Paul Krugman:The Big Hate

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/opinion/12krugman.html?_r=1

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

[RufusTFirefly]

1. PDB: "Right wing determined to strike in U.S."

I guess conservatives wanted DHS to take the Condi approach and consider the threat to be merely "historical."

[Reterr]

2. K&R.eom

[gratuitous]

3. And don't hold your breath

Because they aren't going to apologize or change their rhetoric, tactics or policies. It's what they are, and that is a group dedicated to tearing down the American system and annointing themselves the rulers of the country and the world. They've been temporarily deposed by a popular vote. But they lurk, they scheme in the shadows, and they send their cat's paws out to lash out at the elements of the society the perceive to be weak.

They garner support from unlikely places: Who mourns for Dr. Tiller? Oh, the predictable identity politics people who think that women are entitled to make their own health choices. You'll hear the mouthings of the anti-woman crowd, even here, about how unfortunate the shooting was, but at bottom, it's just another round in the endless violence perpetrated by the fascist right against society's powerless. The media set it up as if it's all just a game, and each day a few hundred or a few thousand more people are cowed, told their rights and their humanity don't matter.

And they're so cocksure of their hatred, that even after one of their own less stable nuts goes on a spree at the Holocaust Museum, they have the gall, the naked opportunism, the flat-out inhumanity to claim that the shooter is somehow aligned with liberal and progressive philosophy. And again, the media play it like a tennis match, as if both sides deserve representation, their swing at the ball. Legitimacy is conferred on this utter lunacy, and another few hundred or few thousand people watch what their society is devolving to at the hands of these ghouls and give in to discouragement.

[Selatius]

4. I'm surprised people keep omitting the whack job who shot up a Unitarian church in TN last year.

The guy who did that felt the people at that church were worthy of death. He was an ultra-rightist as well.

[jwirr]

5. And the guy in Massachusetts who was making a dirty bomb.

[Selatius]

6. Whoa, I didn't hear about that one. nt

[Shallah Kali]

7. Do you mean the millionaire James G. Cummings in maine killed by his abused wife?

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/02/11/slain-neo-nazi-angry-over-obama-victory-reportedly-prepared-dirty-bomb-components/

or did I miss yet another rw radical terrorist?

[jwirr]

8. Yes that was the guy. If she had not found him and killed him we would

probably have a very dirty city somewhere in the US.