Dog-Whistling to the Lunatics

Frank Schaeffer is arguing that the hatemongers on the Right are, by referring to President Obama as "Hitler", are calling to the crazies for someone to shoot him.


(H/T)

Jurrasicpork refers to it as "astroturfing terrorism."

Yes, I know the argument that the Right is going to make: "The Left referred to Bush as Hitler, so why can't we do the same to Obama?" That is a valid point, but there is a difference. The Right has a track record as referring to people they don't like as "murderers" or worse and then, guess what? Some whackjob kills people and the Right does their best impression of Captain Renault: "We are shocked, shocked, to hear that So-and-So killed Such-and-Such. Of course or rhetoric was not meant as a call for violence, we only sought to have a vigorous debate (wink, wink)."

The Right slings around their crazy rhetoric, the lunatics on the Right hear the dogwhistles and then people are killed. The Oklahoma City bombing was the most severe example. The murders of Dr. Tiller and other doctors, the bombing of the Olympic Park in `96, the bombings and shootings at abortion clinics, the recent murder of three cops in Pittsburgh, the killings of people in Illinois by a wingnut gunman, the shootings in a Knoxville church, the killing of the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic party, and the list goes on and on. All of that does not include the decades-long use of domestic terror against minorities and those who sought to help them, where people who only sought to exercise their rights as American citizens were beaten, raped and killed.

This is indeed a strategy of the Right. They seek to win, by force and intimidation, what they could not win in a free and fair election. That is why the Right spent nearly a century disenfranchising minority voters and that is why "voter caging" remains a core political strategy of the Right. Where they cannot win a fair election, they do what they can to suppress the turnout of their opponents and where they cannot do that, they try to steal the election. (The Right in this country has, as its soulmate, Mahmoud Ahamdinejad of Iran, for he did nothing other than play by the Right's playbook "Stealing Elections for Dummies".)

The Right hates the idea of a democracy. They hate the Constitution (witness the Bush Administration's repeated attempts to defile it). The Right hates the idea that people who disagree with them have the same freedom of speech, the same liberty that they do. And where they can, they have used and they will use threats and violence to prevail.

The Right professes to love America, while hating every principle that America stands for and while hating most of the people who live in the USA. They are the phoniest of patriots, for they betray the founding principles of this nation.

There is a lot I do not like about the Democrats. But as long as the Republicans remain the party of intolerance, the party of hate and yes, the party of the neo-fascists, I will proudly stand with the Democrats.