My first thought was “I bet you he watches Glenn Beck”. The circumstances regarding the shooting of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Gifford are still hazy, but it appears that my first characterization was incorrect. It seems that Jared Lee Loughner was not a tea party fanatic bent on “watering the tree of liberty”, but that the driving force was mental instability. However, though the essence of my first suspicion was wrong, I still stand by the face value of the words.
Every night Glenn Beck goes on national television and screams and cries and bemoans the loss of all that is good. He poses apocalypse scenarios, talks about the death of democracy and infers that an armed revolution may be the only course of action. (Infer is the key word, he says everything short of “go get your guns and march on the Capitol” and then later denies it.) The very premise of the tea party movement is vaguely militant. Remember that it's named after the prelude to a revolutionary war. But whether millions of fervent (and armed) people can tell the difference between rhetoric and real life isn't even the point anymore. The issue here is that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin discuss our domestic politics within a frame of morally just revolutionary violence. Constantly. It's become a prominent national meme. Even if the shooter disagreed with Beck and friends, the point is that more militant of the FNC crew have tried very hard to work this atmosphere of instability into our national psyche. It worked on at least one person and now six are dead and many more are wounded. How many more innocent people must die before Fox News reigns in their psychos and Sarah Palin uses a little more tact?
As a side note to the Tea Partyers: Cuba, North Korea, China, Iran the Soviet Union, these are states that make constant reference to their revolutions. Do you really want to be among their ranks?
Every night Glenn Beck goes on national television and screams and cries and bemoans the loss of all that is good. He poses apocalypse scenarios, talks about the death of democracy and infers that an armed revolution may be the only course of action. (Infer is the key word, he says everything short of “go get your guns and march on the Capitol” and then later denies it.) The very premise of the tea party movement is vaguely militant. Remember that it's named after the prelude to a revolutionary war. But whether millions of fervent (and armed) people can tell the difference between rhetoric and real life isn't even the point anymore. The issue here is that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin discuss our domestic politics within a frame of morally just revolutionary violence. Constantly. It's become a prominent national meme. Even if the shooter disagreed with Beck and friends, the point is that more militant of the FNC crew have tried very hard to work this atmosphere of instability into our national psyche. It worked on at least one person and now six are dead and many more are wounded. How many more innocent people must die before Fox News reigns in their psychos and Sarah Palin uses a little more tact?
As a side note to the Tea Partyers: Cuba, North Korea, China, Iran the Soviet Union, these are states that make constant reference to their revolutions. Do you really want to be among their ranks?
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