Marble Composition

Ugly Spills Over

I've been waiting for a long time for a news story like this one to come down the pike, not with any glee, but this nagging sense that this kind of thing was inevitable. Take an inherently violent, gun-loving society, an increasingly unpopular war, and add the politics-as-porn media, and you get one really nasty cocktail. Via Atrios, we get this report from the WireCan (who plucked this one from kentucky.com):

"A quarrel between two firearms vendors at a Floyd County flea market on Thursday allegedly led both men -- described as "good friends" -- to draw guns. Douglas Moore, 65, of Martin, who supports the [Iraq] war, shot and killed Harold Wayne Smith, 56, of Manchester, who opposed it, investigators said."

After the 2004 presidential election a web site popped up called Sorry Everybody, and the links and photos spread like wildfire around the political side of the internet. I was pretty amazed at the number of people that sent in photos and notes. To counter that effort, people who voted for Bush started at site called We're Not Sorry, which has since gone defunct. I recall perusing through it and trust me, it was not pretty. Even though people who voted for Kerry were sorry, the people who took the time to send content into the counter site were angry. Funny too, their candidate had won.

When what passes for "heroes" on the Right these days write entire books accusing 20% of the nation's population of Treason, or the need to deliver the country from the Evil of Liberalism, the message is pretty clear: these people need to be eradicated from the population. It's come to the point where conservatives can accuse liberals of nearly anything, and no one even bats an eye anymore. Liberals are traitors, liars, slanderous, anti-American, anti-family, anti-flag moonbats who worship a Culture of Hate. You name it, hell they probably don't even like Key Lime Pie (Oh the Humanity). As luck would have it, Bruce Miller and friends have compiled a whole book of their own documenting the filth that flies from the mouths of Republicans and their ilk. How handy. Just the other day, Rush Limbuagh saw fit to claim that a Democrat running for Congress served in the Iraq war just to "pad his resume". Rush vomits up bile like that for four hours a day. The examples are too numerous to cite here, but you can go a Googling all day digging this stuff up if you had the time.

I'm not sure exactly what happened between the two men in the story above, but I'll bet this will not be the last time we hear about violence like this. When folks on the Right repeat this stuff day in and day out for years, it has to have an effect. It creeps in; how can it not? They've declared war on Liberals, the left, the media, and anyone who doesn't agree with them. They declared war the word liberal twenty years ago for Christ's sake. Eventually there's going to be a cost, and the people that spew this stuff don't care, because so far, no one's going to make them pay for it. I doubt anyone ever will.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 8/06/2005 08:11:00 PM