How Many More?

[babylonsister]

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/the_commenter_formerly_known_as_ncsteve/2009/06/how-many-more.php?ref=fpd

How Many More?
June 10, 2009, 6:41PM
The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve


snip//

So my question is this. How many more murderous rampages by enraged rightists--whether executed or merely in the planning stage--are we going to have to endure before the traditional media is willing to acknowledge and address the obvious? How many people are going to die, and how highly placed will the victims have to be, before someone connects the dots and starts calling out the ever more violent, hateful and apocalyptic rhetoric of the likes of Coulter, Malkin, O'Reilly, Hannity and Savage as bearing some responsibility for creating this climate of insanity?

As acidly pointed out yesterday by This Modern World, in the fever delirium that conservatives call "reality" these days, people are endlessly, dangerously susceptible to video games, popular music and situation comedies, but completely unaffected by those who actually purport to be trying to affect their opinions. Are we going to have to wait until one of these loons gets his hands on some fertilizer and fuel oil and takes out hundreds before the MSM says "enough is enough" to jolly ol' Rushbo, the dramatic Beck, and the little black dress clad Coulter rather than calling them "great guests" and "entertainers" and "always provocative?"

I just watched the video of Shep Smith Josh (Marshall) linked to in which Shep decried the steady flood of hateful and insane ravings they get in the email. Somehow, they managed to be anguished without once even implicitly noting that their station--the station of Hannity, Beck, Bill-O, the morning show twits and dozens of anger-mongering spokesmodels--might in any way be implicated creating the super-saturated solution in which the prophetic visions that drive the killers to kill crystalize.

And therein lies the problem. At some level, every one of them, from John Boehner to Rupert Murdoch to Rush Limbaugh to Billy Jim Goober, in his un-airconditioned manufactured home/arsenal in the Dixie Twilight Trailer Park believes that race means something more than a slight variance in the genes that control melanin production. They think that something is inextricably linked to "Americanism." Obama personifies and crystalizes their anxiety over the browning of America that's been growing among them for thirty years. For the rich ones, their horror is magnified by the idea that he wants to bump their taxes up a few points and put some modest curbs on the unfettered rapacity they fought so hard to claw back from the New Deal reforms.

Fearing taxes and regulation, they eagerly whipped up the more open racial hostility and anxiety of their poorer breathren. They saw it as a handy tool with which to rally the poor whites to the noble cause of unfettered rapacity. But the truth is that the old rich guys are themselves as susceptible to the forces they have unleashed--they're like O'Brian and the Inner Party members at the start of "1984;" unable to resist the power of the Two Minutes Hate, even though they themselves designed it solely as an outlet for the Outer Party member's hostility for them. In the same way, the richest, most urbane and most cynical of the conservative elite are themselves powerless to resist the the fear they peddle.

And that, I fear, is what will keep the MSM from ever coming to grips, connecting the dots and exerting the social pressure necceary to get them to dial down down the ever more toxic rhetoric from the right. At least not until the body count gets a lot higher or the targets become more powerful.

I pray to god I'm wrong.

[Psychic Consortium]

1. Very sadly you are most likely quite correct. nt

[babylonsister]

2. .

[glinda]

3. Now is the time to dismantle the large Media conglomerates. For the good of free speech and

the safety of the Country.

[abq e streeter]

4. Glad the OP said"willing" ...its not an inability to connect the dots

but unwillingness to do so publicly...most of em in the MSM ; maybe all of em,know damn well what's going on, but if they admit what they know, it makes em look bad for having kissed the asses of these hate-mongering "conservative pundits' for so long. So they'll keep playing the same game till... maybe forever, no matter how extreme and violent the acolytes of Rush et al become, because to finally admit who and what these people are and always have been, would just be an admission of "we knew it all along, but just didn't give a fuck".

[Daveparts]

5. It is More

than Geography and philosophy, it's about more than religion and race. Together in this bubbling cauldron of race baiting and propaganda is a collapsing economy. It tinges all levels with fear and coats the demagoguery with the shine of believability.

This is only the beginning as the nuts and unbalanced minions pop to the surface.