FAIR recently put out a ‘Media Advisory’ http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4233
regarding “Violent Media Rhetoric”. The following are excerpts from their first
two citations:
--Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (12/3/10) on WikiLeaks' Julian Assange:
"Think creatively. The WikiLeaks document dump is sabotage, however quaint that term may seem.... Franklin Roosevelt had German saboteurs tried by military tribunal and shot. Assange has done more damage to the United States than all six of those Germans combined."
"Want to prevent this from happening again? Let the world see a man who can't sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice. I'm not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But….”
--The Washington Post's David Broder (10/31/10) recommended threatening war with Iran as an economic and domestic political strategy:
"With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But… ”
It is a national disgrace, not that promulgating murder is part of free speech, but that media proponents of murder are revered and respected. These quotes serve to illustrate the sickness which has infected not only many prominent 'thinkers' on the right, but our society as a whole. That these murderous, criminal ideas and actions are considered patriotic by tens of millions of Americans, and are given serious consideration in domestic and foreign policy circles is nauseating! That the thinkers, politicians and citizens of the left and center do not repudiate and villify this murderous paranoia AND its proponents with every word and breath is proof of their complicity.
Maintaining that the US has the right, indeed the duty, to murder and bomb abroad at will while other nations or individuals who do so are 'evil' or 'terrorists' is pathetically and transparently hypocritical and completely antithetical to all professed ideals of democracy. The US schoolyard bully gang has run rampant over their world playground for many decades, overthrowing democratically-elected govts and leaders through CIA-staged coups and assassinations when corruption attempts by corporate economic hit men ("EHM's") failed. When our bully nose was horrifically bloodied on 9/11, we cried and whimpered, "How unfair, why do 'they' hate us? 'They' envy us, we must kill and destroy every last one of them!" After all, bullies have feelings too. And so was born the never-ending "War On Terror", coming to an Obama theater near you under a different title.
As for those on the right, I much prefer the unabashedly and proudly murderous Dick Cheney bully to the murderously-creative Charles Krauthammer bully and the murderously- politically and economically calculating David Broder bully. Still, bullies are always cowards at heart. Eventually, their noses are bloodied enough that they slink away or a bigger bully comes along and throws them out of the playground completely. Counsel Joseph N. Welch’s 1954 words to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy could be just as appropriately addressed to any and all of our contemporary American bullies: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
