Too Soon to Blame O'Reilly, Limbaugh, et al.

Bill Gwatney, the Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman was shot in his office by a man who was later himself shot and killed by police.

UPDATE: I wish I had more time to write because then, just perhaps, I would be the first to have written this. As it is, Greg Saunders of The Talent Show beat me to it.

And, he's exactly right. Please, please, please don't tell me that the ranting of the more egregious members of the right-wing noise machine (Savage, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly and yes, Belling) does not have some sort of weird negative effect on the dimmer bulbs on the right. You can see the violence in print simply by reading Peter DiGaudio's anger-laced and insipid rants at Texas Holdem Blogger, the misplaced cockiness of Fred Dooley and the comments from the happy sycophants that live in their haloscan universe.

James Wigderson tried to say in the comment section here that Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann are as guilty. Well, besides being outnumbered (it's scary that righty bloggers breed, or inbreed) I asked him when had either ever approached the level of evil that the crowd on the right delivers. I'm waiting for the obscure comment from some idiot as an example (using Chris Lato logic -- it was probably planted).

One last thing, again from Saunders. This is what passes for conservative humor. Violence begets violence.

The Voice of Conservatism

Slightly to the right of mainstream conservatism, blowhard Michael Savage recently said this about autistic children.

Autism -- everybody has an illness. If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, "Don't behave like a fool." The worst thing he said -- "Don't behave like a fool. Don't be anybody's dummy. Don't sound like an idiot. Don't act like a girl. Don't cry." That's what I was raised with. That's what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That's why we have the politicians we have.

One would think that Savage would find a way to apologize for his heinious and inaccurate comments, especially after being bombarded with complaints from families with autistic children. But in true conservative fashion, Savage instead attacked.

The autism controversy is very important because true autism is extremely heartbreaking. I have devoted my entire life, even as a child, to defending the helpless, mainly the helpless children because of a tragedy in my own family, and it's ironic that people who hate families and children -- a group called Media Matters, filled with anti-family individuals who do not marry; they're men who like men -- would take out of context comments that I made last week directed at the misdiagnosed, the falsely diagnosed, and the outright fakers in the autism field and try to make you, the parents of the truly autistic, attack me.

You know that's what beats at the center of most conservatives, a hatred for those it doesn't understand, A hatred for those different; from characterizing black voters as thugs, to denying a sizable portion of the population the opportunity to marry like anyone else.

Don't be fooled by those who say he does not speak for conservatism. He is their voice. It's just convenient to hide behide his rhetoric and let him take the heat. If conservatives truly thought so little of him, they, too, would be appalled and join with the rest of decent society in having him removed from the airwaves. It's not censorship; he truly is the person yelling fire in a crowded theater.