Past Threats to Giffords

The violent right was so crazed over health care -- that's right, health care -- for ordinary Americans that they went violent and today Gabrielle Giffords was shot. Previously they had attacked her office:



From the Arizona Daily Star, this is the "politics" of the right:

At 2:40 a.m., just a few hours after staff left the building after the late-night vote, the alarm system went off, said spokesman C.J. Karamargin. The panel to the front door and the glass panel alongside it were smashed out. The perpetrator likely had to hop the gated fence to get access to the door, since it’s not viewable from the parking lot.
Karamargin said it was unclear if the glass had been shot out with a kind of pellet gun, if it had been kicked or smashed with an object. The door has been covered with plywood.

This reminds me of the church bombings and the assassinations that wracked the US during the early 1960s as the Civil Rights movement struggled to get justice while the right wing crazies did everything they could to stop it.

It doesn't appear that the person who tried to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords was seriously political. It appears more likely that he was simply mentally unstable. But violent words from the right end up triggering the unstable to act on the violent rhetoric. The right can't claim to be shocked or ashamed of the consequence of their words. They have deliberately used provocative, violent rhetoric for years. Just like the KKK used violent rhetoric and the occasional violent deed to try and enforce its ugly racial politics in the US deep south.

It is really very simple: you reap what you sew. The religious right and libertarian right has pushed violent and demogogic rhetoric for years. This is what it comes to.

The US has been down this path before:

• The 1960s Civil Rights struggle


• The violence of supposedly "God fearing" religious fanatics who are anti-abortion has resulted in doctors assassinated and abortion clinics blown up


• Anti-immigrant rhetoric resulted in the Chinese exclusion act, the Japanese internment during the WWII, forceable deportation of Mexican Americans in the 1930s and again in 1954, the illegal repression of the IWW in the 1910s, Palmer raids which deported "suspects" in 1919/1920, the anti-Catholic immigrant riots in 1844, etc.


• The McCarthy era wasn't just the blacklisting of some Hollywood types. There were tens of thousands of people who lost their jobs because of the paranoid hysteria stirred up by the fanatic ideology "Bomber Joe" McCarthy


• The infamous "yellow press" of William Randolph Hearst helped stir up the Spanish American war. A war that cost the lives of tens of thousands of Philipinos in the Philipine-American war


• The long history of anti-Indian rhetoric... think "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" which has been incorrectly attributed to General Philip Sheridan. And the long history of Indian massacres going back to the early colonies up through the Indian wars of the last half of the 19th century, and even into the violence against AIM in the 1970s.

So, this shooting of Gabrielle Giffords is just the latest of many acts of violence fed by hate speech and violent rhetoric from the right.