House of Reps. member Giffords shot in Arizona today

@JTT,

Quote:

So personal responsibility is just another meaningless conservative/Repub talking point.

Only for the opposition

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@Lash,

Lash wrote:

My son is a history instructor at a community college - and he thinks the privacy of the funeral trumps free speech.

He is correct. Free speech does not give anyone the right to interrupt private ceremonies or other private gatherings for other purposes - to allow people to get on their soap box. Nor does it give anyone the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre. There are obviously many other examples that could be cited.

1 Reply

@engineer,

engineer wrote:

okie wrote:
I had totally forgotten, but Hannity pointed out that Sirhan Sirhan was way ahead of his time, being an Islamist that assassinated Robert Kennedy, many think because Kennedy favored our alliance with Israel.
Sirhan Sirhan was not an Islamist. The Palestinian resistance was secular in nature all the way up until the '80 when we started to see the rise of Hamas. His actions were not driven out of religion.

There is little doubt that Sirhan's actions were driven by hatred for Jews, which obviously has a religious vector to it. He expressed this sentiment in the courtroom. See the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan
"During Sirhan's testimony, Cooper asked him to explain his reasons for the attack on Kennedy. Sirhan launched into "...a vicious diatribe about the Middle East conflict between Arab and Jew." [7][11] Sirhan's anti-Zionist rhetoric was so passionate that one of his own defense counsel, Emile Zola Berman, who was Jewish, became upset and expressed his intentions to resign [yet again] from the defense team. Berman was eventually talked out of resigning by Cooper and stayed until the end of the trial."

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Quote:

What "violent" rhetoric? Nothing you have cited above was either violent or even a call to violence.

Really? It's as if you don't remember the last few years or the Tea Party thing at all.

Let's look just at Giffords herself, for a couple of examples.

Quote:

Representative Gabrielle Giffords on Violent Political Rhetoric, March 2010

January 8, 2011 in Students

“Are you afraid? Are you fearful today?”

“You know, I’m not. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the course of the last several months. Our office corner has really become an area where the Tea Party movement congregates. And the rhetoric is incredibly heated. Not just the calls, but the emails, the slurs. So things have really gotten spun up. But you gotta think about it. Our democracy is a light, a beacon really around the world, because we effect change at the ballot box, and not because of these outbursts — of violence in certain cases, and the yelling, and it’s just … you know, change is important, it’s a part of our process, but it’s really important that we focus on the fact that we have a democratic process.”

“I think it’s important for all leaders, not just leaders of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party … community leaders, figures in our community to say, ‘Look, we can’t stand for this.’ I mean, this is a situation where people really need to realize that the rhetoric, and firing people up, and even things … For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.”

“In the years that some of my colleagues have served, twenty, thirty years, they’ve never seen it like this. We have to work out our problems by negotiating, working together, hopefully Democrats and Republicans.”

–Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, March 25, 2010.

That was two days after she had her office busted up and vandalized.

This is the same lady whose opponent held a fund-raiser entitled 'Get on Target for Victory in November - Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly!' At said fundraiser the candidate and his constituents reportedly fired at targets which had Gifford's initals written on them.

She certainly was on Palin's now-infamous map - not that I make too much of it, but hey - fits the bill for violent rhetoric to a T.

http://static1.firedoglake.com/1/files/2011/01/Palinmap.jpg

---

Even more so than the overtly violent rhetoric is the constant and never-ending drumbeat of extreme and sometimes paranoid rhetoric to back it up. I'm sure I don't have to go into Glenn Beck or the vagaries of Fox, or Rush Limbaugh; but you ought to also consider the extreme rhetoric regularly utilized by elected Republicans.

Cycloptichorn

4 Replies

@Cycloptichorn,

Cyclops, you are straying off on a tangent. The map you post means nothing, in fact the media has almost universally adopted the term "battleground states," which is similar in language as target states or target races. You are trying to make a case where there is none. Besides, there are enough quotes from Democrats, notably Obama himself, making comments about punishing enemies, etc., to show that this is a two way street.

The point is that the guilty guy had a mental problem, and he had no connection whatever with the tea party, in fact he was an "independent" and a social misfit, a nutcase, no other way to explain it.

Last point, wasn't the congresswoman a conservative Democrat ? So your motive theory holds no water whatsoever. I would suggest you knock it off, cyclops, before you dig yourself a deeper hole.

1 Reply

@okie,

I don't know about that, Okie. As despicable as the Westboro people are (we all agree on that, yes?), I am not sure that the Supreme Court will be able to get around the 1st amendment. Demonstrating 100 yards, or 500 yards away from some private event. I just don't see the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution that way.

1 Reply

@okie,

okie, can you tell us what those surveyor's symbols mean...?

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

What's your point?

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@Lash,

[quote]OK, sweetheart. Take a trip back in time with me. Remember George Bush and Dick Cheney? The ones in office always get it worse. With each power shift, the party on the outside gets louder and crueler. I KNOW you won't question this - and further, I KNOW that you will admit the vitriol spewed at W and Cheney was MUCH worse than Obama or any Democrat has suffered.[/quote]
Except for when the radical right was screaming at Bill Clinton for seven of his eight years in office claiming that he was 1) a drug smuggler 2) the murderer of Vince Foster 3) a rapist and 4) guilty of numerous and varied other allegations, (Filegate, Troopergate, ad nauseumgates) all of which proved completely without foundation.

Yup. He got blow jobs from Monica, but the right had never accused him of infidelity, they just had a Special Prosecutor who employed his office beyond his powers to investigate that incident in an failed attempt at a coup d'etat.
Joe(Love you kid, but your memories are short)Nation

1 Reply

@realjohnboy,

I will admit I am not familiar with laws or ordinances about those things, but common sense itself tells me that police departments can cordone off streets for periods of time to expedite a funeral procession, so why can't they prohibit these nuts from getting within 3 blocks of the place if they wanted to? It is a simple matter of decency it would seem to me. I hope the judges have some common sense about this.

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@Rockhead,

Rockhead wrote:

okie, can you tell us what those surveyor's symbols mean...?

What "surveyor's symbols?" What are you talking about?

1 Reply

@okie,

the ones that used to be gunsights.

I'm trying to figure out their meaning.

I thought you would know, being in oil country and all...

1 Reply

@okie,

If you read that Wikipedia article you would seen that Sirhan Sirhan is not Muslim. He is Christian, but has clearly fallen from the faith. Yes, he was rabidly anti-Israel but it was because the formation of Israel had taken land from and displaced large parts of the Palestinian population. From the same Wikipedia article

Quote:

After his arrest, Sirhan said, "I can explain it. I did it for my country."

You don't have to be Muslim to be anti-Zionist. I don't know how you can point to a Palestinian Christian and say he represents Islamic based terrorism. Aren't you a bit concerned that Hannity is so clearly misrepresenting such a key historic event?

1 Reply

@Rockhead,

I still don't know what you are talking about. I am going to guess you are referring to cyclops map with the two lines inside a circle? I used to draft maps for a surveyor a long time ago, and I vaguely remember similar symbols on survey maps we used in geology, and I think they were used for locations or surveyed points, such as corners or pins for survey points, which might include section corners, lot corners, whatever.

I don't know where you want to go with the question, but I think its a dead end for you, Rocky.

1 Reply

@okie,

nope.

you answered my question perfectly.

now you can tackle engineer's query...

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@engineer,

I realize he had tried various Christian oriented faiths, but as you pointed out, he did not continue in that direction. I do not think it is illogical to see that his rabid hatred of Jews was similar to what we see with the Islamic movements today that have as one of their primary goals the total defeat or elimination of Israel. To be perfectly correct, he was not of the Islamic faith, but the root of his hatred is not much different than we see now with Islamic terrorists. Regarding Hannity, I don't remember the exact words he used, so I don't know if he used the same as I did. By the way, I saw something on a web search that Arafat had called for RFK's assassination, supposedly learned by the CIA, but I wasn't sure of the link's credibility, so did not post, but that is also out there as a theory.

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@Cycloptichorn,

I have an easy question for you.
You are acting as if the violent rhetoric is something new or that it originated with the tea party, so here is the question for...
Was there or was there not violent rhetoric aimed at Bush and Cheney during their admin?
Rhetoric that called for them to be killed.
And did it originate from the left?

1 Reply

@okie,

I think the entire idea of "Islamic terrorism" is that it is religious in nature - that you are doing God's work with your violence. If that were true of Sirhan Sirhan, then he would be a Christian terrorist. He is clearly not. He is a nationalist and portraying him as something related to Islamic terrorism is at best a stretch (and at worst an outright lie attempting to rewrite history.) It is no more unreasonable for Sirhan Sirhan to hate Israel than it is for Kuwaitis to hate Saddam Hussein's Iraq for the 1991 invasion and occupation. The cause of his hatred is obvious and it's not religious in nature (although there are many famous Jew hating Christians out there.) Do you support Hannity's statement here?

2 Replies

@engineer,

The country of Israel is religious in nature, engineer, so whether Sirhan was Islamic then or not, the hatred has similar roots as the nation of Islam has now regarding the nation of Israel. I think Islamic terrorism has a religious vector and it has a political or secular vector. If you think about it, the Islamic religion has much to do with political control of the Middle East part of the world, including the geographic area of the nation of Israel. Regarding Hannity's statement, yes I support it because it brought to my attention something that I had forgotten, and because I think there is a link. I think the mindset that drove Sirhan Sirhan is not far different than the mindset of the Islamic terrorist movements we contend with today. The common thread is the hatred for Israel, hatred of Jews, and hatred for the Western world that are allies of theirs. Surely this concept is not too difficult for you to see?

I also appreciated Hannity bringing this up, because it caused me to do some searches and I discovered a couple of other things I had forgotten, one being the book that Bill Ayers had written, he dedicated his book to Sirhan Sirhan. It is the same Bill Ayers that Obama used his home to kick off his political career. It seems bizarre, but apparently true. I have heard that truth is stranger than fiction, and this is one that seems to demonstrate that principle.

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@Joe Nation,

Given how I let my verbage get lax, you are right. I see that I said "vitriol" when I meant to say "violent rhetoric." I wouldn't know how to quantify vitriol...as Bush and Clinton had really impressive honeymoons for a while... and both took it on the chin for a while...

I DO know that I didn't see Clinton's life threatened in the news by the public nearly as often as I saw Bush's. I never heard Clinton's murder suggested or joked about in the media; and I saw Bush's life threatened and his death joked about by the public, liberal TV hosts frequently.

(I have to pause at your "completely without foundation..." re Clinton's laundry list of accusations and smile wryly. Clinton and Co gave people plenty of reasons to look into all that stuff; but so did Bush, Cheney, Obama...)

Away from the misspeak and returning to the issue - My previous exchanges were focused not on accusations, but violent partisan rhetoric. Although Clinton was dragged through the mud, violent public rhetoric against Bush and Cheney far outweighs any against the current administration or Dem officeholders - and although Clinton enjoyed quite a tidy sum of accusations and the ever popular vitriol - violent rhetoric against him pales to W's.

Amended and apologies to Joe (thanks for the redirection) Nation

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House of Reps. member Giffords shot in Arizona today

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