(updated)
As I told you a couple of weeks ago, when John Noveske, a much-admired gunmaker, and Keith Ratliff, a popular gun reviewer, died within a day of each other last month, a lot of folks on the Internet were speculating that the two of them had been killed by the Vast Kenyan Fascist Gun-Grabbing Conspiracy. Now some people think Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered on a Texas gun range over the weekend, was the third victim.
Click this to enlarge -- it's all over the Net (here, here, here, here, here, here):
Remind me again: What's the value to Evil Obama in killing these guys? Are their deaths going to increase support for gun control? Not among gunners (the gun community is just becoming more and more paranoid, paranoia being one of the many unpleasant emotional states than can be eased, if you're a gunner, by purchasing more guns) and not among the rest of us (most of us had never heard of Noveske and Ratliff; maybe some of us knew about Kyle). Are these major players in the gun world? No, they aren't -- and nobody from a major manufacturer or lobbying organization has suffered a scratch.
But long before Sandy Hook, right-wing haters compiled lists of "suspicious" deaths allegedly traceable to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; the dead are almost all small fry or tangential figures. (Murdering Ron Brown: why exactly would one bother?)
In any case, there'll be more of this. And, at least in the case of Ratliff and Kyle -- Noveske died in a car accident -- the gunners are doing what they do with every gun death: denying that gun culture could have possibly had anything to do with the fact the fact that someone was, y'know, shot to death.
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UPDATE, TUESDAY: Wow, this just gets better. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports:
Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded Obama haters are claiming that Russian security forces have discovered that Obama is about to unleash "death squads" across America to assassinate defenders of the Second Amendment. According to Liberty.com, one of the sites perpetuating this latest story, Russian intelligence has outlined the whole nefarious plot in a memo for President Vladimir Putin, detailing the Obama's administration's dispatch of "VIPER teams...which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."Dead gun activists and the Russkies and drones! It's all connected, maaaan! And things get serious on February 22! (Even though they actually started to get serious last month! Or in December, when Obama faked the Sandy Hook massacre!)
Liberty.com (run by a Florida tea party leader), which echoes the theory promoted by similar sites, maintains that these teams -- 800 of them, to be precise -- are set to "disperse throughout his country in preparation for what Russian intelligence analysts are predicting to be a series of high-profile killings of dissident Americans set to begin as soon as February 22nd." Obama has apparently been emboldened to launch such an operation by the recent federal court ruling upholding his right to kill American citizens with drone strikes without explaining why.
And, yes, drones belong in there becauise, as I said in another post, many right-wingers think the Obama drone program is specifically aimed at them.
I'm in the camp that says (best expressed by Roy Edroso) Obama has figured out how to troll the GOP. He studiously avoiding do this in his first term, but practically from the moment he was elected, he has behaved differently. He's more confident, more aggressive, and he definitely seems to be deliberately trolling the GOP.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite example was Joe Biden's ostensibly off-handed remark before reporters that (paraphrasing) "there are a lot of executive actions we can take, regardless of what Congress does."
As soon as I heard those words, I thought "holy shit. That remark is going to cause a five alarm meltdown among wingnuts." And right on schedule, Drudge posted pictures of Hitler and Stalin and the rest of the right wing joined him in predicting Obama's impending imposition of a dictatorship. Members of Congress called for impeachment.
Then? When Obama announced the actual executive actions he was going to take, the GOP was left looking insane. He is using the GOP as his foil. Biden and Obama were obviously just as aware as we were of how "executive actions" would be taken by the right wing, and I have to believe they exploited it.
I've been a bit frustrated by some of the commentary about Obama's claim that he has shot skeet. Most of the commentary has revolved around questions like, "why would he say this?!? Why would he say it *now*?" Apparently these pundits forgot that Obama was *asked a question.* He was just answering it. And he answered the way he did because he was telling the truth.
But think about it: We already know that Obama's popularity, his good looks, his charisma and charm, drive the right wing absolutely bonkers. Completely mad.
And now we have a picture of Obama stepping on THEIR TURF, posing handsomely with a beautiful shotgun acting all manly doing the thing that the wingnuts thought they owned, the thing they thought distinguished them from the liberals.
I think this intrusion into their cultural space is what is really driving the GOP to new levels of rage and madness.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
ReplyDeleteRemember that guttural chant from the 2000 and 2004 GOP conventions? The GOP hired men with deep voices to stand throughout the convention hall, and whenever the crowd started to cheer, the hired voices would come in with a low, guttural bassline, chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" over and over. It was a bit mesmerizing, and reminded me of nothing so much as a rally at Nuremberg.
But then something interesting happened. The next time I heard that chant was at a DEMOCRATIC convention, in 2008. I don't know who on Obama's team, if it wasn't Obama himself, called for that ingredient to the sound of the cheering Democratic crowds. But someone did, and it was repeated throughout the 2012 campaign and at the 2012 convention.
It's almost subliminal, the sound blended with all the other sights and sounds emanating from the convention floor. But I believe it's one of the ways Obama inoculated himself against charges of being anti-American, and was another example of the Democrat claiming a piece of conservative cultural terrain for himself.
The real question is what happens as the madness on the right escalates. Do they go so crazy they are marginalized? One hopes. But more than ever, the calls for violence and revolution and a new civil war are impossible to miss on conservative blogs and even in the comments on regular news stories. that small but vocal base of the GOP that listens to Rush and Beck and Fox News is deep into a fantasy about killing Democrats and overthrowing the government.
I like what Jack said in his first comment - about Obama "trolling" the GOP.
ReplyDeleteWhat worries me, is inflaming the paranoia in these over-armed paranoid people.
However, if they think they're going to be able to overthrow the government, or start another Civil War, they can add delusion to their paranoia.
Also, if you want to start a revolution, you're better off doing it un-armed. When the old USSR fell apart, the military DIDN'T fire on protesters, largely because they knew they weren't armed, and couldn't fire back.
Let some of our paranoid "patriots" fire off some guns at some protests of theirs, and you will have a massacre.
Not because police and military forces will want to fire, but they'll definitely fire BACK!
People with mental disease have NO rights to guns!
And, imo, the desire to have more than 1 simple handgun, and one hunting rifle, per family member, is a sign of some form of mental disease. And even 1-per, is too much.
Ok, maybe they also have tiny, shriveled, and useless private parts - mostly peckers, 'cause most of these over-armed morons are men.
You don't need another gun.
You need some serious therapy.
Why would Obama resort to that, since he killed-off (Not-at-all) Breitbart a while back, and a couple of gun advocates in the past month - all without the Russkie Death Squads?
ReplyDeleteThese people are totally, completely, and absolutely, MAD!
Did they start putting Mercury in the Bud and Coors Lite?
What's not to get?
ReplyDeleteObama kills them, making us paranoid.
Our paranoia causes us to say and do stupid things.
The stupid things we say and do make us look foolish to others and discredit our cause.
It's so devious.
Victor, they certainly would.
ReplyDeleteAs an ex organizer of 'test marches of some years back the biggest problem were the instigator (gators) who had a separate violent agenda....spoilers people from opposing sides who simply wanted to discredit the group. In one case our group security caught some mingers who had molitoff cocktails inside their coats. They were from White supremacy groups.
I see no reason why firearm nuts wouldn't use the same tactics to
a. discredit the movement.
b. justify having firearms
c. if caught they would simply claim they were protecting themselves from 'anarchists(?)' what ever that means in their lexicon.
For that reason today I shy from marches because they can so easily be hijacked.