How Republicans Rationalize Wingnut Violence
“Glenallen Walken,” — not his real name — is a real live conservative and former Bush official who chooses to remain anonymous. Each week “Glenallen Walken” answers questions from readers of Salon.com about why conservatives think and do what they think and do.
This week, the question was this: “Why are angry white guys shooting people?” His answer included this statement:
It may be true that Obama’s election has emboldened some of those called white supremacists — like Richard Poplawski, who stands accused of shooting and killing the three Pittsburgh police officers, and James von Brunn, who was arrested and charged with shooting Stephen Jones. These are, self-evidently, dangerous people.
He didn’t include the the suspect in the assassination of Dr. Tiller in Kansas; nor did he include Jim David Adkisson, who shot and killed people inside a church because:
“his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
[]…]
Inside [Adkisson's] house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
That said, Walken states it would be a mistake to tar all conservatives with the crimes of the few. But I digress.
Walken again:
It can be argued … that their movement is potentially dangerous, just as any movement that teaches the superiority of a single ethnic, racial or religious group over all others may be, whether it is the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party. But taking the potentiality of that danger as an excuse for the state to act to repress these organizations and individuals comes into direct conflict with the First Amendment’s guarantee that people are allowed to think what they like and that like-minded people are free to assemble and to share their ideas with others.
Tell that to dick Cheney.
Walken goes on:
If… anyone is actively engaged in a conspiracy to violate the laws of this country and to do violence against its citizens, the conservative response is to arrest the conspirators, charge them, give them a fair trial in front of a jury of their peers and, if they’re convicted, to jail them for a very long time.
By that standard, conservatives should be actively calling for (if not outright supporting) an investigation into war crimes by Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Rice, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et. al.
But that won’t happen because apparently IOKIYAR.
The most shocking feature of authoritarian following is the easy ability to rationalize your own violence against anyone designated by the leader as deserving. All other rationalizations pale in comparison.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment