Well, it's happened again. This time, the target of rage happened to be at the Pentagon, which, if you remember, was the target of an attack nine years earlier.
I wonder how long it will take for Republican assholes to find common cause with the shooter, John Patrick Bedell, like they did with Joseph Stark, the would-be killer of people who worked at an IRS building in Texas.
After all, they both hated the government and had "grievances" that they felt were best addressed with violence. And while domestic terrorism has been ruled out, the rationale behind using said violence seems to eerily parallel that of hated Muslim terrorists. Sure, I know there's a world of difference, but still, you've got ideologies at work here that mirror one another and it's something nobody wants to admit to.
This fear and loathing of the government has been stoked by right-wing assholes for some time; witness Politico's publication of a PowerPoint slide show offering the Republican National Committee its talking points, one of which is fear of the government and stopping the "slide toward socialism" or some such crap. And now, we have two (seemingly unrelated) acts of violence on government installations. You have the awesome scumbagness of the Tea Baggers who are rooting for this kind of thing while also rooting for the perpetrators (at least in Joseph Stark's case). People are being encouraged to despise the government and play out their deadly militia fantasies.
And we now have two of them to prove it.
Ideologues will dismiss this, of course, because there's not enough of a body count. One or two deaths, particularly those of the attackers, doesn't thrill them enough. In this respect, death is treated like some abstract thing, hence right-wing assholes will actually laud people like Mr. Stark and totally ignore his intention to kill other people. It's a neat mental trick, but loathsome all the same.
But what's it going to take before this stoking of irrational anger (and race baiting) becomes something uglier? Does it take hurting the President? And even then, the right-wing will somehow put the blame on him, a guy who among other things, is trying to push health care reform, not trying to draft everybody, launching some new war and lying about the reasons for it, or running up the deficit and then walking away from the problem. Oh, that's right, almost all that has already happened in the form of the worst president in U.S. history, George W. Bush. He even happily signed off on legislation to spy and round up Americans on American soil but all these anti-government douchebags kept their mouth shut.
Curious.
