I don’t know how this can be viewed as anything less than a failed assassination attempt:
Law enforcement authorities are investigating the discovery of a cut propane gas line at the Virginia home of Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-Va.) brother, whose address was targeted by tea party activists angry at the congressman’s vote for the health care bill.
An aide to the congressman confirmed to POLITICO that a line to a propane tank behind his brother’s home near Charlottesville had been sliced.
The address was listed by teabaggers angry at Perriello for voting for health care reform; the address was said to be that of the Congressman himself, rather than his brother.
Again, this has to be viewed flatly as terrorism and political violence. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and I am no expert on whether anyone was put in serious jeopardy by this. But you don’t slice a propane line without some understanding that you’re venting a flammable gas into the air. I think it’s clear that the person who did this knew their actions could cause injury, or worse — and not just to Rep. Perriello himself, but to anyone who happened to trip across the line.
This is what comes from months of claiming that health care reform is tantamount to Stalinism. When health care reform is seen as literally a communist plot to destroy America, there will be people who decide that violence is a justifiable response. Those on the right who spent the past year demonizing Democrats own this attack. I hope — likely in vain — that they will recognize this, and speak out strongly against violence. I misdoubt, however, that they will continue to use violence in their very rhetoric. They’ve given us no reason to expect better of them.
Rachel Maddow’s been talking about attacks on Democratic reps’ offices and DNC offices. As I’ve been saying, I’m increasingly less convinced these people can be trusted with power. You don’t see liberals doing this when there’s an actual conservative in office.
This is what comes from ramming a law that asserts Federal control over health care when the majority of the country didn’t want that law. This is what happens when the longest serving Congressman sees his role as controlling the people instead of serving them.
There’s no contesting this was a dangerous and evil act. I hope that the cops catch whoever did these things and that they are punished to the full extent of the law. But Hershele, you don’t think you see liberals doing this? Did you miss the SEIU workers using racial epithets and assaulting someone protesting the health care plan? Here’s a page with links for you. Use of violence with regards to this issue is not the sole property of the right.
Ron, this sounds like you’re saying that political violence against congresspeople who voted for health reform is justifiable. I assume that’s not what you intended to communicate, but I’d appreciate if if you could say that from your own keyboard, please.
“Ramming,” I guess, is conservative-speak for “we lost the election, but we still think we get to write the laws.”
As for “the majority of the country,” according to many polls; a plurality of the country opposed HCR before it passed, not a majority. Furthermore, a significant minority of that plurality opposed the law from the left, because they thought the legislation wasn’t big enough. Opposition from the right was between 30 and 40% of the population. Finally, the most recent gallop poll (taken the day after the HCR passed) showed a plurality of the country in favor of the bill.
The polls aren’t the core issue here, however. What really matters is your implication that polls should determine the law, and that it’s reasonable to expect political violence whenever congress passes a law opposed by a plurality. I’m fascinated by the theory of governance you’re implicitly supporting here.
Can you show me where, in the Constitution, it says that Congress is obliged to vote in accordance with what polls say? Will you pledge, right now, that you will never, ever favor a law passed by Republicans unless polls show a majority of the country in favor of that law?
In the country I live in, there is one poll that actually counts, and that’s the election. Democrats ran on a platform that very prominently included health care reform, and they won strongly. If HCR is actually as unpopular as you suggest, then Republicans will eventually win enough of congress and the white house to undo it, and will be rewarded by the voters for undoing it.
OTOH, if HCR is not actually as unpopular as you believe, then Republicans won’t win that big, and when they eventually get into power will probably decide not to undo it.
In either case — unless Republicans are now opposed to our Constitution’s design of representative democracy, and are instead in favor of unelected pollsters having governing authority — I don’t see any substantive basis for your complaint.
Would you care to provide any evidence in support of this claim? I haven’t seen a single reliable poll that agrees with this.
There was already federal control over health care before this. HIPAA would be one notable example.
So you feel that unpopular (even if this one isn’t) political moves inevitably produce violence? This is also divorced from reality.
Why didn’t we see this violence when it came to light that the Bush administration was secretly spying on American citizens in violation of the law? Is it only political moves by those not to the far right that encourage this violence.
I cannot recall a single attempted assassination of Repub politician who voted against the will of the left during the Bush admin. Can you point any out to me?
So you find an attempted murder to be equivalent to the widely disputed allegation of the SEIU assault? How are these two actions, if true, equivalent?
The raw video footage does not support your assertion. Where are the racial epithets? Where is there evidence of anything other than Mr. Gladney being thrown to the ground after an SEIU member (a man subsequently shown holding his shoulder as if he has sustained an injury) has already been thrown to the ground? Gladney appears uninjured in what we see of him in the video. The SEIU’s refutation claims that the man on the ground at the beginning of the video was an SEIU staffer who had his shoulder dislocated before the video begins. I have been unable to locate an impartial account during a search of about half an hour. I’ll wait to see how it is resolved in court before coming to any conclusion about this.
Your comment is very disturbing to me.
OMYGOD! OMYGOD! OMYGOD! Dingell is turning Americans into zombies using the Administrative Procedures Act!
Of course, this is precisely the sort of thing I have come to expect from our elected officials. I recall when W. claimed that “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” So, while Democrats may seek to control us, at least they haven’t pledged themselves to a never-ending quest to harm us….
Seriously, did you listen to the radio story? In the middle of a congenial, 12-minute radio interview the radio host asks Dingell why, if health care reform is so important to saving lives, we postpone its implementation. The quoted language is part of Dingell’s explanation that implementation will take time because a bill designed to ensure coverage for 300 million people will require a lot of administrative coordination.
Health care is already pretty thick stew; do we really need to add red herrings to the mix?
Adding to what NR said….
See! Michael Steele admitted that Republicans aren’t Americans!
This kind of creative misinterpretation is funny. I enjoy it, and I don’t see any reason why conservatives shouldn’t enjoy it, too. What’s worrisome is that too many people don’t seem to understand that it’s a joke; it’s not evidence of anything.
According to Dingell (not “Dingle”):
Rep. Aaron Schock’s office was terror target
This has nothing to do with reps and dems but with people beein angry about this piece of legislation, if obama is so sure about this then why not go ahead and put this bill on the ballot in a special election and let the voter decide !
If it gets approved by the majority of the people then it takes the wind out of the sails of the critics !
The problem is that obama knows that most of the americans dont buy this bill, his hopes are that people become eventually complacent and shut up !
The other thing is that obama as well as the other democrats who said yes got hughe payoffs from the insurance companies they had to return if the law were to be repealed so they got millions of reasons to shove this down our throats !
Amp:
That’s not covered by
?
Fair enough.
Thanks, Manju. But is that because he voted against the will of the left? I don’t get that from the link. I don’t think that this was in response to rightist legislation.
Jake, you’re quite right that the video didn’t give much support to this. I wasn’t particularly impressed with it either. If that’s all there was to this I would not have cited it. But arrests were made and other links in that page cite the criminal complaint by the victim and IIRC supporting eyewitness accounts. So I think this has some credibility.
Meanwhile, House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor’s office was shot at earlier in the week. He also states he has received threats citing the fact that he’s a Jew. If cutting an outdoor gas line is an attempted asassination – and that is damn dangerous – gunshots into one’s office would also seem to qualify. Again – the point is not that such things are not dangerous, but that the assertion that this is the province only of the right is false.
The Cantor incident can legitimately be supposed to come from the left.
The problem with the criminal complaint is that the reliability of Gladney, et al is not so good. A lot of it flatly contradicts what can be seen and heard in the raw footage of the incident. The problem with assuming this is all true is that there are only partisan (one way or the other) reports on the incident.
All we can reliably say is that Gladney claims he was set upon by the minister with the dislocated shoulder and that the SEIU folks claim that Gladney started the fight. I know who I think is more reliable, but that doesn’t justify any conclusion I might come to right now.
To hold this up as an example of left-wing violence is, at this point, irresponsible.
Ron, a plane was flown into the Pentagon — I’m not open to argument on that one — but it wasn’t by liberals. No liberal murdered a white guard at the Ronald Reagan Library. No Democratic leaders are coming out in support of SEIU protestors making racist remarks, or (that I’ve seen) excusing the attacks on Cantor or Schock.
Now, lot, I can’t argue with logic like that. I agree that health insurance reform should be subject to a national referendum in the same way military action in Iraq was, and all our other laws.
Edit: Reading the links, I see the attacks on Schock were by someone claiming the mantle of al-Qaeda — again, not exactly liberal unless you define “liberal” as “opposed to and by the Bush Administration.” Nothing in the Cantor story specifically indicates the attacker was a liberal. It’s not unlikely, but absent further detail I can come up with an alternate hypothesis. In general I don’t associate anti-Semitic violence with the left, but that may be attributable to my own biases (and I’m not counting specifically anti-Israel attacks).
Nope, not even that.
Incidentally, the implication that ‘radical Islam’ = ‘The Left’ is really fucking stupid. (Not that you were one of the people saying this, of course Jake.)
—Myca
Good find, Myca. I hadn’t found that when searching yesterday.
I find it funny that, while decrying the use of attacks on Democrats for political gain by Democrats, Mr. Cantor uses the randomly shot bullet that hit his office’s window (which, admittedly, he didn’t know was random at the time of the statement) for political gain in exactly the same way that Democrats have used incidents of violence against Democrats. I guess it’s just bad when members of the Democratic Party do this.
The implication isn’t the two are the same, but rather one enables members of the other. Indeed, sometimes the connection can go beyond mere enabling or moral responsibility. Lynne Stewart’s leftist apposition to freedom lead her to lend material support to right-wing haters of freedom. Pim Fortuyn wasn’t assassinated by a jihadist; but by a leftist whose views happened to overlap with the Islamic radical right.
As a matter of fact, democratic partisans have often deployed this meme in cases involving cross-ideological political violence and hatred. Chris Mathews, for example, tried to link Kennedy’s left-wing assassin with the right:
His guest, gerald posner, replied “you’re absolutely right.” Mathew’s was riffing off Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to draw a parallel between teaparties and the atmosphere surrounding Harvey Milk’s assassination. Presumably, even though his assassin was a democrat, since homophobia is associated with the right, its the right-wing that bears moral responsibility, or so the theory goes.
Dave Niewert, who I know you’re familiar with and is probably the most prolific distributor of this meme, often lays blames on the right for violence and hatred emanating from the left or non-rightwing sources. For example, in his view the racism and sexism we saw in the democratic primary was a consequence of “Right-Wing Crap Polluted The Waters For Democrats.” Leftists merely “absorbed and internalized all that right-misogyny” (and presumably racism, though he’s actually very gun shy about acknowledging racism coming from the Clinton campaign).
In fact, Niewert will go as far as re-labeling the offending party as “right-wing” if there is any overlap. For example, a woman carrying an obama/hitler sign is now right wing even though she’s a lyndon larouche supporter. presumably, the larouche movement’s alignment with republicans regarding heathcare reform is enough to erase all their left-leaning views, including trotskyism (to the extent their views are discernible). Similarly, Joe Stack, a man who hated capitalism and GW bush, is considered right-wing because his most salient issue, being anti-irs, is a classic rightwing meme.
Now i don’t necessarily agree with these positions. some of them appear far-fetched and mccarthyistic. But i’m not completely opposed to mccarthyism either. My position here is highly nuanced. My only point now is that within the context of the numerous examples i’ve supplied, linking the left to radical islam–considering the overlap regarding israel, 911 conspiracy theories, us foreign policy, anti-globalization, etc–isn’t so “fucking stupid.”
I’d say that people who support homophobia — regardless of political affiliation — bear moral responsibility for all anti-gay violence.
That said, it does make sense to blame political parties, insofar as their platforms and policy preferences support homophobia.
The problem with you, Manju, is that you show no interest at all in opposing violence or bigotry. Based on what you’ve written on Alas, you use opposition to violence and bigotry as a tool for bashing Democrats, and for implicitly making excuses for right-wing violence. That’s really pathetic.
That may be the problem with me, but that doesn’t problematize my argument.
here’s an example of what i’ve written on alas:
whats wrong with that? Fecke’s piece also uses oppostion to violance and bigotry to bash a political party.
i feel your pain and see your point. i suppose exposing mccarthyism does enable communism to some degree, but what to do? stay silent? its a conundrum.
Yes, Jeff does. But it’s far, far, far away from being all he does. In your case, the posts where you’re not saying, in essence, “it’s okay when conservatives do [something horrid], because I can point out examples of Democrats doing the same thing!” are a tiny minority, or so it seems to me.
This is unlikely. after all, the post where I’m saying “it’s okay when conservatives do [something horrid],” pretty much have to exist within a larger post saying republicans actually did something horrid.
its also unlikely because, even though Jeff’s pretty moderate for this blog, he’s still a left winger who votes with the left wing party, whereas i’m a rightwinger who votes against my party. but my posts along those lines, like the recent one defending hrc or the gay marriage one i citred, are unlikely to cause a stir, since they’re well within the zeitgeist.
however, the posts about leftist political violence, violent rhetoric, and especially racism, jim crow, and the southen strategy draw huge amounts of protests probably because they strike at he very heart of progressive self-identity and appear, as you’ve mentioned many times, to justify similar behavior coming from the right.
that shjould be hcr, not hrc…although i did have a post defending hrc, by implication of praising bc.
This seems like a reasonable point to me.
Manju:
I daresay that “Democrat” and “right-winger” are not mutually exclusive. Having shaken hands with Mike Bloomberg 24 hours ago, I’m more than a little hesitant to use party label as a stand-in for political viewpoint.
That doesn’t say anything about White, but it’s something I certainly keep in mind when reading political blogs.