific individuals.
I worry about your humanity. America joining the 20th century with health care reform is far from a significant loss of liberty. Canada, Japan, Switzerland are all free.
This debate neatly encapsulates conservativism and liberalism. I wonder if the muddled middle will go with the conservative argument or the liberal argument. We voted for change in 2008, here it is, filtered through the somewhat unrepresentative Senate.
To my embarrassment I had to research what a threeper was.
“three-percenter” — the percentage of colonists who actually fought for the revolution.
http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/what-is-a-three-percenter/
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/oath-keepers
What they lost at the election box they want to regain with the ammo box.
Hookay. Passive-aggressive assholes like Jon here can swoop in with their clucking dismay at the current course of events, but I think the US is big enough to take down the nutjob right he associates with. Better use of that $700B/yr budget than blowing up Arabs at least.
I have to agree on “the right to be left alone” being an illusion. For all of human history, such a “right” has only been enjoyed by hermits. Everyone else has infringements on this “right” at all levels every day of their lives. Even during the Revolutionary War, there was conscription, forcing individuals to fight in a war and possibly die as a result–what can be more an affront to the supposed “right to be left alone” than that?
Education of children is required, for example–you cannot choose not to. On a daily basis, there are a multitude of laws which won’t leave you alone, though compulsory taxation is simply the most outright and forceful. And remember, taxation was not something the founders prohibited–indeed, they specifically allowed for it. The idea that the nation’s founding principle is “Leave me the hell alone” is incorrect. It may be what many desire, but it is not legally or historically mandated, nor is it what a majority of the people in the union wish.
The principle at work behind things like taxation, mandatory education, and now mandatory health care is the principle of interdependency. Like it or not, as a nation and as a people, we are intertwined. Unless you lock yourself away in a hermetically sealed cave, what you do cannot be disentangled from the effects it has on other people, no matter how hard you wish it to be so. And if you fall ill, and you don’t have insurance, everyone else pays for it. Perhaps you can live with the idea of leaving sick poor people out on the street to die–having the “freedom to fail,” as you put it–but most people cannot, and private funding doesn’t even come close to covering it. You may not like the fundamental human goodness of helping others and providing comfort and support to those in need expressed at the social level, but yours is not the prevailing sentiment. If people hurt, we help them–that is part and parcel of humanity.
As for worrying about individual liberties, that is a potential, and at this point imagined possible threat, and if the government does try to impose these, I will stand against them as vehemently as you–as vehemently as I (and I presume you as well) stood against the shredding of American civil liberties under the Patriot Act and much of the rest of the Bush administration. I don’t like it any more if Obama does it–worse, even, as I have higher expectations for him. I don’t like that Guantanamo is still open, I don’t like that the Patriot Act is still in force. I expected better from him, and I have no illusions that he could do even worse.
That said, I doubt that any civil liberties would be curtailed except under the most extreme conditions, and do not expect that they would be even nearly as bad as what happened already under Bush, in reaction to which Libertarians did not make too much noise. So I am not so worried about your prognostication, not nearly as much as I am worried that the current teabaggers and wingnuts will start open campaigns of violence and secession. It would be only the most extreme Libertarians who would rebel against, say, the issuing of marshal law orders should there be large, armed uprisings. And by then, things would be pretty far gone anyway.
But, as I just pointed out, Bush virtually pissed on the Bill of Rights, violating one half and making the other half virtually moot, and Libertarians did not rise up as you say. So I am not in the least worried that they’ll be doing so anytime soon.
This is not about whether what they believe is right or wrong. It is not about whether it makes sense or not. Those are things that matter in many contexts, but not this one.
The only thing that matters here is that they believe this. And what they may do about it.
And if the fringe does act, if they do start killing, what actions will society take to protect itself?
Jon:
What this is about is what I call the “Rascalian Pretext.”
Maybe it’s been 20 years since I read the late Dr. M. Scott Peck’s (M.D.) book, “The People of the Lie: The hope for curing human evil.” (he’s most famous for his book “The Road Less Traveled” but one thing that has always stuck with me is this assertion:
“people are at their worst when they are least accountable for their actions.”
Shortly after reading that, I came across Barry Goldwater’s famous words at his nomination acceptance speech: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
It suddenly occurred to me that people often use ‘extremism’ in defense of some lofty ideal, and really, any ideal, as a way of shirking accountability to their actions.
I think that this is going on with extremist today. In fact, I think this is what all extremist are always about.
Bin Laden killed 3,000 people and he rationalizes it in his mind as being okay because it’s done on behalf of his religion and his view of his religion.
Noted Hitler apologist, David Irving, defended Hitler with this supposed quote from Hitler “…as for myself, I would never tell a lie. But for Germany I would tell 10,000 lies.” (I believe the book is ‘Hitler’s Generals’… maybe it was p. 15ish – I didn’t get much past that page).
Irving thought he was elevating Hitler as a man of some ethics with that quote, but in fact, if you factor in Peck’s analysis, Irving was in fact damning Hitler. Irving thought it showed Hitler held some virtue. In fact, it demonstrates that Hitler was using extreme nationalism to shirk accountability for his actions. And I might add, if only he would have stopped at 10,000 lies.
Political extremist in our midst today are doing the same thing. The guy that shot the Doctor in Kansas over the issue of Abortion did the same thing.
As Peck implied, they are really sick people. They are using extremism as a pretext to shirk accountability for their actions.
Probably these people aren’t really evil people, but in adopting an extremist pretext the likelihood that they abandon the angels of their better nature is vastly increased.
Peck of course was not really the first person to point this out. Someone else once said that “Religion (or was it Patriotism) was the last refuge of scoundrels” (parahrased from vague memory).
For this reason, I like to call this phenomina the “Rascalian Pretext.” (I figure rascal and scoundrel are the same thing, but you can’t say ‘scoundralian’ pretext).
The question becomes, did they choose the rascalian pretext so that they could be evil, or in adopting an extremist view they inadvertently ended up doing something evil?
In the Road Less Traveled, I think Peck’s analysis was life is difficult. Extremism means we don’t have to think things out, we don’t have to think in proportions and evaluate things. In some cases people are just mentally lazy – they want things simple and straight forward and they don’t want to think in nuances – they just want one thing, one lodestar and that’s it. In other cases, they aren’t very smart and so can only process one lodestar (which is why liberals often think conservative extremist are sometimes both idiots and evil). In some cases they are just bad people and the rascalian pretext gives them a pretext to be evil.
That’s what I think this is all about.
Jon:
In rebutal to this:
We have crossed the line of government telling people what to do, of one portion of the electorate being able to dictate to another. We have violated what a non-trivial portion of Americans view as a sacred right; the right to be left alone.
I support Luis’ statements but would also add this:
The line was crossed twice. Once when the framers of the constitution gave the federal government the right to tax and to spend (for the general welfare). Twice when the 16th Amendment explicitly gave the Federal Government the right to tax incomes.
So, according to the 16th amendment, the Federal Government can tax you and then spend that money on services and goodies like bombers and air craft carriers. They do this now. They tax you, then give money to Boeing for bombers, and provide Social Security Insurance and Medicare Insurance as services.
So the Federal Government can pose a mandatory tax on you that you must pay. The Federal Government could then take that money and give it to a private company for services… say to provide you with health insurance, the same way it gives money to Boeing for bombers. The Federal Government could even let you pick the service provider, tax you for the premium and then turn right around and give it right to the Insurance company. This is basically all stuff that the government does now.
So the only real innovation here is that the Government is imposing a tax for services that it is allowing the private sector to provide – but in this case, the Federal Government is allowing you some liberty to pick the provider and is also stepping out of the role of the middle man in collecting the money.
This then, is nothing more than an institutional innovation.
The alternative is to say that the Federal Government can only solve the problem of health care cost and distribution by socializing health care insurance. That’s something Republicans and Conservatives loath. So in a sense, this is a compromise to make R&C happy.
The most efficient system of course is to take private companies out of the equation (they add cost and take away service) all together. Canada’s national medicare system’s administrative cost are less than Blue Cross of New England.
In fact, if you could press a button so that tomorrow we woke up with France’s vaulted system (considered by many as the best) everybody would be covered and taxes would actually go down because our government already pays more per person than France’s does on health care.
That would mean that you could still buy your health insurance, but it would be redundant. The rest of those who receive it as a benefit could have that benefit monetized and rolled into their pay check. The resulting increasing in purchasing power would increase aggregate demand and walk us out of the Great Recession in a fortnight (it is a demand recession).
But there’s more: American companies would be more competitive internationally because they would be out of the health insurance business altogether, so we might even expect a mini boom as jobs came back to the U.S. from places like Canada.
So you see, its really the Health Insurance companies that have the nation by the throat and by the pocket book. The concern hear by R&C is misplaced.
Then again, I really believe that the real problem is that R&C hate ordinary people. (please note that billionaires and near billionaires are not ordinary people, nor are the ‘unborn’ they are people in the abstract and thus not real, ordinary, get up and go to work everyday Americans – my opinion, only).
I would be very interested to see an objective study which would take maybe half a dozen common medical situations, ones which are eminently standardized and quantifiable, and analyze how much it costs to take a patient through that process, with all costs (including admin and profits) factored in. In effect, for the same procedure, how much is spent by Medicare, American private insurance care, Canadian health care, British health care, etc.
Does such an analysis exist?
Tim, suggest you go back to my comment you quoted and re-read the next sentence.
It is hard I think for all of us to step back from the “reform is good / reform is bad” argument, but that’s not what I am talking about here.
(Even just after saying that, I have to restrain myself from arguing. That’s kinda funny.)
Luis,
An interesting question, but I am not sure it would be possible with different accounting practices and the shear amount of cost shifting involved.
To choose an example, consider an ambulance ride. The city I live in, along with the adjoining city across the river and the town my folks in have all recently increased the cost of an ambulance ride substantially. The reason? Medicare pays less than the ride costs, so to make up the difference they increase the cost to non-medicare patients. These are emergency personnel, it’s not like they are going to stop picking people up. But looking at the prices, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that medicare was cheaper.
I think of this whenever I see people doing cost comparisons of what medicare pays for procedures versus private insurers. Medicare is not single payer. It is single payer with hidden subsidies. That is the problem with ‘medicare for all’. If everyone was on it, you can no longer hide the real cost.
(yeah, I do it too. )
Jon:
I think you misunderstand my question. I do not mean what the costs are as charged to the individual, but how much each system actually spends. The idea is to isolate procedures which are specially chosen for the standard (equal) nature of process involved across systems and localities, so that we can better understand how each system does the exact same thing. For example, a dental checkup where no further care is required is pretty standard: a patient comes in, an assistant does a prelim check, the dentist follows up, an x-ray is taken, cleaning follows. For that simple process, how much cost is incurred by each system? How much is spent on overhead (materials & salaries), on administration, how much profit is or is not taken, etc. In short, which system provides the most bang for the buck?
I think such an analysis should be very doable, and would not be surprised if such a study exists out there. I just don’t know where I would look.
I get the question, but how would you separate it all? Overhead costs can be split pretty arbitrarily.
Although, upon further review, a breakdown of salaries and equipment costs would make for interesting reading in it’s own right…