The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right

Monday 10 January 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

To: Palin-lovers, Fox "News," the "mainstream" media, and the Far Right, et al.

From: William Rivers Pitt

Date: Monday 10 January 2011

Re: The blood on your hands

Dear “Patriots,”

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords isn't much older than I am. She served in the Arizona State House of Representatives, and the Arizona State Senate, before being elected to three successive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. She once described herself as a "former Republican," and is today considered a "Blue Dog" Democrat, meaning she holds a number of conservative political positions. This is not terribly surprising, given the generally conservative political bent of the state she has served for the last ten years. She was married four years ago to a space shuttle commander who had served as a Naval aviator, and who flew 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, before volunteering for astronaut training.

Last Wednesday, she was sworn in to her third term as the Representative for Arizona's 8th congressional district. One of her first acts in the newly-minted 112th Congress was to read aloud from the House floor, in response to the Republican Party's recitation of the Constitution, the following lines: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

She returned to Arizona not long after to assist in the implementation of that most vital of Constitutional principles, calling together a meeting of her constituents in a peaceable assembly so the citizens she represents could petition the government for a redress of grievances. Among the gathered crowd were a number of her staffers, a judge, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green who was born on September 11, 2001.

And then all Hell broke loose.

A man named Jared Lee Loughner waded into the group and fired a bullet into Rep. Giffords' skull at point-blank range, before turning his weapon on others in the crowd. Christina-Taylor Greene, who would have celebrated her tenth birthday on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, was shot in the chest and killed. The woman who brought her to the event was also shot. Gabriel Zimmerman, who served as Rep. Giffords' director of community outreach, was also killed. He was 30 years old, and was recently engaged to be married. U.S. District Judge John Roll, who had served on the bench for twenty years, was also killed. Dorwin Stoddard, a church volunteer, died after putting his body between his wife and the hail of bullets. His wife was also shot. Two of Rep. Giffords' constituents, Dorothy Morris and Phyllis Scheck, were also killed. All in all, 31 shots were fired before several brave souls tackled Loughner, disarmed him, and wrestled him to the ground.

At the time of this writing, Rep. Giffords is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition. The God you Bible-spewing frauds love to flog the rest of us with must have been in that supermarket crowd with her on Saturday, with His hand on her shoulder, because it is nothing short of a full-fledged miracle she survived at all. Doctors are actually cautiously optimistic that she will survive, though the degree to which she will ultimately recover is still sorely in doubt. She can respond to simple commands, according to her doctors, and is marginally able to communicate. If she survives her wound, it is wretchedly certain her life will never, ever be the same.

I just thought you should know a few things about the people you helped into their graves and hospital beds this weekend.

Yes, you.

You false patriots who bring assault rifles to political rallies, you hack politicians and media personalities who lied through your stinking teeth about "death panels" and "Obama is coming for your guns" and "He isn't a citizen" and "He's a secret Muslim" and "Sharia Law is coming to America," you who spread this bastard gospel and you who swallowed it whole, I am talking to you, because this was your doing just as surely as it was the doing of the deranged damned soul who pulled the trigger. The poison you injected into our culture is deeply culpable for this carnage.

You who worship Jesus at the top of your lungs (in defiance of Christ's own teachings on the matter of worship, by the way) helped put several churchgoers into their graves and into the hospital. You who shriek about the sanctity of marriage helped cut down a man who was about to be married. You who crow with ceaseless abandon about military service and the nobility of our fighting forces helped to critically wound the wife of a Naval aviator who fought for you in a war. You who hold September 11 as your sword and shield helped put a little girl born on that day into the ground.

You helped. Yes, damn you, you helped.

The "mainstream" media is already working overtime playing up the "Disturbed loner" angle with all their might. There is no doubt, from the available evidence, of Mr. Loughner's transformation into a disturbed individual. But here's the funny part: all the crazy crap he spewed, about the gold standard (a favorite of Glenn Beck, the master of Fox "News" fearmongering...so he can sell his gold scam to suckers) and government mind control and everything else before going on his rampage, is straight out of the Right-Wing Insanity Handbook. His personal YouTube ramblings were a mishmash of right-wing anti-government nonsense...the kind that attracts sick minds like Loughner, the kind that only reinforces their paranoia, the kind that finally pushes them over the brink and into the frenzy of violence that took place on Saturday. The kind that the likes of you have been happily spreading by the day.

He did not act alone. You were right there with him. You helped.

I'm talking to you, "mainstream" media people, who created this atmosphere of desperate rage and total paranoia out of whole cloth because of your unstoppable adoration for spectacle, and ratings, and because the companies that own your sorry ***** agree with the deranged cretins you helped make so famous and powerful. It was sickeningly amusing on Sunday to watch Wolf Blitzer bluster and bluff on CNN about how the media owns no responsibility for this disaster. It was like watching a ten-year-old try to explain how a lamp got broken while he was running through the living room, but no, it wasn't him. It was, in reality, a pathetic display...but that is what you generally get whenever Wolf is on your screen.

"Mainstream" news personalities like David Gergen and John King bent over backwards warning people not to blame Sarah Palin and her ilk for this calamity. It was a sick man who did this, they said. Bollocks to that. I hate to break this to the "mainstream" media know-betters, but words matter. When people like Palin spray the airwaves with calls to violence and incantations of imminent doom, people like Loughner are listening, and prepared to act. The "mainstream" media lets it fly without any questions or rebuttal, because it's good for ratings, and here we are. Words matter. Play Russian Roulette long enough, and someone inevitably winds up dead.

Remember the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and the subsequent occupation? "WMD everywhere, al Qaeda connections to 9/11, plastic sheeting and duct tape because we're all gonna die!" was the central theme of the majority of your broadcast schedule for years...until it was all proven to be a lie. You helped the liars, you were the liars, but you knew that. You also got your spectacle, and the corporations that own you got paid a king's ransom, so everyone was happy, except the dead.


Tell me this is any different, I dare you. For the spectacle, the ratings and the pleasure of your owners, you ran names like "Sarah Palin" across the sky in lights, even after she should have faded into well-deserved obscurity, and helped this blister of right-wing rage fester until it finally burst. This was your show, and in perhaps the most wretched irony of all, I would bet all my worldly possessions that your ratings are through the roof right now. You got what you wanted. I hope you are pleased.

And yes, I'm talking to you, Sarah Palin, you unutterably disgusting fraud. You pulled it off your ridiculous website, but it's out there: you put cross-hairs - literally, cross-hairs - on Rep. Giffords, you blithered about "reloading" instead of "retreating," and you made this country more stupid and violent with every breath you took. Well, congratulations, you failure, you quitter, you inciter of mobs. You put the cross-hairs on her, and someone finally pulled the trigger. Run from it all you like, Lady MacBeth, but this blood will never be washed from your hands.

I'm talking to you, Sharron Angle, you walking punch-line, who talked about "Second Amendment remedies" being necessary if you didn't get your way on health care reform during your failed Senate campaign.

I'm talking to you, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, and to every other right-wing tripe-spewing blowhard blogger and Fox News broadcaster. I hope you are proud of yourselves, because this is the day you get to reap what you have been relentlessly sowing since you were forced to encompass the unmitigated outrage of a Black man winning the office of President of the United States.

That's right, I said it. Anyone who thinks good old-fashioned American bigotry and racism are not the core motivation for a vast majority of these so-called "revolutionaries" should get their heads examined. You've heard of the "elephant in the middle of the room?" Well, this is the burning cross in the middle of the room, and no amount of spin will douse those flames.

I'm talking to you, Koch Brothers. Your money to create and spread this disease was well-spent; you now have one less Democrat in the House to worry about, at least for the foreseeable future. Congratulations, you un-American sacks of filth.

And I'm talking to each and every one of you who listened to these traitors and believed the nonsense they spewed at you for no other reason than to pick your pockets for campaign/organization contributions. I'm talking to you who wore your silly fatigues and carried your badly-spelled fact-deprived signs to protests with pistols on your hips and rifles on your shoulders. You who threw bricks through the windows of politicians you disagreed with. You who shot out the windows of Rep. Giffords' office not even a year ago.

You worked very hard to create exactly this atmosphere in America, and now it has come to be. We have entered the age of the Wrath of Fools, and we now must again exist in an America where the word "assassination" has become all too relevant.

You helped this happen. You.

You know it. I know it. Have the guts to admit it, even if only to yourselves.

I know many Republicans and conservatives, and consider them to be dear friends. The single most influential person in my life (aside from my mother) was a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, and there is no person I respected more than him. I do not count these people, and those like them, among those whom I address here. They are as sickened and repulsed by you as I am.

This is not the end of the story, but is just the beginning. The good people of the United States of America, the true patriots, have finally seen you with your media-painted masks ripped off. They have seen what comes to pass when hate, venom, ignorance and violence goes unchecked and unanswered. You have been exposed, and the fact that it took such an unimaginably horrific act for that exposure to take place only increases the fierceness with which you will be answered. You will be repudiated, not with violence, but with the scorn and rejection you so richly deserve. Spin it as you will, scramble all you like. You are found out, and you have nowhere to hide.

Oh, P.S., if anyone reading this is operating under the delusion that the overheated right-wing rhetoric that went a long way towards almost getting Rep. Giffords killed, and had a strong hand in putting six people in the ground, is some sort of new Obama-era phenomenon, well...

"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, Denver Post, 12-29-95

"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."

- Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton

"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."

- Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

- Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."

- John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

"Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men."

- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01

I could go on, and on, and on, and on, but you get the gist.

Most Disrespectfully Yours,
William Rivers Pitt


http://www.truth-out.org/the-wrath-fools-an-open-letter-to-far-right66686

Amen brother

Amen to that.

And next the republicans will retort with something, then the democrats will, then repubs, then dems, never ending circle of blame... lol... it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic...

Where have the Dems used so hate-filled violent Rhetoric.

I challenged someone, any one, to show me proof.
I'm still waiting.

I hear the claims but no one shows me the proof.

Show me an example damnit!

like 3rd graders, never shutting up....

Democrat: A carrion bird that eats the bodies of their own dead and craps out votes.

It's absolutely disgusting to use this tragedy for political gain. By all accounts, the kid was mentally ill.

Father of 9 year old shooting victim speaks

And don't act like this is the first time the Dems complained about the right wing Rhetoric.

It reminds me of the old saying, two in fact,

They don't believe the **** til they step in it, and

If it looks like, and smells like ****. Don't taste it.

Wanda Sykes Hopes Rush Limbaugh's Kidneys Fail
'Boondocks' Creator McGruder Calls Condi Rice, Colin Powell Murderers
Ebert's Site Praises Left-wing Bush Assassination Film
Kathy Griffin Says 2011 is 16-year-old Willow Palin’s ‘year to go down’
Alec Baldwin threatens to Stone Henry Hyde, kill children
Joy Behar on Sharron Angle: That ***** is Going to Hell
Aaron Sorkin happy when hunters shoot each other
Montel Williams Urges Michele Bachmann to kill herself
Sean Penn Calls Reagan's Alzheimer's 'Justice'
Rosie O'Donnell Calls bush 'war criminal' who must 'be held accountable'
MSNBC Asserts Violent Rhetoric Exclusively From Right; Two Months Ago Featured Guest Calling for Violent Revolution From Left
About That Dangerous Political Rhetoric, Markos Edition Great article...titled "My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi. And is now DEAD to me!" Written by a far leftist loon about...that's right Congresswoman Giffords! Don't miss the map with targets painted on many states, including Arizona!

who cares what the dems are whining about? they do it so often, no one pays any attention to them anyway

Not even close to the same.

Try again.

Close to the same what? Targets on a map? That's been done on the left too. What else you got, other than a serious case of hypocrisy and a chronic case of extreme bias?

Nice work on the making of links.

Too bad it isn't very informative to what was asked.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” — President B Hussein Obama

Get out there and “punish our enemies” — President B Hussein Obama

“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” — President B Hussein Obama

“Punch back twice as hard.” — President B Hussein Obama

I want to know “whose *** to kick” — President B Hussein Obama

“…I’m itching for a fight.” — President B Hussein Obama

I know those damn righwingers!!!

Can't deal with the fact that your side is a bunch of violent racist, sexist losers? Go QQ to someone else.

If only the president would have meant any of that towards the Right..

I sure wish he would have been more like that when it came to fighting for what he got voted in on.

I see more retardedness on behalf of the classless left.

The progressive “climate of hate:” An illustrated primer, 2000-2010

Sandra Bernhard calls for Sarah Palin to be gang-raped Women hate being gang-raped, right? If it turns out that they really love it, I'm going to be so embarrassed.

Not the same!

Let me post the article so others can judge,

My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!
by BoyBlue
Thu Jan 06, 2011 at 11:07:17 AM PST
I am from the Tucson area and live in Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords' district. I worked like a dog for her elections when she was in the Arizona House, surrounded by rightwing nutcases. When Arizona re-districted in 2002, a seat opened up and she was right smack in the middle of it. So was I because I live in Oro Valley, Arizona, which is at the heart of that - then - new CD. I was one of several people to talk her into running and pledging complete loyalty and pledging to raise as much money as possible for her.

She ended up running for the first time against a fellow AZ House member, Randy Graf who was a rightwing whacko who advocated guns in bars and was the "Russell Pearce before Russell Pearce" vis-a-vis border issues. With a LOT of hard work and plenty of money, Gabby won. Easier than thought, too. I never like to throw money in people's faces, but i have given Gabrielle Giffords THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dollars in both good times and bad times for me financially.

BoyBlue's diary :: ::
Fast forward to this election season. A weirdo ******* named Jesse Kelly who advocated ELIMINATING Social Security and was a tea bagger favorite got the GOP nom to run against her. I am gay and had been married and my spouse left me January 15, 2010. I shot myself in the mouth in a serious suicide attempt, because of that. Barely surviving, I spent two months in the hospital and still have some paralysis. I did receive a severance from my employer, as i had been laid off in December, 2009. That may have been part of the reason my spouse left me.

Anyway, after months of physical and mental rehab, I got back into the political scene and started working for Gabby once again. I raised over $100,000 for her and maxed her out myself out of my severance, even though i still don't have work and could not qualify for state aid because of my severance.

She wins her re-election and told me she was still a supporter of Speaker Pelosi at her victory party. We talked about how Nancy Pelosi was a successful woman and accomplished oh so much in just four years as Speaker.

Today, just a little while ago, I saw on Andrea Mitchell Reports (out of the one eye in can still see out of) that Giffords voted AGAINST Nancy Pelosi as our Minority Leader. Rhetorical question: I fought back from my condition and jumped in with both feet to help Gabrielle Giffords for THIS ****???

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is dead to me now. I won't lift a finger, make one phone call, nor will i EVER vote for her in the future. And why did she do this? Giffords never told me she was conservative Democrat. And her voting record is okay. Damn.

http://www.fireandreamitchell.com/2011/01/08/daily-kos-pulls-page-entitled-my-congresswoman-voted-against-nancy-pelosi-and-is-now-dead-to-me-written-on-january-6th-2011/

You mean right wingers right? Cause that is who you described.

I don't have to go anywhere in my thread.