Vallejo man allegedly shoots friends to death

[Bucky]

32. OK, there was booze. But RW arguments *depend* on playing on our lurking paranoias.

One reason conservatives and liberals don't talk to each other anymore is that politics has become so toxic in the last 30 years. You're a not a liberal b/c you support higher taxes and want to help unionize workers. You're a liberal because you want black convicts to rape Kitty Dukakis, and you want to kill unborn babies, and you want to turn America socialist, and you support death panels and FEMA camps and secret Shariya plans to take over Oklahoma.

So after years of getting riled up and freaked out by secret Muslim presidents and the ACLU protecting the terrorists who lurk under his bed, a normal guy gets drunk, gets into a heated argument with a neighbor (a guy who blindly leans Democratic and thus unwittingly supports the Marxist takeover of America and maybe something about Saul Alinsky) and in a booze and paranoia-fueled stupor guns his neighbor down.

And pity Mike Scally too, of course, who somehow thought he could reason with a man drunk on beer and Fox. He had no notion how deep that hatred ran, how far deep into his neighbor's psyche Limbaugh's psychotic coils had latched. You never know what a man's breaking point is, when he can go when his reptilian stem takes over, when his buttons have been pushed.

Normal housewives on the open prairie in the 1890s, driven mad by the ceaseless wind, would kill their whole families. Crazed ex-boyfriends hunt down and harass and stalk the women they profess to love. Normal American kids, under unimagineable stress and inadequate leadership gave us Abu Ghraib and My Lai and dozens of other undiscovered atrocities in the blink service of "freedom." Driven stupid with worry, I once pulled a man twice my size out of his pick up and was ready to boot stomp him before my daughter screamed at me to stop--he was her Church's youth minister and he wasn't trying anything; they'd just left his and his wife's house ten minutes earlier and she was just needing to talk to a non-parent adult person.

I understand the tipping point. What pisses me off is that the conservative media establishment does too. I think being a better person means learning to navigate around it to find the right solutions in life, while Fox and Beck and Clear Channel and Limbaugh and all their ilk try to better their lives by toying with people's lurking reptilian stems, tickling their darkest fears and insecurities just in order to win a few elections and secure a few more tax breaks or lucrative government contracts.

I think Martin Hohenegger is a fool and was a dangerously deluded drunk that night. But I won't pretend he was only a victim of one sort of drug. Fox News killed his neighbor every bit as much as Jack Daniels did.