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Articulate Op-Ed Piece Explains Why Negativity Toxic

Lonecowboy

Well-known member
reader (the Second) said:
June 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
By FRANK RICH

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.


What if they are right-- then is a person being extreme and paranoid or only prepared??
What would today's "mainstream media" have said about the American revolutionist's during King George's day??
Why would you want someone to come foreward to silence free speech!!
Isn't this, and the abiity to defend yourself, your family, your property, your ideas what America is all about??
Isn't this FREEDOM-- free to express ourselves about our government, our leaders.
 

backhoeboogie

Well-known member
Reader,

Does it take a writer like that to get your attention? Why don't you try reading what other folks have to say in this forum? We've been discussing the rising cost of ammunition (if you can find it) over and over and even Kolo gets in on that discussion.

Texas is discussing leaving the U.S. versus going in debt to bail out the over priced California real estate fiasco amongst other things.

The folks in this forum have much better angles than the writer you are quoting. Take a listen to the voices in this forum from time to time. You might be surprised.
 

Steve

Well-known member
after hearing "negativity" for eight years blasted from the other side.. it rings hollow now that some are shouting for restraint...

on the ammo note... many years ago New Jersey banned armor piercing ammo..

now the left comes out with an ad claiming Christie, a (liberal) republican supports the unregulated use of armor piercing guns and rifles...

maybe both sides should stop ratcheting up the rhetoric in misleading ads and political attacks...
 

Lonecowboy

Well-known member
reader (the Second) said:
Thanks. I read this forum which is why I agree with Frank Rich that our country is deeply polarized and that the polarization is becoming dangerous.

There is a gulf between some of you and the majority of Americans.

No other comment on this intelligent piece of writing? That's telling in itself.

Didn't obama promise to unite America, this is one of the few promises he seems to be keeping, people are slowly starting to wake up and all turn against his ideas.
. R2, maybe the gulf is between some of you and the majority.
no comments on my questions R2, this is telling in itself.
Maybe King George was sensing a "polarization" in his empire too,just before the revolution.
People are fed up and want change, just not this change!!
 

backhoeboogie

Well-known member
Steve said:
maybe both sides should stop ratcheting up the rhetoric in misleading ads and political attacks...

There has been a 425% price increase in ammunition in the last 8 months. Are sales receipts proof enough?

Supply and demand? The demand is there. The shelves empty out faster than they can stock them.

Call it rhetoric if you like. I am only stating what is going on locally that I have first hand knowledge of.
 

backhoeboogie

Well-known member
reader (the Second) said:
No other comment on this intelligent piece of writing? That's telling in itself.

So you see this as some sort of cutting edge news editorial? Wake up and smell the coffee. If you aren't aware of what's been going on, you're completely out of touch with the main stream.

It is worse. Much worse and too far gone for the most part.

You have not been listening. Are you just now getting concerned?
 

Mrs.Greg

Well-known member
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....
 

Steve

Well-known member
backhoeboogie said:
Steve said:
maybe both sides should stop ratcheting up the rhetoric in misleading ads and political attacks...

There has been a 425% price increase in ammunition in the last 8 months. Are sales receipts proof enough?

Supply and demand? The demand is there. The shelves empty out faster than they can stock them.

Call it rhetoric if you like. I am only stating what is going on locally that I have first hand knowledge of.

I think you misunderstood my comment about misleading ads... my comment was..

many years ago New Jersey banned armor piercing ammo..

now the left comes out with an ad claiming Christie, a (liberal) republican supports the unregulated use of armor piercing guns and rifles...

maybe both sides should stop ratcheting up the rhetoric in misleading ads and political attacks...

the right seems to be responding to the attacks on our rights. and as long as the left keep airing misleading ads and supporting legislation that attacks our rights, the tension will increase..
 

Steve

Well-known member
Mrs.Greg said:
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....

let me try... it sounds like a good news anchor/bad news anchor argument.. to boost ratings on the back of a tragedy..

but the left is jumping all over it... why? because a disgruntled old white man shot a black man...

black men randomly shoot black men all the time.. and with little to no media response.. in DC alone 62 others have been murdered this year with out a peep out of the media ,,, so according to the media,.. no real story here..

a muslim man shots a soldier home doing recruiting duty and according to the media,.. it's no big deal...

people get shot every day around the world and nobody really cares..

but this example fits their agenda,.. and it is timely enough that it is big news....

it might be sad news.. that a pathetic old man with serious mental health issues went off the deep end... but it is not as big of news as the left is making it out to be..

Have a nice day... and thank GOD you don't have to live in the cess pool we call DC...
 

kolanuraven

Well-known member
Steve said:
Mrs.Greg said:
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....

let me try... it sounds like a good news anchor/bad news anchor argument.. to boost ratings on the back of a tragedy..

but the left is jumping all over it... why? because a disgruntled old white man shot a black man...

black men randomly shoot black men all the time.. and with little to no media response.. in DC alone 62 others have been murdered this year with out a peep out of the media ,,, so according to the media,.. no real story here..

a muslim man shots a soldier home doing recruiting duty and according to the media,.. it's no big deal...

people get shot every day around the world and nobody really cares..

but this example fits their agenda,.. and it is timely enough that it is big news....

it might be sad news.. that a pathetic old man with serious mental health issues went off the deep end... but it is not as big of news as the left is making it out to be..

Have a nice day... and thank GOD you don't have to live in the cess pool we call DC...


Everything hits a tipping point....maybe this last incident is just that...ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!
 

backhoeboogie

Well-known member
Mrs.Greg said:
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....

They are pretty liberal in my opinion Mrs Greg. John Q Public is pretty much fed up with the media in general.

I am still in the dino age and watching Fox news on the local level via an antenna. When they twist my arm and force me to go on business trips, or when I am in a hotel on vacation, I get the "other" Fox you are referring to. It is a little better.

The truth hurts but I like hearing the truth.

If someone like Katie comes on the set, I change channels or turn it off.
 

Mrs.Greg

Well-known member
Steve said:
Mrs.Greg said:
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....

let me try... it sounds like a good news anchor/bad news anchor argument.. to boost ratings on the back of a tragedy..

but the left is jumping all over it... why? because a disgruntled old white man shot a black man...

black men randomly shoot black men all the time.. and with little to no media response.. in DC alone 62 others have been murdered this year with out a peep out of the media ,,, so according to the media,.. no real story here..

a muslim man shots a soldier home doing recruiting duty and according to the media,.. it's no big deal...

people get shot every day around the world and nobody really cares..

but this example fits their agenda,.. and it is timely enough that it is big news....

it might be sad news.. that a pathetic old man with serious mental health issues went off the deep end... but it is not as big of news as the left is making it out to be..

Have a nice day... and thank GOD you don't have to live in the cess pool we call DC...
I wouldn't like DC for sure BUT I think your mistakin about the seriousness of this. I agree,he probably was a old man with mental health issues....I work almost daily with people like this,sad. But the media is feeding this negative crap and people are falling into the trap. When Bush was in I didn't see Macon have to put up a sticky about assassination posts. It makes my skin crawl when I read some of the stuff posted in here that follows that kind of agenda....
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
I find it telling that some on PB will actually post fearmongering articles about Hate and Rascism, to stir the pot.

If the anger is taken out as hate and Rascism, it will be misdirected. Some people are feeling a need to blame.

The bubbling frustration and anger is because of the economy and government mismanagement. And fraud in some cases.

Others are angry that they are not truly represented by the government.

We had a perfect example of that in the last couple of days in Iran.

The voting public felt they were robbed. US citizens are feeling somewhat the same.

So the Liberals in the bunch need a scapegoat, so they write fearmongering articles like this one.

Funny how R2 believes Fox news and the purported emails they recieve, when it serves her purpose.
 

kolanuraven

Well-known member
[b said:
hypocrite[/b]xposer"]I find it telling that some on PB will actually post fearmongering articles about Hate and Rascism, to stir the pot.

.


No shite Sherlock??? :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:


Man, you got the correct tag name...or at least the first part... hypocrite
 

Steve

Well-known member
reader (the Second) said:
backhoeboogie said:
reader (the Second) said:
No other comment on this intelligent piece of writing? That's telling in itself.

So you see this as some sort of cutting edge news editorial? Wake up and smell the coffee. If you aren't aware of what's been going on, you're completely out of touch with the main stream.

It is worse. Much worse and too far gone for the most part.

You have not been listening. Are you just now getting concerned?

I don't see it the way you do. I have been concerned for awhile. My point of view is that this is not about free speech and democracy but has spiraled down to vicious hate and that the type of Internet spawned and condoned hatred is dangerous.

I find it telling and sad that some of you respond by ignoring the hate crimes and incitement of hate and worse discussed in the article.

who is ignoring the hate?... you?

any time someone kills another person it isn't because they like them to much..

either the person is deranged or hate is involved.. or it is a tragic accident..

I find it telling that you ignored the other 62 murders in DC this year,.. but can't stop talking about a sad pathetic 88 year old man that seriously needed counseling and medications..

but maybe if you actually looked at his "life" you would wonder what went wrong.. instead of just blaming it on his austrian descent

He served in the United States Navy for 14 years, and was a commanding officer of PT boat 159 during World War II in the Pacific Theater, receiving a commendation and three battle stars.

He enrolled in Washington University in St. Louis in 1938 and received his Bachelor of Science in journalism in 1943. During his time at the university, von Brunn was said to have been president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter and a varsity football player

His early business career was in NYC as copywriter, art-director and film producer

Von Brunn had worked as an advertising executive and producer in New York City for 20 years

he moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he continued to do advertising work and began painting

James W. von Brunn, attempted to place the Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent citizens arrest, 12-7-81. Von Brunn charged the FED with treason and other high crimes.
Von Brunn later described his actions as a "citizen's arrest for treason." He reportedly complained of "high interest rates" during the incident

he was later described as later as a real-estate broker and lastly as a writer-artist

if I had "just read" his bio, I would have pegged him as a flaming liberal... or a liberal conspiracy theorist.. but the fact is some how he allowed hatred to rule his life..
 

Mrs.Greg

Well-known member
backhoeboogie said:
Mrs.Greg said:
I imagine I'm going to get my butt jumped on for this statement....But WHY would a Fox news anchor be surprised about the negativity out there they're the ones that fed this stuff to the public.....

They are pretty liberal in my opinion Mrs Greg. John Q Public is pretty much fed up with the media in general.

I am still in the dino age and watching Fox news on the local level via an antenna. When they twist my arm and force me to go on business trips, or when I am in a hotel on vacation, I get the "other" Fox you are referring to. It is a little better.

The truth hurts but I like hearing the truth.

If someone like Katie comes on the set, I change channels or turn it off.
psssttt...Fox doesn't always tell the truth.....ask a Canadian....oh wait a minute its OK to put down a group of soldiers that are fighting with and for the US in Afghanistan....silly me...I forgot that.... :wink:

OH YA....911 was Canada's fault.....Dang your right the truth hurts.... :p


Sorry try as you guys may....FOX = GARBAGE..... :!:


edit:I had to add this I'm not fond of any of the American news stations....I find they sensationalize the news WAY too much. What's the name of that lady that does news story's for CNN? I watched her one night....GAGGED me.....
 

Steve

Well-known member
reader (the Second) said:
von Brunn was a regular in the KKK and white supremacist circles and well thought of. It's simplistic to say that he was ONLY a deranged old man. I heard an FBI agent describe meeting him in South Carolina at a KKK meeting and how the other KKK members treated von Brunn.

The guy who shot the soldier was also putting hate thinking into action, but it was hate thinking from other countries, not the U.S.

Frank Rich the writer of the op ed was focusing on the U.S. and the growth of hate thought here and the condoning of it that goes on right here in River City, if you catch my drift.

and it is overly simplistic to say racism or hatred, was his only problem... or issue he had against others..

but if you ignore the "real" causes of his hatred and only focus on the end result.. it is bound to happen again....

the guy was a decorated war hero... went to college,.. led a career..and then by all accounts dropped off the edge..
to blame it on austrian decent is well,,, racist as well..
 
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