Justin's Political Corner

The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers — not because it turned out that they were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren’t), but because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong. Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their opponents.

The problem is that all they’re really doing is attempting, yet again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists on their own side.

Leading the charge is William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who published a post over the weekend titled“Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives”:

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to review the posts of the people he’s attacking — since neither I nor anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however — and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited — unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives. (More about that in a moment.)

The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism’s potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.)

Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they are not from the political right is simply risible.

It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical extreme.

Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white people.

Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose totalitarian rule.

Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to prevent it.

Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to oppress white people.

Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish conspiracy.

Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming here as part of an “Aztlan” conspiracy to retake the Southwest for Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.

You get the idea.

Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.

But the conspiracist Oath Keepers are hardly the only extremist element that has been absorbed within the ranks of the Tea Party. The list is long, but it’s headed up by the Minutemen who have become Tea Party leaders. Moreover, as I explored in an investigative piece for AlterNet, the movement became a functional extension of the Patriot/militia movement in many precincts, especially in rural areas, away from the television crews.

Jacobson’s limitations on what constitutes “right wing” are not only ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they’re also predictably self-serving. So it’s not surprising that, given his criteria, even his list of “failed eliminationist narratives” is fatally flawed.

Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode, were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However, there are three cases here that we did indeed describe as involving right-wing extremists. And you know what? We still do.

We realize, for instance, that the post-shooting narrative favored pretending that Jared Lee Loughner was somehow not a terrorist because he was mentally ill (a claim they for some reason do not make when it comes to Nidal Hasan, the mentally ill gunman in the Fort Hood shooting rampage). They also found other mitigating factors, such as Loughner’s youthful liberalism, to claim that he was not a right-wing extremist, despite the obvious liberal-ness of his targets. However, none of that can overcome the reality that at the time he acted, Loughner was carrying out what he saw as a mission on behalf of his now-adopted right-wing beliefs involving a global monetary conspiracy. He was indeed a right-wing extremist, and other experts on the subject who have examined the record have reached the same conclusion.

Similarly, we found that the IRS plane bomber was indeed a terrorist, and that he was acting on behalf of the very same extremist anti-tax ideology we described above. And the Pentagon shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was acting out on his beliefs derived from Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories — and Jones, despite many efforts to pretend otherwise, is clearly a classic right-wing conspiracy theorist and extremist from the old John Birch mold.

Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we’ve outlined above — but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and the ideological distances keep shrinking.

We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a hate-crimes law.

But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead, conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and spread, and otherwise look the other way while viciously attacking anyone with the nerve to point it out.

Conservatives have instead made a cottage industry out of whitewashing away their extremists, most notably when decrying any efforts by law enforcement to confront the issue, and this latest effort in the wake of the Boston bombing is just the latest chapter.

In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions. And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them — first by pretending that they don’t exist while attacking anyone who points out that they do, and second by silently giving them a warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.

H/T: David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars

Ever since the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, it’s been repeated like some surreal requiem: The reason mass gun violence keeps happening is because the United States is full of places that ban guns.

Second Amendment activists have long floated this theme, and now lawmakers across the nationare using it too. During a recent floor debate in the Colorado Legislature, Republican state Rep. Carole Murray put it this way: “Most of the mass killings that we talk about have been effected in gun-free zones. So when you have a gun-free zone, it’s like saying, ‘Come and get me.’”

The argument claims to explain both the motive behind mass shootings and how they play out. The killers deliberately choose sites where firearms are forbidden, gun-rights advocates say, and because there are no weapons, no “good guy with a gun” will be on hand to stop the crime.

With its overtones of fear and heroism, the argument makes for slick sound bites. But here’s the problem: Both its underlying assumptions are contradicted by data. Not only is there zero evidence to support them, our in-depth investigation of America’s mass shootings indicates they are just plain wrong.

Among the 62 mass shootings over the last 30 years that we studied, not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns. To the contrary, in many of the cases there was clearly another motive for the choice of location. For example, 20 were workplace shootings, most of which involved perpetrators who felt wronged by employers and colleagues. Last September, when a troubled man working at a sign manufacturer in Minneapolis was told he would be let go, he pulled out a 9mm Glock and killed six people and injured another before putting a bullet in his own head. Similar tragedies unfolded at a beer distributor in Connecticut in 2010 and at a plastics factory in Kentucky in 2008.

Or consider the 12 school shootings we documented, in which all but one of the killers had personal ties to the school they struck. FBI investigators learned from one witness, for example, that the mass shooter in Newtown had long been fixated on Sandy Hook Elementary School, which he’d once attended.

Or take the man who opened fire in suburban Milwaukee last August: Are we to believe that a white supremacist targeted the Sikh temple there not because it was filled with members of a religious minority he despised, but because it was a place that allegedly* banned firearms?

True security in our schools and other designated gun-free places may require more. Forbidding firearms alone clearly won’t keep violence away—not least because of how easily bad guys can get their hands on guns. Nearly 80 percent of the mass shooters we documentedobtained their weapons legally.

Indeed, America is anything but gun free. We now have more than 300 million firearms in private hands. In the last four years, nearly 100 state laws have loosened restrictions on them. To varying degrees, every state except Illinois now allows guns to be carried in public.

All of which raises an obvious question: If more guns in more places is a solution to the bloodshed, then why did we just witness the worst year for mass shootings in recent history?

h/t: Mother Jones

Shocking news. The right wing media misled their readers again.

That “Sandy Hook father” who was testifying on “the Hill” about his anti-gun safety legislation stance is not actually a Sandy Hook father, was not actually testifying on the Hill, and while he wrote to at least one right wing media outlet to correct their incorrect reporting, few (if any) have made the corrections.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate reported:

On Sunday, roughly a week after Stevens spoke at the hearing and the same day the clip in question was posted, the Examiner reported matter-of-factly that Stevens’ daughter, Victoria, “attended Sandy Hook Elementary school, scene of the mass shooting in December.” The following day, Brietbart.com stated plainly that she had “survived the crime at Sandy Hook.” On Tuesday, the Daily Caller did the same, explaining that she had “survived the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.” We heard a similar story from Townhall.com, as well as from a spate of other conservative sites.

Stern noted that several of the articles went live after the correction was made by the father. The father emailed The Examiner to ask that they correct the article so as not to be like the left (insert cognitive dissonance here). See, his daughter does not attend Sandy Hook and was not present at Sandy Hook during the tragedy.

Yet, the Breitbart writer asserted, “Stevens’ daughter Victoria attends Sandy Hook, and was there on Dec. 14 when Adam Lanza committed his heinous crime.” No corrections were made anywhere except on the Town Hall article, written by their “news editor”, who corrected where the testimony took place, but left her wildly inaccurate title, “Sandy Hook Father: ‘My Child Is Safer at Home Where I am Armed’” standing with no correction.

Stern points out that the misleading video was posted on Youtube by the same people who are pushing the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, which should have been a clue to Breitbart et al. But they’ve never rebuffed an opportunity to climb up onto the cross of persecution.

Watch the video titled “SANDY HOOK FATHER OWNS CONGRESS”, upon which Right wing media hung what’s left of its credibility:

Let’s see. This same right wing media claimed that MSNBC deceptively edited the heckling video of Neil Heslin, an actual Sandy Hook father, testifying in favor of gun control. They claimed that the person who interrupted him was responding to an “invitation” to speak (also known in the civilized world as a rhetorical question).

This meme has now become fact.

Follow me down the rabbit hole of desperate false equivalence wherein you must pretend you don’t understand what “testimony” is and also never learned to raise your hand in school. Since MSNBC can’t play the entire tape of testimony, they have to make edits. They made a choice to include the last part of the father’s testimony before he was interrupted.

Right before MSNBC begins the clip, the father says “It’s not a good feeling to look at your child lying in a casket or looking at your child with a bullet wound to the forehead. It’s a real sad thing.” Then he paused, clearly struggling, before rhetorically asking, “Is there anybody in this room that can give me one reason, or challenge this question, (and this is where MSNBC picked it up) why anybody in this room needs to have one of these assault-style weapons or military weapons.”

This is when he was so rudely interrupted. Still thinking what a great time this would be to impose NRA talking points on him? It’s obvious why the right didn’t transcribe what the father said in their claims of misleading editing, because then they would have to include the part about his child in a casket with the bullet in his head, and that wouldn’t sell the right’s attempt at painting themselves as the victim very well. Imagine if MSNBC had included that part — the accusations of politicizing the tragedy would have echoed off of the imaginary mountains of right wing persecution for months to come.

The father used the rhetorical question as a form of address. He looked around the room the way people do when testifying and wanting to make a point to all present. He was most likely referring to the testimony given by or via the presence of the anti gun safety legislation supporters in the room. You’ll have to forgive him if he wasn’t perfect at it; he’s under a bit of strain, having just lost his child in a horrific tragedy. This was not meant as an “invitation” to insensitively hurl NRA talking points at him. Really.

The same people who spent last week screaming about an allegedly unfair edit on the heckling of Heslin by MSNBC did not bother to correct their obscene attempt to use Sandy Hook for their own agenda. They incorrectly identified a man, who has been lucky enough to not have to see his child’s face ripped apart, as a Sandy Hook father. Stevens is not a Sandy Hook father. According to Stern, the right did this in many cases after the father wrote to the Examiner with the correction. Their articles still stand days later, uncorrected.

It’s easy to go all wild west tough guy when you haven’t had to identify your child in the morgue and you’ve been spared seeing just what kind of damage bullets can do to the human body.

h/t: Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA

Nothing says “I love the Constitution” like shouting down the father of a dead six year old boy.

I’ve always said that Republicans, and gun nuts included, don’t really love the Constitution – they love one amendment.  The rest, not so much.

The Connecticut general assembly held hearings on the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, where 20 six- and seven- year-olds were mass-murdered by a young man with an assault rifle who systematically shot each child three times to ensure that they were dead.

The gun nuts showed up at the hearing in full form, some even in combat fatigues because, what a better way to say “I’m not a nut” than to come to a hearing on the murder of children dressed as some wannabe-soldier.

From the ctpost:

“The Second Amendment!” was shouted a couple of times by as many as a dozen gun enthusiasts in the meeting room as Neil Heslin, holding a photo of his slain 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, asked why Bushmaster assault-style weapons are allowed to be sold in the state.

“There are a lot of things that should be changed to prevent what happened,” said Heslin, who said he grew up using guns and was undisturbed by the interruption of his testimony.

“That wasn’t just a killing, it was a massacre,” said Heslin, who recalled dropping off his son at Sandy Hook Elementary school shortly before Lanza opened fire. “I just hope some good can come out of this.”

The ctpost goes on to note:

The sometimes boisterous public hearing — after nearly four hours of testimony from State Police, parents of slain Newtown first-graders and city mayors — seemed dominated by gun owners, who railed at more than 90 proposed bills.

Of course they were. They gun nuts are crazy, but they’re not stupid.  They’re simply adopting the teabaggers’ strategy of shouting down the health care reform townhall meetings in the summer of 2009.  If you act crazy enough you can scare the bejeesus out of legislators, and vote counters, and Supreme Court justices deciding a presidential election.  Republicans have always known this.  And it’s a tactic they routinely deploy.

Of course it’s not just for show.  The gun nuts really are crazy, so when they yell and scream, and heckle the father of recently murdered child, the crazy is real.

And they’re crazy when they allege that the entire Sandy Hook massacre is really a government hoax created to take away their guns.

And they were crazy when they wouldn’t let the Justice Department even peek to see if any suspected 9/11 terrorists had bought a gun in the US.  Mind you, we all lost civil liberties after September 11 – but guess who didn’t?  Gun nuts.  Their right to carry a piece of metal into a JC Penney and scare the bejesus out of moms and dads shopping with their children was more important than September 11.  But none of the rest of our constitutional rights trumped finding those who murdered 3,000 Americans on that horrible day.

After all, these are people who think America is one step away from becoming Nazi Germany.  If you push a gun owner hard enough, more often than not they’ll admit that the real reason they want guns is to stop the US government from becoming Hitler.  And while it’s an admirable goal to remember the lessons of history, if you think Nancy Pelosi bears any resemblance to Eva Braun, then you are prima facie evidence as to why far too many gun owners don’t have the mental capacity to own a gun.

Gun nuts are not “law-abiding citizens.”  Far too often they’re people who hate America, hate our government, hate our leaders, and hate any part of the Constitution that doesn’t deal with having the right to mass murder children during a juice-break.  You simply are not sane if you think America is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian state, and if you think Barack Obama is a socialist.  But we’ve tolerated insane-talk far too long from the Republican party (from Palin, Romney, Priebus and all the rest), and from the NRA.  And then we all act surprised when some gun nut picks up a gun every three months and blows innocent people away.

h/t: AMERICAblog.com

At least two people were shot in a shooting at Lone Star College in north Houston, Texas. Witnesses on the scene say the shooting may have escalated after a heated argument. Both victims have “multiple gun shot wounds,” ABC13 reports, and are in serious condition. They will be brought into surgery. One of the victims — who was shot in the leg — is a school employee. The other, a younger man, was found on the ground unconscious, with his eyes closed.

The college, as well as other neighboring schools, are on lock down. Lone Star College has been evacuated.

I blame the NRA for enabling the shooting.

h/t: Think Progress

The American Family Association’s Buster Wilson has been warning for the last few weeks that Presidnet Obama is getting ready to confiscate guns en masse. When Obama announced his twenty-three executive actions yesterday, gun groups largely shrugged them off, but not Wilson. In his latest effort to stoke fear, he’s warning that the Obama administration may take guns away from pastors and radio talk show hosts like himself who denounce homosexuality:

Wilson: What if the Attorney General, and listen the reason I say this might happen is because if you remember the first report put out by the Director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, when the President became President of the United States, she put out a paper talking about the people who are the categories of people who might be homegrown terrorists. In that list she put people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, people who believe in pro-life issues, people who don’t believe in having illegal aliens here, they put a lot of good, decent categories of people in that paper. Well here’s what number four says, the Attorney General can put who he wants to on the list of people who are too dangerous to get guns. What if he decides radio talk show hosts who don’t believe in gay marriage, they’re dangerous, so they shouldn’t get guns; what about pastors who preach against abortion and homosexuality, they’re too dangerous get guns; that could happen.

Not only did Wilson clearly distort the plain wording of the executive actions, but he also grossly misrepresented the DHS report on right-wing terrorism.

He said that the DHS report tacked “good, decent” people “who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, people who believe in pro-life issues, people who don’t believe in having illegal aliens here.”

The 2009 report [PDF], which concentrates on racist and anti-government militias, only mentions abortion in a single footnote as an example of how violent actions can be driven by a single issue, such as the bombings of clinics or the murder of abortion doctors. The only references to the Second Coming or Christianity are to the racist, anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement – whose members have engaged in violence – and a note about how End Times and doomsday prophesies have in the past radicalized certain individuals or groups.

As for immigration, the DHS only addresses the connection between anti-immigrant militarism and hate crimes against Hispanics, like violent border vigilantes, not political activism on illegal immigration.

The author of the report, Daryl Johnson, is actually an anti-choice, Mormon gun owner and a Republican. His warnings were prescient – right-wing extremists recently committed a massacre in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) – A former student opened fire at the Stevens Institute of Business and Arts in downtown St. Louis, MO. Initial reports indicate he walked in the building, took the elevator to the 4th floor then shot one of the school’s financial advisers in the chest.   The shooting happened in the administrator’s office.  He then turned the gun on himself.  The shooter was found in a stairwell of the 5 story building.

Police say that this was not a random shooting.  The financial adviser was targeted.  The victim is believed to be 40-50 years old. 

The shooter and the financial adviser are the only people who have been shot. The victim and the shooter have both been rushed to the hospital.  One of them has been taken to Barnes Jewish hospital. Another has been taken to St. Louis University hospital.  The gunman is reportedly in grave condition.

The student was well known by the faculty.  He was a long time student at the school. 

H/T: Fox2now.com 

In an outlandish column for WorldNetDaily, Bradlee Dean suggests that the mass shooting last week in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged in order to aid the passage of the UN Arms Trade Treaty and gun control legislation, comparing the administration’s purported actions to that of the Nazis setting the Reichstag Fire.

Though WorldNetDaily often publishes conspiratorial stories like Dean’s column — the site was the driving force behind the birther movement — it’s still regularly validated by more mainstream conservatives. Last month, the site announced that they had hired former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as a columnist. 

Dean, an “ordained preacher, heavy metal drummer, [and] talk-show host of Sons of Liberty Radio,” suggests in his December 21 column that the “timing is impeccable” for both the theater shooting in Aurora and the shooting in Newtown because they happened while the UN was deliberating over the Arms Trade Treaty:

The Sandy Hook shooting occurred just days after Sen. Rand Paul sent out an alert that the U.N. was set to pass the final version of the Small Arms Treaty, supported by Obama the day after election.

Part of the treaty bans the trade, sale and ownership of all semi-automatic weapons … like the one Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and 6 adults.

The “Batman shooting” in Aurora, Colo., also happened to coincide with the same time as negotiations of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty.

The timing is impeccable.

Aside from its conspiratorial nature, Dean’s column is also plainly inaccurate. Contrary to his suggestion that the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty would ban “the trade, sale, and ownership of all semi-automatic weapons” like the one used by Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, it does nothing of the sort. The Arms Trade Treaty is an effort to regulate the international arms trade and overtly affirms the “sovereign right” of countries to regulate the domestic ownership of firearms ”pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system.”

As we have previously explained, the Department of State has stated that it will oppose any treaty that contains ”restrictions on civilian possession or trade of firearms otherwise permitted by law or protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

According to Dean, Obama’s call for “meaningful action” and the push from others for new gun violence prevention legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook is akin to Adolf Hitler “attacking his own Reichstag to start a world war”:

When the “fire” is started, these government gun banners are right there to strip away your rights in an attempt to gain control under the guise of “putting out the fire.”

Adolf Hitler was responsible for attacking his own Reichstag to start a world war. Hitler was also responsible for sending his brownshirts to incite the people so he could play the role of solving their problems. No one believed Hitler was guilty of these crimes until after the fact.

Then it was too late.

Today, these gun banners are doing the opposite of what our forefathers fought, bled and died to give us.

Dean’s column also includes a video suggesting that the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine shooting (among others) were similarly staged.

h/t: MMFA

Earlier this week, WorldNetDaily columnist and regular Fox News guest Erik Rush tweeted a video arguing that President Obama orchestrated the Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colorado shootings in order to cover-up a massive government scandal, forcibly disarm Americans, put people in concentration camps and start a civil war. Of course the conspiracy theory iscomplete nonsense, but Rush doesn’t think so.

Today in WND, Rush effectively suggested that people should begin an armed revolt against the government: “There are also Americans – some misguided, some ideologues – who work every day of the week in the cause of compromising our liberties,” Rush writes, “I suppose suggesting that we shoot them wouldn’t be taken very well – although that is precisely what it came down to 236 years ago.”

Rush, who hoped that a Romney administration would imprison liberals and journalists, like in the conspiracy video warns that the Obama administration is using the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to “divert attention from its own abject criminality,” crack down on gun ownership, do away with the Constitution and require “compulsory periodic assessments of citizens by government psychologists.”

H/T: Brian Tashman at RWW