THANKS

Thank you, Aimai, Tom, Phil, and Bulworth, for dealing with the slime while I was playing hooky.

A quick thought about the repulsive revenge-fantasy post by Dan Riehl that was quoted by Tom on Saturday:

... Imagine a hard working, mostly white middle class marching on Washington wondering how this inept government destroyed the American dream, while an empty suit that happens to be black thinks he can simply take to a microphone and everything will be just fine....

There may indeed be blood in the streets before the current political and economic issues before the nation are resolved....

And the rage won't just last days ... it could be a battle fought for years and not always without its victims. Can you imagine the look on the faces of the Obama-loving Ayres apologists at the New York Times when the bombs start exploding in their lobby, instead of the Pentagon?...

And I can understand that rage....

Nepat said in comments:

Here you essentially have someone - Dan Riehl - advocating exactly the kind of behavior that they allegedly hate Bill Ayers for, and it doesn't seem to matter.

It occurs to me that maybe there's an element of jealousy in right-wingers' fevered invocations of long-ago tales of lefty political violence. Manly conservatives are supposed to have a monopoly on political violence; it's supposed to come from a macho right-wing government -- if there's a bit of nastiness in Bush's torture prisons, or Giuliani's precinct-house bathrooms, well, that's the natural order of the universe. The soldiers should be right-wing, and the high school football team too, and they should be the toughest SOBs out there.

The right obsesses over the 1960s and early 1970s in part because long-haired, bookish lefty males -- people believed to be effeminate by definition -- made a show of power. (What's worse, they also seemed to getting more sex.) If there's no Nixonian "law and order" in the offing, it's no surprise if deskbound righties like Riehl are fantasizing about a wave of bloodshed generated by a right-wing mob. The Riehls of the world don't have a problem with the shedding of blood -- they just have a problem with sharing the right to shed blood.