Geezer terrorism breaking out?

Two terrorist killings last week, another one today.

The suspect in the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington is a neo-Nazi white supremacist born in 1920. So we even have geezer terrorism now.

Dave Neiwert, of course, is following this story closely at his Crooks and Liars blog. Dave is now the managing editor of Crooks and Liars.

Digby has been saying what our Pod Pundits will be reluctant to say: the Kansas shooting resulted in removing one of the few regular providers of late-term abortion services and the closing of the clinic. Which means that in that case, terrorism worked:

I would think the lesson is quite clear ... : if you want to close clinics, kill the doctors. It's very efficient. And since the authorities are likely to see this as the act of a lone nut (also known as a martyr) there's no price to pay.

Well, hopefully the perpetrator will pay a price. But she means the anti-abortion movement, which will go right on claiming that abortion is understood by God Himself to be the murder of innocent babies. And that mentality will go on encouraging people to commit acts of violence against health-care providers.

One thing about the Holocaust Memorial killing that hopefully will be distinct from the reporting on the murder of Dr. George Tiller. FOX News, the Christian Right and most Republicans generally want to distance themselves from overt anti-Semitism. So they are unlikely to try to "balance" their reporting on this incident by saying "we condemn acts of violence by neo-Nazis and by Jews, too". Which was pretty much the type of "balancing" formula anti-abortion partisans used in the Kansas case. So the stenographers we call our national press corps will likely provide marginally more decent reporting on this incident. We can always hope. But Digby is right to focus attention on how poorly the press deal with these issues.

Speaking of the press, how many terrorist murders to we have to have in one week for them to clearly call them terrorist acts? Two last week, one this week. And Wednesday isn't even over yet.

I'm sure Rush and Glenn Beck and Hannity and Bill O'Reilly will come up with some crackbrained way to blame today's shooting on the libruls.

Digby also comments on today's murder:

It's pretty clear that the right wing has lost whatever restraint it had and that the ongoing paroxysms of violent, extreme rhetoric are having their effect. The crocodile tears of the anti-abortion forces after the Tiller assassination notwithstanding, it's also pretty clear that they know this violence is effective. If you want to paralyze a society and force people to capitulate out of fear of random violence, nothing beats terrorism.

And once the right gets everybody looking over their shoulders, they'll misdirect the citizenry and run to the rescue with calls for "law and order." (Recall that the violence of the 60s didn't originate with the left --- it originated with racist cops unleashing hell on non-violent protesters.) It's working great with the deficit.

I would also add that after the 9/11 attacks and the (still-unsolved) anthrax attack that followed, because our political establishment lost its head and our sad excuse for a national press wallowed around in fear, The Terrorists achieved their aim of terrorizing the country. And look what seven years of government by fear got us under the last administration.

Incidents like this really illustrate how bad it is to have a seriously broken press corps.

Tags: domestic terrorism, terrorism

| +Save/Share | |