Assassination: Live-Blogging and Not Exactly Holding Back on the Potentially Explosive Politics…

January 8, 2011 | Posted in Miscellany | | 28 Comments ↓

An Assassination: Live-Blogging – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

 

08 Jan 2011 03:18 pm

 

3.49 pm Various Palin sites are frantically removing various incendiary materials – which is both gratifying, but also, it seems to me, an acknowledgment of previous rhetorical excess. TakeBackThe20.com is in meltdown, images like these are being removed ASAP, and Palin’s Facebook page simply cannot cope with the number of commenters blasting her.

3.41 pm A local Giffords campaign office had a brick thrown through the window last spring.

3.35 pm A campaign notice from Giffords’ opponent last summer:

Aakelly048cAakelly039c

How many political candidates hold an automatic rifle in their open crotch in order to demonstrate their ideological bone fides? The conflation of conservatism with the willingness to use violence depressingly deepens.


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28 comments on “Assassination: Live-Blogging and Not Exactly Holding Back on the Potentially Explosive Politics…”

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  1. A god hating, psycho anarchist, with grammar issues, ‘nothing to see here, there’s are not the droids you’re looking for’

    Reply

  3. More like libertarian extremist, especially with all that anti-fiat currency and “2nd Constitution” stuff – but if you were as nuts as he is, you’d probably be a libertarian extremist, too.

    Reply

  4. But the default setting was to blame the tea party, Palin, and Afghan War vets, (in that order) when he was more than like a MoveOn, Obama, and Code Pink supporter. Hence the template.

    Reply

  6. @ miguel cervantes:
    Obama supporter? Code Pink? I’m not sure I even want to know how you come up with that.

    Giffords’ opponents stirred up a lot of murderous/violent ideation around her. Those opponents include Palin and her infamous “target” list. So the connection is blatant and obvious. Probably doesn’t mean a lot in the sense of motivating this guy. For all we know he was mistreated at a 7/11 when he asked for change, and that’s what set him off. Or maybe it was Xmas season car commercials. But it still highlights and intensifies the dissonance of the Palin/Tea Party culture in the mainstream. Because it’s so wonderful and unquestionably appealing to you, I don’t expect you to have any sympathy or sensitivity for the reaction, but it’s real, and it’s what’s been showing up consistently in opinion polls and in the attitudes of realistic Republican politicos.

    Reply

  7. Granted he’s a nut, but he leans more in one direction than another, probably like Cornel West, thinks that Obama didn’t surcame the banks,
    or some such nonsense, probably is for the public option

    Reply

  8. mobile.twitter.com via Drudgereport.com:

    caitieparker @lakarune I haven’t seen [Jared Loughner] since ’07. Then, he was left wing.

    caitieparker @antderosa As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.

    caitieparker @antderosa he was a pot head & into rock like Hendrix,The Doors, Anti-Flag. I haven’t seen him in person since ’07 in a sign language class

    caitieparker @antderosa He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was “stupid & unintelligent”

    Reply

  11. If Sullivan has apologized for jumping the gun, in his passive aggressive
    way, you think you would do so. Historically, h e seems more in the Guiteau-Cgoltz, continuum for lack of a better template, Maybe he followed Kos’s admonitions back in the summer of 2008

    Reply

  14. @ miguel cervantes:
    Congratulations to you and Patterico for demonstrating what a mild form of the syndrome looks like/making Kos look good by comparison. Compare that jpg to Jesse Kelly’s assault rifle fetishism:

    Or to this:

    …and all the other pandering she does to a militia sensibility.

    Again, the point isn’t that Palin did more than contribute to the atmosphere. In the wake of events like this one, that’s more than enough.

    And if you really want someone in politics and media who’s enough of a lunatic to compare to this guy, with a lot of the same fixations, I think you know exactly who that would be. Another good friend of SP’s.

    Reply

  17. George Jochnowitz wrote:

    @ fuster:
    Pat Buchanan licks Islamic ass.

    Good for you, George. Buchanan is not a nice man and probably doesn’t much care for the Islamists but is willing to stick his tongue anywhere that he thinks will be harmful for Jews. He’s not merely anti-Israeli, he’s the real deal in bigotry.
    I remember when Guiliani was mayor. Boy, did he lick Chasidic ass.

    Reply

  18. You know Colin, maybe you should have shuttered this site when you had the chance. Because you have lost your bloody mind, comparing me to a butcher like Laughner, who murders children, defending Hamas
    terrorists, who also coincidentally murder children; and I see none of you, defended me, so frankly goodbye

    Reply

  19. Well, I hope the rest of you – er, both of you – fuster and George – feel just horrible about not having defended miguel from a non-existent insult.

    Really, no one needs to make up an excuse or pretext to stop participating.

    Reply

  24. @ fuster:
    I am an insult to migs, in case you haven’t noticed. The world is an insult to migs. It makes him feel better to imagine that it was all of our personal failings that drove him away.

    He holds you responsible for not defending him, and gives you no chance to clear up whatever misunderstanding.

    It’s not just this horrid discussion with the flagrant insults that you somehow failed to notice… If you really loved him you would have shown him more kindness all along. When was the last time you sent him flowers? Did you even remember your last anniversary?

    Reply

  26. who can say what anyone sees in anyone? maybe I’m short and green, but I’m well-groomed and don’t expect too much.

    Reply

  27. People are good. People all deserve respect.
    There are, however, people who do bad things. They do so because they are trying to be good but have been misled by their faith in a cuckoo doctrine. For example, Muslims who blow themselves up in order to destroy mosques and kill other Muslims–the most common form of violence nowadays–are doing so because they believe they are being kind to Islam and to the world.

    Reply
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Noted & Quoted

Keith Spencer: …data shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate – Salon.com
(3)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election
Keith Spencer: …data shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate – Salon.com
(3)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election

TV pundits and op-ed writers of every major newspaper epitomize how the Democratic establishment has already reached a consensus: the 2020 nominee must be a centrist, a Joe Biden, Cory Booker or Kamala Harris–type, preferably. They say that Joe Biden should "run because [his] populist image fits the Democrats’ most successful political strategy of the past generation" (David Leonhardt, New York Times), and though Biden "would be far from an ideal president," he "looks most like the person who could beat Trump" (David Ignatius, Washington Post). Likewise, the same elite pundit class is working overtime to torpedo left-Democratic candidates like Sanders.

For someone who was not acquainted with Piketty's paper, the argument for a centrist Democrat might sound compelling. If the country has tilted to the right, should we elect a candidate closer to the middle than the fringe? If the electorate resembles a left-to-right line, and each voter has a bracketed range of acceptability in which they vote, this would make perfect sense. The only problem is that it doesn't work like that, as Piketty shows.

The reason is that nominating centrist Democrats who don't speak to class issues will result in a great swathe of voters simply not voting. Conversely, right-wing candidates who speak to class issues, but who do so by harnessing a false consciousness — i.e. blaming immigrants and minorities for capitalism's ills, rather than capitalists — will win those same voters who would have voted for a more class-conscious left candidate. Piketty calls this a "bifurcated" voting situation, meaning many voters will connect either with far-right xenophobic nationalists or left-egalitarian internationalists, but perhaps nothing in-between.

From: There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate | Salon.com

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Eli Zaretsky: Trump’s Charisma – LRB Blog
(5)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election
Eli Zaretsky: Trump’s Charisma – LRB Blog
(5)
Political Philosophy, Politics2020 Election

Understanding Trump’s charisma offers important clues to understanding the problems that the Democrats need to address. Most important, the Democratic candidate must convey a sense that he or she will fulfil the promise of 2008: not piecemeal reform but a genuine, full-scale change in America’s way of thinking. It’s also crucial to recognise that, like Britain, America is at a turning point and must go in one direction or another. Finally, the candidate must speak to Americans’ sense of self-respect linked to social justice and inclusion. While Weber’s analysis of charisma arose from the German situation, it has special relevance to the United States of America, the first mass democracy, whose Constitution invented the institution of the presidency as a recognition of the indispensable role that unique individuals play in history.

From: Trump’s Charisma

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Matt Yglesias: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying – Vox
(0)
Operation American Greatness
Matt Yglesias: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying – Vox
(0)
Operation American Greatness

[E]ven Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.On some level, it’s a little bit funny. On another level, Puerto Rico is still languishing in the dark without power (and in many cases without safe drinking water) with no end in sight. Trump is less popular at this point in his administration than any previous president despite a generally benign economic climate, and shows no sign of changing course. Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.

From: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying - Vox

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