In a piece titled 'The Reckless Right Courts Violence', he calls on the rightwingnuts to tone it down. Actually using the word 'incitement', he links to many instances of the wild idiocies coming from radio and telly loony pundits.
All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.
. . .
Hyperbolic accusation and fantasy murder may well serve a talk-radio industry facing a collapse in advertising revenues—down 30–40 percent over the past two years, reports NewMajority.com’s Tim Mak.
As revenues dwindle, hosts feel compelled to intensify the talk-radio experience, hoping to win larger audience share with more extreme talk. It’s like the early days of the pornography industry: At first a naked woman is thrilling enough, but soon a jaded audience is demanding more and more, wilder and wilder.
. . .
It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.
He winds up thusly:
If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.
But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable.
All well and good, you say?
Well, maybe not.
The first of four (so far) commenters quotes that second-last paragraph and says:
I was with you until that line. Just because you know he is not these things, there are many who believe he is; so have you just given your permission?
*headdesk*
1 comment:
fern hill, Frum ain't exactly a blushing ingénue when it comes to wielding rhetorical weaponry. His wifey claimed he crafted the expression "the axis of evil".
His contentious paragraph is predicated on the notion that most sane people understand the double negative construction of speechifying. But - he knows that the Repulsicans have deliberately pandered to their base of malevolent rightwing religious bugshitcrazy xenophobic zealots. So who da phoque knows what the message really is.
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