I think when even Roger Ailes realizes the Assassination attempt on Giffords and murder of 6 people, including a 9 year old girl has set off a reaction by the American public that is both visceral and a potential tidal wave against the hate games these guys have been using to control the electorate…
Fox News Prez Orders Staff: Tone It Down
Fox News President Roger Ailes has warned his staff to tone down right-wing rhetoric as America debates whether political vitriol played a role in the violent attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. “I told all of our guys, ‘Shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast,'” Ailes said in an interview with Global Grind. “I hope the other side does that as well,” he added. That’s not to say Ailes is buying the argument that harsh political attacks or Sarah Palin’s map marking Giffords’ district with crosshairs had anything to do with the deadly attack by suspected gunman Jared Lee Loughner.
To get a feel for what it is like on the groound in Arizona – one of the local papers:
Arizona’s enemy: The Collective Consciousness of Hate
This Graphic ties some of the bits and pieces of what is going on in Arizona together. Like a lot of places, you have a cozy relationship between the Republican Party, Republican Candidates, and the Tea Party with fringe hate groups including the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the splinter racist Minuteman Militias.
What has happened in Arizona is that these groups – sometimes directly in the statehouse as legislative aides and in writing laws have managed to get a voice in the legislature and Governors Mansion, working directly for Republican legislators. This is a little different than in the South where Republican Legislators sneak out to a Council of Conservative Citizens Barbeque or confab every year to press the flesh with part of the base – but otherwise try and keep the white sheets away from the state house.
Here is an article about one of the leading right-wing hate-talk radio personalities in Arizona – John Justice – NY Times reports on Jon Justice and hate radio in Tucson
Come on out and shoot a machine gun to “target” Gabrielle Giffords? Flashback: Giffords Opponent Had M16 Shooting Event, ‘Help Remove Gabrielle Giffords From Office’
And lastly this –
Hate Speech, the Right’s Magic Bullet
…The fact is, it has been the right’s goal to poison our political discourse for years. Remember the notorious “GOPAC Memo” back in the 1990s, created for the Republicans’ leadership training institute and endorsed by Newt Gingrich? Titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” in it, candidates are instructed in what words to use when defining their opponents (i.e., liberals). “These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contract,” the memo said. “Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals, and their party” (in other words, demonize them).
Among them: intolerant … lie … pathetic … radical … sick … steal … traitors. Gingrich and his allies deliberately set out to employ toxic language against their opponents, and are still doing it. They will say anything to get a vote, especially now that the angriest and most irrational so often make up a majority of those who bother to go to the polls. This kind of talk is part and parcel of their strategy, and no matter what motivated the Tucson killings, it needs to stop.
Their lock-and-load rhetoric is reinforced by the rambling ranks of those who go on the Internet to spout any conspiracy theory, distortion of history or outright lie that helps them make it through the night. Add, too, the men and women of radio and television, the Limbaugh’s, Beck’s, and their ilk who use the airwaves as a cudgel, battering viewers and listeners with the certainty of their illogic, their thinly veiled messages of bigotry and meretricious embrace of Constitution, religion, flag and family.
All of them will huff and puff that this is an isolated incident by a madman that cannot be blamed on their bombast and bluster. But let’s call it out for what it is; let’s debate what in our gut we know to be true: even if it was not their intent, it’s likely the words of the right on radio and TV and in the books they publish spurred on the man who killed two and wounded six in a Knoxville, Kentucky, church in July 2008, and the murderer of George Tiller, one of the few doctors in America who still performed late-term abortions for women with problem pregnancies whose health was at stake from life-threatening complications, or whose infants would be born dead or dying. Their invective, whether inadvertently or not, has encouraged the vandalism and threats faced by so many of our candidates and elected officials, including the now desperately wounded Congresswoman Giffords. Her shooting, and the death and wounding of so many who came to meet with her, are just the latest example of ideologically-motivated bloodshed.
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