News outlets are
reporting that Congressman Russ Carnahan's campaign office was broken into at 2 AM this morning and a small fire was set. A man is in custody but so far no details are known as to his motives. I have to say, though, that
if, and so far
it is a big if , the man in custody is a right-wing activist, no responsible reporting on the matter would ignore the following facts:
In late March, the tea party held a rally where they burned a photo of Russ Carnahan outside of his Manchester office. Dana Loesch can be heard in the video saying, "This is how a fire smells when it's burning Tyranny."At that same rally, they (1) used shoes to whack a picture of Russ Carnahan, (2) kicked the photo of Carnahan, (3) set up a game where people would throw boots at a picture of Carnahan, (4) and even encouraged small children to throw the boot at Carnahan. Ed Martin's campaigners directly participated in these actions and Martin spoke approvingly of the rallies, posting links directly to videos of Carnahan's picture getting booted and burned. Gateway Pundit titled his post about the event Hundreds Rally as Russ Carnahan is '"booted" and "torched."At the rally, they used a photo of Carnahan with blood dripping from his mouth:
In the week prior to the event, Bill Hennessy wrote a blog post claiming that the tea party no longer had any moral or legal obligations to the government.After the event, Hennessy tweeted openly about "revolution:"
The day after that rally, the tea party carried a coffin to Russ Carnahan's HOME, as in his private residence:
So, as I said above, I have no idea if today's incident is directly linked to any of those incidents or to the St. Louis Tea Party. But whether it is or not, the extreme behavior of the tea party pretty obviously creates an environment where these types of incidents become more likely. The media and public officials (of both parties) need to step up and condemn their ridiculous antics unless we want to see more of this dangerous behavior.
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I bet the person who did the arsoning was enabled by Dana Loesch's violent hateful rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI notice that crackpots on the right can speak with near impunity with regards to "revolution", but those orgs on the left which peacefully agitate for change are often routinely infiltrated by private or federal/local/state security agents. Nothing new, still is irritating as hell though.
ReplyDeleteThere have been several pipe bomb reports in the St. Louis area, one of which went off at a power substation in Lake St. Louis recently.
ReplyDeleteMy concern is that far-right-wing activists are going too far with their support of what they believe in that they are willing to hurt people to prove their fealty.
How can the bomber or bombers say that they are part of a republic if they don't support a democracy where people use civic discourse rather than uncivilized brutality? What they are doing does not uphold democracy. It doesn't "refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants". It's domestic terrorism based on the same political beliefs that people like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph had.