http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2009/06/tragedy-at-holocaust-museum-stand-up-to.html

Then consider the outrage from the right over the DHS report on right-wing extremism. It ‘insulted’ veterans, pro-lifers etc. … of course, the only real insult in the warning to law enforcement officials was to the law enforcement officials themselves, who are apparently too dumb to look at the current situation (black Democratic president, shattered economy, vets returning from the most traumatic charnel house since Vietnam, etc.) and figure out that they might want to be on the look out for right-wing nutters lashing out.

I joke about the report being an insult to law enforcement, of course. But I do wonder at the surprise some people exhibit when stuff like the Tiller murder or the Holocaust Museum shooting happen … haven’t they been, you know, observing events in the world? It’s like the Ryan Report or the Boston Archdiocese scandal — there are always people gobsmacked at revelations that Catholic priests abused the children in their care, as if this hasn’t been known since the fucking papacy was in Avignon, or you know, the First Council of Nicaea.

Okay, a trend is shaping up. Next thread!

The righties sees hate crime differently than humans do. They find this sort of extremist action as lowbrow at worst, akin to those hillbilly grandmothers that hilariously hold off the authorities with a blunderbuss while their moonshiner sons get the still onto the old Model T out back of the barn and drive away, whooping it up, and John Law gives up and goes back to the office with much chagrined head-shaking.

I’ll give ‘em the occasional maniac, because with 350 million citizens to choose from, you’re going to have to suffer a fair number of nutcases going batshit before a trend can be called. That the right fell all over itself denying the shooter was one of their own speaks volumes, of course, but it’s not a wave of violence.

What sweats me is the likelihood of a wave of violence actually occurring, because those fuckers can deny, ridicule, and dismiss, as is their habit, but there are hundreds of thousands of heavily-armed, completely insane assholes out there, and they’re only waiting for the slightest whiff of civil unrest to go out and shoot them some vegetarians/ fags/ colored folk.

I’m a gun-friendly person myself, on a much smaller, left-wing, “it’s okay to make people pass some rudimentary suitability test before they shoot things” kind of scale, so I venture, hobbit-like, into the depths of gun Mordor on occasion. You go to any of the gun forums on the Interwebbing, you will find about 50% of the comments have some reference to: 1) the need to kill for FREEDOM, 2) Barry X. Husssein’s tyranny coming to an end so abrupt that he’s already on the floor when the report is heard from the belltower, and 3) the big Peckinpah style showdown which is imminent.

These people have big, crazy plans.

You speak as if the right hasn’t already started shooting …

Commie pinko bastard, why doesn’t he die of easily-cured illnesses like a real man?

Or think of the MSM as a computer…and Faux News and the Washington Times as both malware and scareware.

Or think of the Bush/Cheney administration as a computer…with what they did to the executive branch and so many federal agencies (malware), what they did before starting the Iraq War, along with their repeated invocation of 9/11 (scareware) and the illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens and bypassing of FISA (spyware).

And, of course, when the Bush/Cheney administration decided to trash over two hundred years of American tradition, the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, as well as numerous federal anti-torture statutes, they created a new category…tortureware.

And who were these programmers who decided to reprogram America to fit their warped and twisted conservative vision, the neo-con Republicans with the help of both lapdog Republicans and conservative DLC Blue Dog Democrats…so the header over the Bush/Cheney administration’s malware, scareware, spyware and tortureware activities should be neoconware, a really viral and often lethal “control” program.

Anyone have an anti-virus program that will help? Can we de-bug our democracy before it’s too late, before more right-wingers go berserk and kill even more innocent citizens? Has the Republican Party and conservatives in general become so consumed and compromised by scareware, malware, tortureware and spyware that they are self-erasing before our very eyes? Will the culture of corruption, lies and greed Republican Party crash the computer (our country, our beloved democracy), just as they’ve worked so hard to crash our economy?

Happens on Facebook. Sometimes I put a political post on there, some pithy epigrammatic sort of thing, and suddenly there’s a pissing contest and the whole “Gramma’s pictures of the babies” aspect of Facebook is gone, and there’s this back-and-forth that looks like what people were getting into right before the Civil War, instead.

This country is just barely keeping itself together, I’m starting to realize. If the left has to get militant again, the right is going to start shooting, and we’ll have chaos.

Kind of a buzzkill in some ways.

Just thought I’d mention it. Buzzkill, man.

I’ve gotten the sense that Obama is really big on procedure. I don’t know what I think of this — is this tone-deafness or legal principle? I really don’t know. IF that’s what it is (and it’s defensible from that perspective, even if it’s not correct), it’s ugly but understandable.

That said, the brief was evidently written by a Mormon Bushie and shouldn’t have been released in that form, and Holder at the very least owes the GLBT community an apology for letting such an inflammatory piece of horseshit get out on his watch. Ideally I’d love to see it handled in a manner akin to the flap over the Special Olympics. (I dropped an email to president@whitehouse.gov (for all the good that’ll probably do) and cc’ed it to my congresscritter.)

Well, so long as you don’t go all Brad’ing about over it, I don’t see the problem in you leaving the camp. The federal government’s fucking you over, there’s no reason to accept it just because Obama’s the guy in the office at the time.

OK, so… so… so, presumably, the Constitutional law professor currently occupying the White House was at least in some way involved in approving this brief for submission–it would be odd for him NOT to be, at least in some capacity, even if it’s a quick “Yeah, looks good, go ahead” from the BlackBerry.

That’s one of the more foolish suggestions (excluding those made by ‘wingers) that I’ve seen @ S,N! in a while.

the world would be a better place if this were true.

He also happened to be bankrolled by Republicans, and then got elected by co-opting Obama’s style and rhetoric. Our mayors race also happened to pit a young black upstart against a white female establishment candidate, so the dynamic made it easy, but still. If someone was trying to bring him down, more power to them.

OK, so… so… so, presumably, the Constitutional law professor currently occupying the White House was at least in some way involved in approving this brief for submission–it would be odd for him NOT to be, at least in some capacity, even if it’s a quick “Yeah, looks good, go ahead” from the BlackBerry.

Um, no, I wouldn’t have thought so, actually. Do you honestly think he would have time to proofread motions in every case the USG is involved in?

OK, so… so… so, presumably, the Constitutional law professor currently occupying the White House was at least in some way involved in approving this brief for submission–it would be odd for him NOT to be, at least in some capacity, even if it’s a quick “Yeah, looks good, go ahead” from the BlackBerry.

But… but… but what it looks like to me, not that I’m an expert or anything, is, “Here are the points you can’t expect to win on: DOMA was put together by some pretty smart bigots, and they were very careful to avoid technical error, so here are the challenges that are least likely to be successful. We leave it up to you guys at Lambda to figure out the lines of argument that will succeed.”

It’s just real tough to get a read on what the attorneys intended–which marks them as tremendously capable. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, of course, and this may be purest wishful thinking on my part, but they may be telegraphing how to argue in favor of gay marriage.

Hope.