Gabrielle Giffords is going to step down from Congress this week. I certainly don’t want to tell her how to recover or what’s best for her. I wish her the best, and if this is what’s right for her, I support her doing it 100%. But surely Loughner got, if not what he wanted, a victory today. Surely whatever bounced around his twisted, anti-feminist, gun-fetishist, sick mind having her out of Congress was at the top of his list of his reasons to go on that shooting. And he got it today.
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This could set a bad precedent for other crazies out there. I’ve heard people making noises about other Politicians, here in this State. Rumblings, mutterings, call it what you will. But for all the bullshit floating around in the air, theres always someone who’ll take it to the next level.
In all honesty, I’d never heard of Ms. Giffords until she was shot. I don’t pay much attention to other States congresspeople. But when I learned that she was the wife of a highly respected Shuttle Pilot, and a damn fine Congressperson in her own right, I knew that this could be the start of something. The TeaNazies are quite open about how they would “solve the liberal problem” if an election didn’t go their way. That includes local Politicians potentially being subjected to similar attention.
Make no mistake, the TeaBaggers are the philosophical grandchildren of the old Silver Brigades. The children of the old John Birch Society, being raised steeped in the rabid anti-soviet, anticommunist propaganda of the 50’s and 60’s. The people who remain utterly convinced that Franklin D Roosevelt was a Soviet agent who tried to turn the United States into a communist country. The kind of folks who say that we should have nuked Baghdad back when we “had the chance”.
The chance that Bill Clinton deliberately ignored and should have been shot for doing so.
Most of the ones I’ve had conversations with over the last couple of years are diehard right wing nutbags. You see the gamut, the not so subtle hints of holocaust denial, or the mutterings about the jew-controlled newspapers and TV networks. They all deny it, but get a few beers into them, or get them comfortable in a one-on-one situation, and they’ll let it all hang out.
There good reasons why Stormfront and other neonazi organizations consider the Tea party meetings and rallies to be prime recruiting ground. Apparently, they’ve been pretty successful.
@1 Oh, I don’t know; the fact this will be Loughner’s view of the world for the next 75 years isn’t much incentive for the like-minded.
http://www.mccullagh.org/image.....-cell.html
Having toured Alcatraz a couple times, I’ve seen that very cell I think. they keep one cellblock in good condition for the tourists to give folks an idea of what the prison was like. Saw the cell that Al Capon sat in, saw the one that the “Birdman” occupied and the one the guards were executed in during the riot of 57. Saw the ones the escapees were in. They even have replica paper mache’ heads in the bunks.
Loughners cell will probably be either semi-flat off white, or light blue in color, and he’ll spend the rest of his life under heavy medication. He’ll likely have a television, and even an internet connection.
Alcatraz started to go to shit when they doubled up on occupancy. As long as a prison is one man per cell, it can be managed. The problems start when they put two people in that space. Alcatraz Island would make a good replacement for San Quentin, now considered to be obsolete and sitting on some of the most expensive real estate on the west coast.
There is some rather serious consideration of rebuilding Alcatraz, to handle as many as 5,000 prisoners in single cell blocks. The State of California is considering closing San Quentin and selling off the land to developers.
That cell will no more deter more Loughner types from acting, than the threat of the death penalty reduces the act of murder.
Is this really a sign terrorism worked? I don’t think Loughner had real political motives. He was just a nut who I believe (I could be wrong) would have been willing to kill any politician, Democrat or Republican.
@ 4
Exactly right. They used to hang people in public. There were some little towns that kept a gallows next to the courthouse and there’d be a couple of hangings a month, folks gathered around, drinking whiskey and hooting and hollering. However, still had regular killings in saloons.
Of course, they also hanged people for stealing horses and cattle rustling as well. It still didn’t stop it from happening.
Terrorism works when people learn to avoid confrontation. When some asshole plants a bomb or sneaks up behind a politician and shoots them, the folks who are considered “civilized” become terrified. This applies to politicians as well. Politicians can terrorize people quite easily, and many people just go along with being terrified because they are told to. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are a good example of this. They tell people they must be terrified of the gays or the Moslems or whatever flavor of the week they came come up with. They run around telling people how terrible that threat is, and how it will destroy their way of life. It’s all just marketing. But it is the sort of marketing that gets people killed.
Notice, you don’t see President Obama running all over the country telling people how terrified they should be all the time, the way George Bush did.
Certainly this exemplifies the entirety of the GOP platform and domestic propaganda policy. I myself, would never consider voting for an individual who professes the need for war, and rationalizes it in some ephemeral, but somehow “eminent” threat. When a politician stands up and demands warfare, that is the person you need most fear. That is the person who stands to benefit most from that fear, and that is the individual who personifies the greatest threat to your person and your way of life.
I refuse to be terrified.
Thus ends one of the biggest idiocies ever from the left. The idea that an act by a mentally ill man had any political significance. Now if the reverse had been claimed, that political acts have relevance regarding mental illness, I would have agreed.
Did Loughner get his way? Well Sarah definitely got what she wanted. Someone crazier than her to do her bidding. Now I grew up in Arizona, I learned to shoot a rifle when I was 5. I have seen people out there with their brains fried from the incredible heat. So when you’re angry, you might go out to the desert and shoot at some tin cans or a dead appliance or two. If you’re even more angry you might come into town and shoot your gun off while standing on the corner, usually at the sky. If you are insanely angry you might come into town and shoot up a bunch of random people. But to put it down to simply being a serious nut job is to ignore what went on. Loughner clearly chose his subject, that subject was a Democrat, a Democrat that had been pictured with a cross-hair on her face, a Democrat with a cross-hair on her and the cooing of Sarah softly telling his head what to do. That is no GodDammed random event. Loughner is crazy, the kind of crazy that Sarah and her ilk hoped would come out from the woodwork and follow their rantings. This has everything to do with politics. How is it that in a state lousy with republicans that he managed to go after a Democrat?
@8 I noticed in today’s news that Arizona’s Republican governor wagged her finger in President Obama’s face in Phoenix today for, um, not sucking up to her enough when she visited the White House a couple years ago.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....d=webmail1
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I wonder if this means Gov. Jan Brewer won’t get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom the next time President Obama invites her to the White House?
Where I grew up — and I’ve never been to Arizona (and can’t think of any reason to go there) — her behavior would be considered RUDE.