The Tragic Arkansas Shooting and Conservative Hate Speech

Posted by Steven D., Booman Tribune at 3:52 PM on August 14, 2008.

I've waited to make my first comments about the murder of the Chair of Arkansas' Democratic Party. I wanted to make sure that there was no personal connection between the shooter and Bill Gwatney, and apparently there wasn't one. Instead, there are some initial eerie similarities between the shooter Timothy Dale Johnson, and the man who massacred members of the Unitarian church in Knoxville, Tennessee last month. Both, for example had just lost their jobs, and both were very, very angry about that fact:

Wreaths and flowers lined the sidewalk in front of Arkansas' Democratic Party headquarters Thursday while police and others tried to explain why a man who lost his job at a Target store drove more than 30 miles and fatally shot the party's chairman.

Until Wednesday morning, when he wrote profanity-laced graffiti on a store wall, Timothy Dale Johnson had been a good employee in a stockroom, a Target spokeswoman said.

Johnson apparently lived alone and had never married. Under most circumstances he probably would have continied this isolated, but not all together unproductive life. He probably had certain emotional difficulties with people. According to neighbors he kept to himself, yet was considered a model employee at target. Yet, after losing his job, the first action he decided to take was to murder a prominent liberal and Democrat, much like Jim David Adkisson decided to take his rage and anger at his personal situation out on the "liberal" church in Knoxville. Both chose to use firearms to murder innocent people they did not know personally. It is logical to assume that they both chose their targets to make a statement. Indeed, we know for a fact that Adkisson, the church shooter, wrote a specific hate filled manifesto detailing his reasons for targeting the most prominent "liberal" church in Knoxville for his massacre.

I don't think it is a coincidence that within a few weeks, another disturbed individual who had lost his job (at least by his own perception -- Target is denying they terminated him), chose to shoot someone associated with "liberals" and "Democrats." The right wing bloggers and talk show hosts can deny their complicity in these "random" actions, and, indeed, legally they are not responsible for the criminal actions of a few "rogue" individuals. However, their writings and commentary, widely disseminated has spread a culture where violence against liberals, Democrats, feminists, gays, blacks, immigrants, Muslims and any other out group is frequently expressed as "comedy" or in fantasies of wish fulfillment. They can claim all they like that they cannot be held accountable for the aura of hatred they have engendered in American society, but their protestations ring hollow.

People too young to have lived through the Civil Rights era might not remember that much of the same hate speech was prominent among conservative, racist and nativist circles. The result was a wave of violent attacks on prominent liberals and activists, and I am not just referring to the Kennedy brothers and Dr King. A whole host pf people were murdered by those who felt entitled to take the lives of those who threatened their political ideology. The bombings in Birmingham, church burnings, Medgar Evers assassination and many other acts of violence.

Since the rise of talk radio and Fox News in the 1990's we have seen the slaughter of hundreds of people at the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City by individuals with right wing leanings. We have seen reports of numerous arrests of right wing "terrorists" (though they are never labeled as such in the media or by the Bush administration) who have planned massacres of "illegal immigrants" and other violence. We have experienced another wave of African American church burnings. We have seen numerous murders of gay men and women, where the defendants raise the ludicrous excuse of "gay panic" as a defense for their evil, premeditated killings.

It's past time for members of the the right wing wurlitzer to apologize for their hate speech and to renounce any further use of the language of extermination with respect to their political, religious and ideological adversaries, as well as their demonization of minorities. I don't expect them to do so, but it would be the right thing to do, and aren't they always preaching about how much more moral and decent their movement is compared to us "Leftards' with our evil gay agendas, our eco-terrorists, our traitorous failure to "support the troops" and a myriad of other imagined sins?

All I know is no prominent liberal spokespersons have made the following statements:

"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for." -- Rush Limbaugh

"I would have no problem with [New York Times editor Bill Keller] being sent to the gas chamber." -- Melanie Morgan

""[T]he day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals and it's going to be very amusing to watch." -- Lee Rogers

"And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." -- Bill O'Reilly

"Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"-- Michael Reagan

"Some liberals have become even too crazy for Texas to execute, which is a damn shame. They're always saying -- we're oppressed, we're oppressed so let's do it. Let's oppress them." -- Ann Coulter

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee. ... That's just a joke, for you in the media." -- Ann Coulter

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." -- Ann Coulter

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too." -- Ann Coulter

And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove. -- Rep. Peter King (R)

Where does George Soros have all his money? Do you know? Do you know where George Soros, the big left-wing loon who's financing all these smear [web]sites, do you know where his money is? Curaçao. Curaçao. They ought to hang this Soros guy. -- Bill O'Reilly

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals." -- Karl Rove

Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot." -- Kathleeen Parker

Right now, even people sitting on the fence would like George Bush to drop a nuclear weapon on an Arab country. They don't even care which one it would be. I can guarantee you -- I don't need to go to Mr. Schmuck [pollster John] Zogby and ask him his opinion. I don't need anyone's opinion. I'll give you my opinion, because I got a better stethoscope than those fools. It's one man's opinion based upon my own analysis. The most -- I tell you right now -- the largest percentage of Americans would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on a major Arab capital. They don't even care which one. They'd like an indiscriminate use of a nuclear weapon.

In fact, Christianity has been one of the great salvations on planet Earth. It's what's necessary in the Middle East. Others have written about it, I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity but I'll get here a little later, I'll move up to that. It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings. ... Because these primitives can only be treated in one way, and I don't think smallpox and a blanket is good enough incidentally. Just before -- I'm going to give you a little precursor to where I'm going. Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I'd like to see done to these people, just so you understand that I'm not going to be too intellectual about my analysis here in terms of what I would recommend, what Doc Savage recommends as an antidote to this kind of poison coming out of the Middle East from these non-humans. -- Michael Savage

Tagged as: target, bill gwatney, arkansas' democratic part, timothy dale johnson