Right Winger Violence
-- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.
-- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.
-- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.
-- December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.
-- January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.
-- February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.
-- April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.
-- April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.
-- May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.
-- June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.
-- February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)
-- March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.
-- March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.
-- May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.
-- May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.
-- May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.
-- July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.
-- September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant. [Digby]
posted by Lloyd Dangle at
8:11 AM
13 Comments:
This is absolutely shameful, Lloyd. I no longer have enough respect for you to engage with you further. How do you conflate white nationalists with tea-partiers with liberals who fly planes into buildings ( oh, wait, because it was an IRS building, the guy is a rightist. Look it up. NOT SO).
There are plenty of unhinged people out there. Many are white, poor or middle class and live in middle America and are therefore more apt to be conservative.It does not follow that Conservatism ( which I honestly don't think you understand in any meaningful way. READ A BOOK.) equals murder.
ASSHOLE.
If the general social structure were flipped, you'd see the newly marginalized lefties acting out in similar ways. In my list of Lefty crimes, should I include the Discovery Channel shooter? Animal Rights activists? Anarchists? Any minority that is a member of an ethnic special interest group?
Ultimately, Lloyd, you're a great drawer, but sort of a dim bulb.
Oh, and there goes Uland. Faced with complete refutation of his position that gun-toting right wing nuts are harmless as kittens, he takes his electrode-rock drawing or whatever it is and goes home, flinging personal insults behind him. Having Uland call you a dim bulb is kind of like having a cat call you an ass-licker.
Do you think I should be able to equate an Obama voter with a Stalinist? If you do, Lloyds' argument is sound. If not, case fucking closed.
Turn off your cable for a week and read a few books, people..
Let's say Lloyd is right, and all of these people chose to take up arms and commit acts of violence because they were taken with "right wing" ideology. How does one define "right"? Is Edmund Burke responsible? Are the rational believers to be punished? How can we be held at all responsible for the actions of unhinged people? And, again, it's a pure numbers game; the vast majority in this country are middle American, white and middle/lower class. Unless they're in a Union, they're probably going to vote Republican. I'm willing to wager that per capita, the Left Wing is just as "violent".
john- My position isn't that "gun toting right wing nuts" are harmless. All nuts are potentially harmful. Advocating for 2nd amendment protections, reminding people that Secession is an option, and carrying legally doesn't make one a nut. Being a nut makes one a nut, and that knows no ideology.
You'll understand when you're older, I hope
Not that any of you are interested in these issues beyond their contribution to the creation of a one dimensional caricature of who ever it is that got the cheerleader instead of you, but if you have an interest in the kind of Conservatism that I advocate, I'd check out the site Front Porch Republic, read some Russell Kirk and read Ross Douthat's columns. David Brooks I'm even with to a certain extent.
But what fun would that be? Thinking is such a fucking bummer. Why bother when you can drag your 45 year old carcass to door to see if that rare Ramones import you paid too much for on Ebay came?
Just to pile on poor young Uland there, I seem to remember that one of his earliest comments was that most violance is committed by black guys and illegal immigrants. And now he objects to being lumped in with white supremists. At least have the courage of your convictions! Come on, own it, asshole!
Oh, Uland, now that I went back and searched for your original comment, of course, you said violence is committed by black guys and that crime and immigration are icky issues that liberals don't want to deal with. Is there some reason you won't live up to your word and go away? Can't stand to let anyone else have the last word? You know that is a sign of a paranoid personality, don't you? Is that why you don't have a job and can just consume media all day? Collecting a little SSI, maybe?
"I no longer have enough respect for you to engage with you further."
If only, Uland!
Glaring ignorance needs to be corrected. I'd be remiss if I didn't. I work from home and spend about half the day with our 15 month old. Nap time= idiotic rant hour for daddy...
"Work from home" = run your meth lab. No wonder you can't let go, tweaker!
Lloyd, it would be nice if you and your fellow left-wingers would get out from your mainstream-media induced coma, and get some truth in your lives. Sure their is vitriol from both sides; has been for decades, even centuries. But to claim the right is supremely guilty while the left is blameless (as you did in one of your recent strips) is pure and absolute fantasy. In fact, as the Tuscon tragedy shows us, the higher-ups in the democrat party and media continue to spew flashoods and vitriol toward the right with absolutely no justification.
An excerpt from an article in March 2010: (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mithridate-ombud/2010/03/24/medias-myth-right-wing-violence)
"Before letting the media continue to perpetuate a stereotype that may not actually exist at all, let me give you the facts that U.S. journalists refuse to cite. Let me show you where real violence comes from, and I don't even need to mention the millions of babies killed every year by progressives or even the tens of millions of people murdered by their communist heroes.
It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter's speech to be cancelled this week.
It was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare.
It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers.
Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto.
It was liberals who destroyed AM radio towers outside of Seattle.
It's liberals who burn down Hummer dealerships.
It was progressive SEIU union thugs who beat a black conservative man who spoke his mind.
It's doubtful that a conservative fired shots into a GOP campaign headquarters.
In fact, Democrats have no monopoly on having their offices vandalized.
Don't forget it was Obama's friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008.
It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008.
It was a liberal who threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated her Austin-based group that planned to bomb the RNC.
It was liberals who assaulted police in Berkeley.
It was liberals who intimidated and threw rocks through the windows of researchers.
The two Black Panthers who stood outside polls intimidating people with nightsticks were probably not right-wingers.
Every time the G20 gets together, it's not conservatives who destroy property and cause chaos.
I could literally go on and on, but let's try to have some perspective here. Violence is a product of the fringe, on either side, and it's sickening to try to use it for political advantage. Those who commit violence in the name of politics deserve political change no more than they deserve leniency in sentencing. Violence furthers no cause. The only call to action that violence has ever motivated Americans to is the retaliation on attackers. Somehow I think the liberals know that very well.
The media and politicians who are trying to construct a meme of conservative violence as we run up to the 2010 elections should only face the weapon they fear most; the ballot."
That meme continues with all the documented cases of left-wing hatred here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/the-progressive-climate-of-hate-an-illustrated-primer-2000-2010/
And before you brush off the source, how about actually taking a look at it? I'm sure you could google any particular instance for accuracy.
I think what the right-wingers here MEAN to say is that violence is not an acceptable recourse for political grievances in a civilized republic, and that the actions of these people are nothing short of abhorrent, regardless of their political stances. And also that any nut who takes up arms against fellow Americans with no violent provocation has no business calling himself a conservative, and furthermore is a traitor to everything the conservative movement, and this country, stand for.
Clearly that's what they mean to say, even though it LOOKS like they're making excuses and saying "well you guys are probably just as bad."
Right?
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