Another Attempted GOP Assassinaiton

[Antiboyscout]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-la ... bc2416b539

I guess this is the new normal.

[Admiral X]

"See, gun control works - if he'd had a gun he might have succeeded!" :p

Honestly, considering all the dehumanizing rhetoric from the new left, this isn't surprising at all. They are everything they accuse others of being.

[Nealithi]

I will apologize in advance for my language. I am sorry but I do not feel I can express myself clearer than this.

What the HELL happened to this country!?
For the love of GOD, we used to be better than this horseshit!
It is not alright to throw shoes, pull knives, or fucking shoot our representatives.
DAMNIT.

I am sorry. But this makes no sense to me. I do not like our sitting President. I don't currently like either party as they have both decided to sit at extremes in their rhetoric. But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?

[unknownsample]

I will apologize in advance for my language. I am sorry but I do not feel I can express myself clearer than this.

What the HELL happened to this country!?
For the love of GOD, we used to be better than this horseshit!
It is not alright to throw shoes, pull knives, or fucking shoot our representatives.
DAMNIT.

I am sorry. But this makes no sense to me. I do not like our sitting President. I don't currently like either party as they have both decided to sit at extremes in their rhetoric. But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?

Tribalism and as Dave Roberts points out in this excellent essay the blame lies largely in one direction

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... istemology

Back in November 2009, as the Obama backlash was just gathering steam, Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his radio program to “Climategate.”

That was the episode in which a climate research institute was hacked and the private emails of scientists were leaked. Conservative media sifted through the emails, stripping individual sentences and phrases out of context and spinning them to look sinister, as though scientists were coordinating and manipulating results. Mainstream media dutifully covered the “controversy.”

No fewer than five separate investigations later cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but by then, for a large class of right-wing media consumers, it was already settled history, part of shared lore.

It pushed Limbaugh to new rhetorical heights.

“What this fraud, what the uncovering of this hoax, exposes,” he said, “is the corruption that exists between government and academia and science and the media. Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!”

[TGLS]

What the HELL happened to this country!?
...
But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?

Nothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.

[LittleRaven]

But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?

That's actually a perfect analogy. It's bubbling up now, but the pot has been slowly heating up for decades.



The average American has been virtually shut out of our wealth generation machine for damn near 40 years now. Fixing this is hard, and neither party currently has the stomach for it, so both sides do all they can do keep everyone distracted with the culture wars. But we've reached the point where in order to keep people distracted, you have to crack the heat on those wars to downright dangerous levels.

Prolonged periods of political or economic dysfunction produce Communists and Nazis. Always have. The US is a very right wing country, so the Nazis got here first, but the Commies are on their way. Neither of these groups have any problem using violence to achieve political aims.

[LittleRaven]

Nothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.

Really? The Gabby Giffords shooting was

1. Not partisan as far as we can tell. Jared Lee Loughner had no particular beef with Democrats as a whole, at most he simply had some generalized anti-government sentiments. His fixation on Gabby doesn't appear to have been particularly motivated by politics, but it's hard to tell, since he's completely nuts. Like, seriously. He suffers from acute paranoid schizophrenia. His worldview is cracked beyond repair.
2. Seemingly an isolated incident. We went years without a similar attack either before or after.
   
   By contrast, it's barely been a year since the last time someone explicitly set out to kill Republican lawmakers. I'm not sure Gabby is an entirely appropriate comparison.

[Nealithi]

What the HELL happened to this country!?
...
But how can this unacceptable behavior just be bubbling up like this?

Nothing happened to America. It's just the periodic bubbling of hotheads who are upset and want to make a point. It's not as if assassination isn't something unheard of. About 7 years ago, somebody tried to kill Giffords; conflating either side with either of these assassinations is foolish.

Senator Giffords was who I was referring to as being shot recently. But I have to admire her doctor.
"She does not have my permission to die."

[TGLS]

Really? The Gabby Giffords shooting was

1. Not partisan as far as we can tell. Jared Lee Loughner had no particular beef with Democrats as a whole, at most he simply had some generalized anti-government sentiments. His fixation on Gabby doesn't appear to have been particularly motivated by politics, but it's hard to tell, since he's completely nuts. Like, seriously. He suffers from acute paranoid schizophrenia. His worldview is cracked beyond repair.
2. Seemingly an isolated incident. We went years without a similar attack either before or after.
   
   By contrast, it's barely been a year since the last time someone explicitly set out to kill Republican lawmakers. I'm not sure Gabby is an entirely appropriate comparison.

At the time, there was a lot of people who were blaming the Tea Party and the Republicans for the shooting with their wild rhetoric. I agree with both points, but both have faded because of the verdict of history. Here's another way to think about it. If the guy who shot Reagan instead shot Obama, I bet Democrats would blame racism and Republican rhetoric. If he shot Trump, Republicans would blame Democrat rhetoric and SJWs. People are using violence of wingnuts for soundbites these days.

[Darth Wedgius]

I saw political discourse get a lot nastier with the first election of George W. Bush. Now one side considers being outraged to be a virtue, and that doesn't really lead to rational debate. With Antifa kicking the violence up a notch, I'm happier than ever for the second amendment.

This may be tied to the rise of social media, but that's a wild guess on my part. Correlation does not equal causation, etc.