NO, THE LEFT DOES NOT DO IT, TOO

Tom Tomorrow's really all over this shit. From Media Matters back in 2005, courtesy of This Modern World:

Radio host Glenn Beck "thinking about killing Michael Moore"

BECK: Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore," and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, "Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death." And you know, well, I'm not sure.

More here.

And from Tom Tomorrow himself, at TMW a couple of days ago:

I guess no one has told him about Oklahoma City, or the murder of George Tiller (adding: or any of the other abortion providers killed or assaulted within the last thirty years). Or the would-be Tides foundation killer, or the guy who flew the plane into the IRS building, or the guy who shot up a progressive church in 2008, or the neo-Nazi who killed three cops because he feared “the Obama gun ban,” or the neo-Nazi who shot up the Holocaust Museum, or the anti-tax lunatic who took three people hostage at a Virginia post office, or the anti-government guy with the apartment full of pipe bombs who was arrested after accidentally blowing up his own hand, or the Truther who opened fire on cops at the Pentagon, or the guy arrested on the Mall two months ago with “a .223 caliber rifle, a .243 caliber rifle barrel, a .22 caliber rifle, a .357 caliber pistol, several boxes of ammunition, and propane tanks wired to four car batteries in his truck and trailer.”

To name a few.

Click here for the rest.

So I was channel surfing last night, and got to watch some of Butthole Bill O'Reilly's reaction to Paul Krugman's New York Times column from Monday, and lemme tell ya, it wasn't pretty. For starters, O'Reilly was utterly outraged, and remember that the Butthole is usually outraged, so this is like outrage on crack, steroids, and Red Bull combined - I mean, his face was red and his voice was cracking - that Krugman would lay some of the blame at his feet for the heinous political shootings in Arizona last Saturday. I couldn't bear the diatribe for long, but as far as I could tell the argument O'Reilly was making was something along the lines of "Guys like us don't advocate violence, or use violent rhetoric, or dehumanize our fellow Americans simply because we disagree with them" combined with "Besides, the left does it all the time, too, so it must be okay for us to do it."

Never mind the fact that the two arguments contradict each other--you can't assert that you don't do something and then say it's okay that you do it because the other side does it, too. O'Reilly's just plain wrong. I'd say he's lying, but as Al Franken once pointed out years ago, it's not really lying when O'Reilly asserts non-truths because the he's so fucking crazy that he obviously believes his own bullshit. But make no mistake: the left in no way resembles the right when it comes not only to prominent political figures employing gratuitous violent rhetoric, but also when it comes to political violence itself.

O'Reilly was scrambling to find examples of similar rhetoric on the left, and presented some stuff that just didn't add up. He managed to find some bulls eye symbols on the Daily Kos. He showed a clip of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who I don't even think of as a liberal, talking about how Republicans might get so upset with Rush Limbaugh's de facto leadership of the GOP that political operatives might blow up his head with a CO2 cartridge. That's when I changed the channel, not able to deal with it anymore.

Obviously, a bulls eye symbol, and speculation about what angry GOP operatives might do to a political enemy, is just not the same thing as the right wing's consistent and omnipresent use of violent imagery and language. Like I said, I didn't stick around long, so I don't know if the Butthole went on to offer some "examples" of left wing violence, but I imagine he didn't because there aren't any. I mean, I don't think there's even anything O'Reilly could have twisted like he did with the Matthews quote. Frankly, this really does look like a case of "the lady doth protest too much, methinks." O'Reilly knows he's busted and he's squealing like a pig. Even his boss is telling the Butthole and his ilk to tone it down.

The bottom line here is that the left simply doesn't do this. Liberals don't speak in violent terms about their political opposition. And, much, much, much more importantly, the left doesn't physically attack their political opposition. This is a conservative thing. And they'd better get their shit together on it, or some day soon the left just might start shooting back.

And it will be the right wing that has pushed us into civil war.

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