It’s true, Kane & Lynch have put all kinds of incendiary rhetoric out there.
But uh, my man, if WaPo is your go-to for “the leftist media” you may want to re-examine your whole shit.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s excusable. Everyone agrees it was a heinous crime.
But at the same time, the victims here we not random. They have done shit which makes a ton of people hate then. And really, that hatred is not so misplaced. These guys take money from donors in order to vote to screw the public in many cases. They are not good people.
Attacking them with physical violence is not justified, but perhaps they should be less shitty, and inspire less hate towards themselves.
/emerges from Internet bunker
Whew, just a quick comment from Adam. I’ll take it!
I bet you read this!
It’s not justified…it just is.
Three hundred million instantly deadly weapons and who knows how many millions of angry untreated mentally ill people willing to use them makes violence simply a matter of when and where. Trying to parse out which “side” is responsible for what percentage of the rhetoric is a laughable waste of time. We’re here now. Angry rhetoric is coming from all sides, and it isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
From what I read of this guy’s postings, it’s not like he had some coherent worldview that fits neatly into “left” or “right” anyway…any more than the Portland killer did or the guy who shot Gabby Giffords. These guys are just fucking nuts, and this isn’t the last shooting. There’ll be plenty of blood in the streets.
CRB is a great example of “we are the silent majority” pont-offal-ificating that conservatives do today. Get-along-with-everyoneism is the philosophy of the age when you subconsciously know you’re the moral minority and want to keep on, keepin’ on and not confront the moral challenges the other side has raised.
The more frustrated people get with the system, the more likely they are to turn to violence. So far these killers or would be killers have basically been bananas. If only we had quality mental benefits or establishments in this country. Not that everyone having a bad day needs to be committed or that that it would guarantee stop some of this but it… .could help.
Gifford has some nice words on the event, sorry if it was posted already:
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, nor if you’re a senator or a representative, nor a staffer or a sworn officer,” Giffords said in a statement.
“If you serve the institution of Congress, you’re connected to your colleagues, current and former, by a shared sense of service to ideals far greater than yourself. … This shooting is an attack on all who serve and on all who participate in our democracy.”
No one should want this outcome for any of our reps. I prefer to see them shouted down at Town Halls and voted out.
I keep seeing people saying that’s what The Left™ is doing, but I’m never actually seeing The Left™ doing that.
To clarify; I see them saying Russia hacked numerous resources, including the DNC and voter registration info. I see them saying that Russia tried to influence the election by putting out “fake” and inflammatory “news” items online in an effort to hinder Clinton.
However, that’s isn’t saying the election was false, fake, illegitimate, or anything of the sort. In fact, people keep pointedly saying they’re NOT doing that. Are some wacko bloggers and conspiracy theorists? Sure, but they do that with literally every election (cf - lizard men). But who are the “big time politicians” doing that?
Dan, google is your friend. How about Rep. John Lewis (who called Trump illegitimate) and the 67 democrats who boycotted the inauguration? i.e. 30% of democrat reps. Or even Pelosi who refused to say Trump was legitimately elected when directly questioned? This whole Russia thing is the perfect example: no proof, no collusion, but months wasted searching for that smoking gun.
I doubt those congresspeople think Trump is illegitimate; I think they’re just pandering to the extremes of their base (as all politicians do). My point is that right now they’re playing with fire - incendiary statements, escalating accusations, etc. When you have a former vice-presidential candidate encouraging people to “fight in the streets” against the President, you’re taking it too far. The extremes in the base will take those comments at face value and run with them. That’s how you get, for example, the “Anti Fascists” who claim that the only good Republican is a dead one (even after today’s attack).
Tim, I’ve never seen that article, sorry.
Are you kidding?
There is tons of evidence. It’s known, without question, that Flynn hid interactions with Russia and didn’t declare money he received from them. Jared Kushner tried to set up some crazy plan to talk to the Kremlin using Russian equipment. Sessions concealed interactions with the Russians, and had pretty clearly lied about them (as an example, he claimed they had those interactions as a senator not a campaign surrogate… But you know how many meetings he had with foreign leaders prior to the campaign? ZERO.)
This idea that there is no evidence of Russian involvement with the Trump campaign is a complete lie. And that ignores the fact that not having an investigation because you haven’t proven guilt is nonsensical, given that is the point of an investigation. And all that ignores the hilarious hypocrisy of folks saying you can’t investigate something for a few months, after instigating Benghazi for literally years, with literally dozens of Congressional hearings, and never finding ANYTHING in terms of
wrongdoing by ANYONE. Seriously, they never found anything, after years of digging… We have already found more wrongdoing surrounding Trump’s campaign in just a few months.
Ok, I’m gong call bullshit on you here. Kane’s statement there was obviously taking about peaceful protests. He was in no way at all inciting violence.
You are literally regurgitating the far right talking points without doing any checking to see if they are true at all.
Our current President has openly questioned the legitimacy of the election.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802972944532209664?s=03
By this you mean toe the progressive line, right?
His point is people are different and don’t like being told what to do by a few hundred people thousands of miles away, whether they have an R or a D next to their name. The funny thing is how much this lines up with the alleged grievances of Islamic terrorists.
The world isn’t going to revolve around D.C. forever. You don’t have to believe it or vote a certain way about it or anything else. It will just happen.
Hurr, durr.
As for John Lewis, I suppose that’s a fair point - he’s at least historically important and still a visible figure today, even if his legislative influence has waned over the years. When I think “big time politicians” I tend to think of higher-end guys, but that’s my own definitions at play.
Boycotting an inauguration isn’t saying he’s illegitimate (unless they’re ALSO saying he’s illegitimate). That’s just not supporting him and being disrespectful.
Pelosi was playing coy with the verbiage for a bit but acknowledged he won the Electoral College while TRUMP was claiming there were millions of fraudulent votes cast.
Violence is not acceptable, period. Beyond that, Progressives are cursing this guy more than anyone because he did more to hurt them than any other event in recent history.
Republicans are going to use this to attack democrats, even though most incidents are in the reverse. They will also likely use this to crack down on protests at town halls and such, even more than they were already doing.
Establishment democrats are going to use this to attack progressives and further marginalize them. They didn’t even need an excuse before to label progressives as violent, what will they do now that they can point to this?
That said, i fear this is only going to get worse.
As people feel further and further disenfranchised they are going to feel like like they have no other choice. The system is nearly at a breaking point and it feels like the only check against Trump’s unlimited power and ability to blatantly and openly do whatever he wants is the supreme court. How much longer that will last nobody knows. Maybe after he fires the second person investigating him, he will disband them too? A year ago i would have thought the idea of a president firing one person investigating him and admitting that was the reason was crazy, how naive i was.
These are not good people. They (the republican party in general) were bribed to support taking away healthcare from millions of Americans so that their owners could get a few percentage points back on their taxes. How many thousands of Americans are they going to kill each year due to this one bill? Think back about those town halls full of people who republicans actively want to physically harm and remember the sob stories about how a spouse would die without Obama care. When someone has nothing and you want to kill their spouse, what do they have left to lose?
Also, a lot of these shootings seem like they could have potentially been helped by better mental health care and/or common sense gun control. Both things that republicans strongly oppose.
So while i think this is terrible, i have a REALLY hard time feeling sorry for them.
I’m sure in his mind the shooter was doing what the right always talks about and using his 2nd Amendment to defend himself from the government.
If they are some sort of militant movement they have a looong way to go to catch up with the death toll inflicted by right wing militants in the US.
Also there is basically no real political left in the US. What you call “left” are centrists… and “militant centrist” is not really a term you hear very often.
Also Trump is an idiot and his woes are entirely self-inflicted. If he didn’t pal around with Russian agents and constantly try to protect them this whole Russia thing would have blown over by now.
I can’t help but think that incidents like this are only the beginning in our current political climate. The political party tribalism is already at its peak and then you combine that with people who are getting desperate and about to lose their health insurance. Someone noted in the Pharma thread that things are getting a lot like Marie Antoinette where the rich are essentially telling the poor to go fuck themselves and I wonder whether the backlash is finally going to come. Whether or not violence is acceptable (it isn’t, of course), in the end it doesn’t matter. As charmtrap noted, it just is. Violence during the French Revolution was terrible as well but that didn’t stop it from happening. I don’t forsee any large scale uprisings but with today’s technology you can cause the same damage with only a single unbalanced individual with a rapid fire weapon.
So you’re saying it’s about to get all
up in here