Right-Wing Violence Will Continue, And Fox News Will Have to Answer For It

[RedEarth]

Right-Wing Violence Will Continue, And Fox News Will Have to Answer For It
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on June 10, 2009, Printed on June 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140539/

If Fox News is going to continue to traffic in hateful, vigilante-style rhetoric, then folks at Fox News, as well as their apologists in the GOP Noise Machine, are going to have to come up with better talking points to spin away the consequences of the right-wing madness they're so eager to incite.

They need a better line of defense because the one they trotted out in the wake of the right-wing assassination of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was wholly unconvincing.

It was just as feeble as the defense Fox News' Glenn Beck tried to employ in May to distance himself from the accused right-wing cop killer in Pittsburgh who seemed to mimic Beck's language about how President Obama was coming to take away everyone's guns.

The Fox News crew is going to need better talking points because I fear the violence -- the bouts of right-wing domestic terrorism -- are likely to continue. As long as Fox News and the Noise Machine refuse to back off the incendiary language that they're actively mainstreaming, the political violence, visible just months into Obama's historic first term, may have only begun.

Note that during a jailhouse interview, Tiller's suspected killer claimed that similar assassination plots against abortion providers are already being planned.

And please note what you did not hear from virtually anyone on the far right who addressed the Tiller story last week. Yes, they tried furiously to distance Bill O'Reilly from the controversy or suggest there was nothing problematic with the "baby killer" rhetoric he used. But what you did not hear was anyone condemn, or even take issue with, O'Reilly's on-air crusade.

Why the silence? Because militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it's now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis.

The fact is, I couldn't find a single prominent voice within the GOP Noise Machine who even hinted that O'Reilly's relentless attacks on Tiller were in any way off the mark or, in light of the vigilante Kansas church killing, needed to be reconsidered, that they should have been dialed down. And that's why the ugliness has only begun.

http://www.alternet.org/media/140539/right-wing_violence_will_continue,_and_fox_news_will_have_to_answer_for_it/

[Gman]

1. The OKC bombing was just one thing that came out of the last time the RW did this

they bristled when the Big Dog hinted that it was their fault.

Only this time it's much worse and much more inflammatory.

[izquierdista]

2. That's because they have an understanding

You never heard Hitler call for Jews to be gassed, he never signed any execution orders, because he didn't have to. They have an understanding in the right wing, that words are just rhetoric. Actions and deeds just appear spontaneously out of thin air. And those actions, if they cause popular revulsion, may require a little break in the harangue, but as soon as it is all over, the words are replayed with astoundingly similar results. They have "proximate cause" down to a science and "plausible deniability" elevated to an artform.