While the usual suspects are spinning away the latest round of death threats by the right-wing lunatics, someone appears to believe it isn’t just hype pushed by the liberal media and the Democrats:
More than 100 House Democrats met behind closed doors Wednesday afternoon with representatives of the FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police. The lawmakers voiced what one senior aide who was present described as “serious concern” about their security in Washington and in their home districts when they return this weekend for the spring recess.
Usually only the congressional leadership has regular personal protection from the Capitol Police. But at least 10 lawmakers have been offered increased protection by law enforcement agencies, said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).
This is nothing new for these guys- while Sarah Palin is literally putting crosshairs on congressmen, law enforcement has had to deal with this before:
The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied. Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. “Why would they try to make people hate us?” Michelle asked a top campaign aide.
We lucked out the last time, and hopefully we will luck out again this time.
This, though, is what infuriates me about the glibertarian response at Reason that DougJ pointed out last night. The entire economic theory of the glibertarian, boiled to its essence, is the belief in the causal relationship that tax cuts + deregulation = free market magic! They ignore everything else, hundreds of years of evidence and economic theory that it just isn’t that simple, and just keep talking about less taxes = MOAR FREEDOM.
But then, when there is a honest to goodness obvious causal relationship right in front of their very eyes, what do they do? Ignore it, or excuse it, or dismiss it as just a couple lunatics.
It’s inexcusable. There is a direct relationship to the rhetoric of the Republicans in congress, right-wing leaders like Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and others, the right-wing media at Fox and the various wingnut welfare venues and Rush Limbaugh, and the recent uptick in threats and vandalism. You don’t have to trace it. You don’t have to wonder why some people are acting up this way. Again- Sarah Palin is literally putting crosshairs on congresscritters. Rep. Neugebauer screamed “baby killer” during Bart Stupak’s speech, and all of a sudden Bart Stupak’s voice mail and fax machine are overflowing with threats calling him a baby killer. Republicans screamed “socialism” all year long, and what do you know- a two-thirds majority of Republicans think Obama is a socialist. It really is crazy how this shit works, isn’t it, libertarians?
This does not take much effort to realize that the Republican leadership, both elected and unelected, are ramping up the rhetoric from the already fevered pitch, and the people are reacting. Meanwhile, Reason magazine sits around with their finger in the wind and their thumbs up their collective asses mumbling “no one is dead yet” and “hoocoodanode!” Not one breath will be wasted condemning the behavior or noting why it is happening, though. They will offer some better ways to protest, so thanks for that!
At this point, these hacks are looking like the idiot tobacco industry executives who denied for years that tobacco was addictive. Which, considering Reason’s long relationship with big tobacco, is kind of fitting.
balconesfault
The funniest comment I’ve heard was from a Republican Commentator over at FrumForum calling the bill “Polarizing”.
Seriously – as if the people screaming about Healthcare Reform wouldn’t be screaming about just about any move Obama makes. The screaming has been at 11 since Palin was added to McCain’s ticket, energizing the crazies, and at this point there are obviously some big money men behind the GOP who must believe that their only way to hang on to the power they wielded through the last decade is to keep it pegged at 11 from now till eternity.
El Cid
Attention: propertarians DO NOT CARE ABOUT FREEDOM.
That is all.
4tehlulz
It’s all fun and games until someone blows up a daycare center.
J.W. Hamner
Libertarians think that pretty much everything is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. It tends to go: “If we condemn these people for making death threats, what’s next? Bar codes on your baby’s forehead!?“
dmsilev
What’s real fun to watch is the authors of the various pieces at Reason showing up in the comments here and trying to defend themselves, usually with some variation of the Claude Rains defense (“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”).
-dms
Menzies
The central problem of American libertarianism is that it requires a truly awe-inspiring degree of arrogance. I imagine such inflated egos easily become blinders.
geg6
@dmsilev:
Heh. Ain’t dat da truth.
Napoleon
People should read up on Spanish politics in the run up to the Spanish Civil War.
BC
Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have seem frustrated for the past year that no one has been picking up on their hinted incitement to violence. All the protestations from the talk radio and rightwing internet sites notwithstanding, I have felt that they have wanted someone to assassinate Obama. I think that is the end desire for all the shit about birth certificate, the worse-than-Hitler screeches, the sockulist screeches, etc. After all, what is the response supposed to be to someone who is taking away your freedoms and putting you and your family in re-education camps?
The Grand Panjandrum
Yes the party that while in the majority put a bill on the desk of the President to interfere in the PRIVATE and INDIVIDUAL healthcare decisions of a family and that family’s doctors, should now be bitching about “gummint takeover” of healthcare. Makes perfect sense. Because why? Just because, STFU!
Ash Can
Despite the fact that he showed character by posting in that thread, what Jesse Walker was doing in this article was even worse than this. He was finding fault with the protestors’ techniques, not the fact that they were protesting in the first place. He’s all for pushing back against HCR (or, as he tellingly called it, “Obamacare”); he was criticizing the protestors from doing it the way they did.
Even though he discussed what he wrote directly with us, and did it calmly and articulately, he said nothing to dissuade me from believing that, deep down, he’s just another pseudo-intellectual/pseudo-iconoclastic undergrad searching for moral justification for his displeasure with authority.
beltane
The glibertarians are either an incredibly stupid crowd (a distinct possibility) or they harbor a secret desire to witness large-scale right wing violence, as it would validate some of their most deeply held fantasies. Megan McArdle’s shrill defense of teabagger excesses makes me believe it is more the latter with them.
BC
Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have seem frustrated for the past year that no one has been picking up on their hinted incitement to violence. All the protestations from the talk radio and rightwing internet sites notwithstanding, I have felt that they have wanted someone to assassinate Obama. I think that is the end desire for all the shit about birth certificate, the worse-than-Hitler screeches, the soci alist screeches, etc. After all, what is the response supposed to be to someone who is taking away your freedoms and putting you and your family in re-education camps?
Mudge
Naopleon is right. During the Spanish Civil War era, anarchists had a second name..libertarians..and our current libertarians are exhibiting many of the less refined traits of anarchists. The era also illustrates the significant differences between anarchists, socialists, communists (who usually hated each other) and fascists, differences that the right attempts to eliminate via propaganda and mendacious rhetoric so they can interchangably try to attach all those labels to liberals.
Mike P
I actually used to enjoy Reason a few years ago. It was a good way to diversify the opinion stuff I was reading. But ever since Weigel left and Obama was elected, that crowd has gone off the deep end. As Cole points out, the way they just refuse to see the direct line between the rhetoric and the actions of the Tea Partiers is disturbing.
debit
@BC: Don’t they understand? If someone did assassinate Obama, someone who said, “Yep! Rush and Glenn told me to, so I did!” every Democratic agenda would be passed for the foreseeable future. The Fairness Doctrine, or some facsimile thereof, would be back and enforced and they would be off the air. Don’t they get that?
JenJen
The most masterful spinning yet occurred on “Morning Joe” today, when both Mika and Scarborough insisted that if they held a press conference every time someone called them a bad name on Twitter, they’d be on every hour.
Joe went on to say that Democrats did the exact same thing to him personally during Impeachment and the 2000 Recount.
Next they talked about the awful double standard in the liberal media, since the media never reports these things when they happen to Republicans, and apparently these things happen to Republicans every day! Who knew? The GOP did a nice job of keeping the extra security/law enforcement needed for their members under wraps, I guess.
Political Carnival has the video, here.
Bill E Pilgrim
I’m just puzzled why…. Libertarians?
I mean, the extreme right wing that is what the Republican party has become is inciting violence, and we’re examining what libertarian blowhards think of it?
I understand that it’s important, deathly important, that those who stand a chance of doing so on the right (I won’t even try to call them moderates) start denouncing this.
So as a small part of that group, I guess, libertarians are as important to prod or criticize as anyone else. However only if one bought their disingenous claims to be somehow not just another bunch of right wingers would all this focus on them in particular make a lot of sense.
Shorter me: Of course they’re playing down or defending the incitement, they’re right wing clowns just like the rest of them. Did anyone ever really doubt this?
liberal
You don’t know what you’re talking about. The theories are working out quite well in Somalia, that minarchist paradise.
John Cole
@Bill E Pilgrim: Because I think thoughtful libertarianism can be an effective counterbalance to excessive government and bad behavior (like invading countries and torturing people). Go read Jim Henley and Thoreau.
It infuriates me what Reason magazine has become.
liberal
@El Cid:
Heh.
Though, actually, propertarians do care about freedom.
They despise it.
liberal
@John Cole:
There’s almost no “thoughtful libertarians”. Most of them are cryptofeudalists.
Bill E Pilgrim
@John Cole: Of course it can, but these aren’t libertarians like Thoreau, for god’s sake.
That was the whole point.
Chomsky’s a libertarian in a certain sense, more than someone like McCardle is anyway.
Jon H
@Mike P: “But ever since Weigel left and Obama was elected, that crowd has gone off the deep end.”
During a Republican administration, Reason can relax because their corporate patrons can easily get their way from the government.
During a Democratic administration, Reason needs to start earning their paychecks, and their corporate patrons expect results. Fonz Gillespie needs to turn more tricks if he’s going to be able to afford to keep himself in the cheesy leather jacketed fashion he is accustomed to.
BC
debit@16: Beck, Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and others on the talk show circuit really don’t think through what they are spouting. It’s almost like they envision themselves as heroes a la the French Resistance in WWII, they’ll have their moments of glory and will go down in history books as unflinching defenders of freedom. The fantasy of guerrilla action is always better and less bloody than the reality – but we already know these people don’t deal with reality anyway, don’t we? Their listeners, who in their own minds are flinchless defenders of the Constitution and the American Way (which in no way has a black person as president), eat the fantasy up. Some of these people use re-enactment (usually as staunch Confederates during the Civil War) as a way of getting their fantasy of glory out of their system, but their information highway is telling them it’s time to start defending the country from the islamofascistcommunistsockulist in White House and Congress that is raising their taxes and taking away their freedoms and making their children and grandchildren slaves.
Violet
This.
Thinking of it this way is kind of encouraging. No on trusts tobacco executives anymore. People just assume they’re lying. How fitting for the rightwing hacks to be in the same category.
BC
The liberals during Bush years were more libertarian and with more cause than the libertarians are today. The wholesale assault on the 4th Amendment was not opposed by the libertarians of that time. Those calling themselves libertarians today really don’t give a damn about anything except their right to bear arms and their right not to be taxed. Just as the Moral Majority means sexual purity (but only for women, mind), so the Libertarian means 2nd Amendment and No Taxation.
mantooth
“Ignore it, or excuse it, or dismiss it as just a couple lunatics.”
While pointing out any liberal crazies as the rule, not the exception. That whole commenting thread warbles between the impotent rage of empty threats and childish “liberals do it too so there!” justifications I would let me 3 year old get away with.
jenniebee
@4tehlulz: Agreed. April 19th is not shaping up to be a slow news day this year.
celticdragonchick
This will go on until somebody does get shot or a congressional office is bombed.
Then, Michelle Malkin will scream that the librul media is trying to pin it her and her ilk while Red state and the freepers will claim that it was actually seekrit libruls trying to frame conservatives in retaliation for Acorn.
aimai
On Debit’s point up above I think its important to realize that the threat of violence isn’t really goal oriented–its cathartic. There are a lot of angry, disturbed people in this country who feel the country that they wanted has already gone–and they really don’t care if the whole thing goes down in flames now. Frankly, hurting Dems and especially the Obamas is, to them, an emotional need more than it is a plan. Think more of the kind of person who commits “suicide by cop” in a fury than a realistic program.
aimai
someguy
Well, if there is such a thing as justice, it probably deserves to as punishment for its political crimes, which maybe isn’t the reasons the wingers would cite. Good to see there’s something the left and right agree on.
mds
Not just a certain sense. Chomsky is out-and-out “left-libertarian,” which is at least as valid a category as the right-libertarianism which claims the exclusive libertarian mantle for itself. Far too many of these guys think it’s capitalism that maximizes freedom, be it in China, Singapore, or Pinochet’s Chile. That’s why they’re royal libertarians: they love kings as long as they’re the ones rewarded by kings. It’s possible to be a free-market anti-capitalist (e.g., mutualism), a libertarian socialist, etc., etc., but you’d never know that from most of the Reasonoids. Again, when Balko’s just about the best you’ve got, and even he jettisons any concern for the federal detainees that Scott Brown asserts have no rights whatsoever, because hey, Martha Coakley was an overzealous prosecutor (and coincidentally a Democrat), something’s broken somewhere.
Karen
I want proof of all the death threats and violence liberals have done to Republican. After all, that’s what the right wing is saying liberals did so they’re just getting even.
And their answer now is, liberals are making it all up, we’re crying wolf and what else could we expect them to do. In other words, they’re innocent but the Democrats deserve it.
Like a coffin placed on lawn of Representative Russ Carnahan (D-Mo)
I knew where this was going ever since Obama became President. I used to think it wouldn’t stop unless they killed him. But now I know even that won’t be enough. I honestly think now that they’re planning a right wing coup.
Yes, I know it sounds crazy but doesn’t all this violence against lawfully elected Democrats sound familiar? To me it sounds like the junta that happened in Greece in 1963. Or the right wing in Argentina where educated students “disappeared.”
And there will be no remorse. No horror can be committed that will shake them back to their senses.
That is what scares me the most.
Fern
@aimai:
Nicely put. Also true.
Cerberus
Hmm, why would a political movement which has in its long history ignored the huge amounts of evidence and casual relationships regarding societal sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia in order to prop up an inane idea that everyone is inherently equal in the marketplace, which has failed to even acknowledge the downturns, massive infrastructure decay and collapse, massive budget messes, and growing income disparity that have directly resulted from their “all tax cuts all the time” economic philosophies, which has failed to see any causal link between social services they personally benefit from and the scary government that never does anything by them,
why would they fail to see an easy causal relationship?
That’s a tough one John, I’m really going to have to furrow my brow and think on that one for awhile.
But seriously, it’s ignorant tripe, because the movement of libertarianism is one of ignorant denialism. Seeking to eliminate the very real effects of systematic oppressions and the coercive power of the corporation for purposes of wishful thinking. It’d be bad enough if they were sincere to this hideous principle, but in practice they’ve become even worse, a gentle face of feigned rationality for the purpose of making far right lunacy “intellectual”. Before it was hideous society-destroying selfishness, today it’s Glenn Beck trying to get somebody shot so his dick can get hard and the libertarian wing is there to give some sort of reason other than “negroid stole my fictional white world”.
I can understand the underlying desire though that is your real desire. You want there to be a strong sane second party to save Republicans from continuing to slip deeper into an obvious madness rather than the comfortable delusion that says the status quo is awesome for all parties. I’m not sure its possible, unfortunately.
The Republican Party really did make a deal with the devil with the Rapturists Fundies and angry Klansmen and I’m not sure there’s a way back from that.
On the plus side, I’m not as worried as most people by one-party Democratic Party rule. For a start, I see the conservadems splitting into a Republican Party Mark II as soon as possible to prevent anything liberal happening (a party of radical centrism as the CW trolls in the MSM want) and if not that, the democrats have always been willing to be their own counter.
I mean you got the members of the party that are as bought off as republicans, ones who are in “tough” districts, ones who have private regressive obsessions (Stupak), and plenty of inter-group squabbles by people who fundamentally agree about broad policy on the best way to implement it (see the Firebaggers v. Pragmatists shake-up).
So yeah.
Sentient Puddle
@Bill E Pilgrim: In addition to what John said (or perhaps to expand on it), what we see as modern day libertarianism is typically what’s considered the biggest policy wonkery on the right. Which is to say, their greatest intellectual heft amounts to “government shouldn’t do anything, and we should fuck up its efforts as best we can.”
Yet despite that, arguments like “government should get out of [policy X],” “what does the government know about [policy Y]?”, or points to those effects are generally considered acceptable discourse in today’s policy debate, and generally go unrefuted. I have no idea why. This supposed intellectualism is incredibly lazy, and doesn’t really hold any water when you take little more than a cursory poke at it.
…
Now that I think about it a little more, I wonder if libertarianism as a whole is just a lazy ideology. It’d be one thing if their mantra was “make government more efficient,” which probably best resembles the sort of opposition John referred to, and one I could certainly live with. But I’m not really sure that’s the endpoint to the ideology. Seems like the actual endpoint is closer to a “respectable” anarchism.
Pleh. I should write an essay.
SFAW
Of course, that assumes that the Rush/Beck-inspired psychos stop there.
I’m hoping aimai is right, but I’m starting to believe that it wouldn’t take too much for a pre-Gilead scenario to occur. The current threats are only dry runs. (Well, not really: if “they” really wanted to do a dry run, it wouldn’t be in the home districts, it’d be in DC. Still …)
anthony
I remember during the Bush years, the Reasonoids were relatively readable. What with their corporate sponsors getting everything they wanted, they could concentrate on the little details.
Ever since Obama was elected, however, Hit and Run has been more or less unreadable – in the same sense as McArdle and Althouse are unreadable. Sure, people are still being tortured to death in Bagram, but o noes rich people might have to pay more in tax.
I used to consider myself a libertarian. But then I realised that “Libertarian” just meant “I don’t want to pay for any of the services I use”. I’m still looking for another term for “person who cares about personal freedoms”.
Shinobi
Whatever, if you try to confront anyone on the right about this you will immediately be refuted by the “Liberals are just as bad” doctrine. (Probably a corollary to IOIYAR.)
I mean lets be honest, liberals do everything bad thing republicans do JUST AS MUCH, even if there is no actual evidence to support that.
Cerberus
@anthony:
Liberal or DFH. Or hell, even progressive.
It boggles my mind that after at least of century of being on every right side of every single personal rights question posed by society, people are still searching for “another way” to value the individual because liberal is all tainted by trying to make government work as not just another arm of the oligarchy or aristocracy.
There has been a great movement that has consistently stood up for the individual and there are even versions of it that are obsessive about personal freedom (aka ACLU), but the general push is making it so people have more freedom to genuinely enjoy their lives without social coercion, governmental oppression, economic discrimination, or having to scramble for basic survival and yet it has never gotten credit.
Oh, can we have something like that but without all the hard effort or constant tweaking of public policy or indeed without having to pay for it at all?
No, but you can be another ignored hippie. Thank you for playing.
P.S. I’m not actually mad at you for the response, just always darkly bemused by the way that question always gets phrased as if no one is looking out for the individual and agitating for basic civil rights consistently.
bago
The sad thing is that work like this seems like it’s right up Radley Balko’s alley. He has unflappable civil libertarian instincts, and deserves awards for his work on the Maye case. However, if he were to move on something like this, his Koch paymasters would fire him in an instant. Sad, really.
b-psycho
@Cerberus:
Because it inherently can’t.
The functional purpose of government is to stroke the aristocracy to the promised land. Any crumbs the average person gets is just Revolt Insurance.
Cerberus
@b-psycho:
Well given that government is us, it’s really hard to do without any form of it and even harder to prevent the stronger from exploiting the weak or us without any possible form of it.
It’s also really hard to form the nice labor-saving and rights-upholding benefits of having society without any form of government.
Given that and given that those who started with the most power will do their upmost to corrupt everything to retaining said power (see aristocracy and oligarchy throughout history (and say what you will about America’s hideous inequalities but at least the police and military aren’t literally on the payroll of the aristocrats like a hundred or two hundred years ago)), there is one force that has consistently fought on multiple levels to increase individual freedom.
That would be liberals or more the general leftish side of the political spectrum. Whenever someone is being oppressed by a larger force either governmental, militaristic, or corporate, liberals have been on the ground trying to protect the rights of the individual in question, whipping up protest and public opinion, and trying to pass laws to prevent it from recurring.
And at the end of it, they don’t get credit and a bunch of people just go, hmm, can’t we just do without government and then life will magically get better?
And well, no.
In fact, if you want something like say, Christianshavn (the anarchistic experiment in the middle of Copenhagen), you need a strong liberal government to be there as insurance (if it fails or they want out, they can reintegrate in a second to Denmark’s immense social security net) and the protection to know you won’t be taken over by outside forces and that those who surround you fully support your right to be non-conforming and weird and be supportive of individual freedoms.
Such experiments in ultimate personal freedom requires the safety net of a strong liberal government and radically activist liberal, leftie movements.
The problem, I think, is we all want shortcuts. We’ve seen the DFH, progressive path and its decades of thankless, stressful, often futile work to make life slightly better for the next generation to do the same. Slow evolution.
It’s tempting to think there’s some secret hidden “I win” button that would just make utopia appear without any effort or often with our capitalist trained American minds, without having to personally contribute in any monetary way.
If we just get rid of “government” than it’ll eliminate all coercive agents throughout the world.
Which I guess if you were white, generically Christian or blandly secular, heterosexual, male, upper-class, and in an area with “invisible” infrastructure making life convenient, it could seem that easy I guess because the religious, social, economic, bullying, etc… pressures would be less obvious or directly affecting you, but for the rest of us, government is way down on the list of things making life hard to live on our own terms.
b-psycho
@Cerberus:
The sentiment that “Government is us” assumes no gap between the concept of “representative” & direct democracy. The amount of issues on which much of the public disagrees with what ends up done anyway (better examples of this in the U.S. than HCR would be things like the bank bailouts & our imperialist foreign policy) seems to shatter that.
As far as labor goes, a large part of why it leans on a relationship with government is because anti-state alternatives were actively squashed, up to and including their members being simply murdered. The acquiescence to government and subsequent watering down of the point to labor organizing was, to me, a mistake we’re still living with the consequences of.
…which is why I lean towards opposing ANY concentrations of power on principle, whether in the state or their corporate bagmen. Trusting anyone with that kind of power is suicidal.
This isn’t something I challenge, as I’m a leftist myself. If someone put a gun to my head and made me choose, in the short term I’d pick liberals, so I’m not anti-liberal. If anything, I think liberals aren’t consistently liberal enough.
Straight male, yes, but you’re off on the rest. I’m a working class black male atheist.
Bill Murray
I pretty much agree with Cerberus. It’s true government isn’t always us, but it is the only player that allows any say at all.
Somerville
Don’t know if any body has already mentioned this but after looking at the Palin map with the ‘crosshairs’ marking the various targeted Dems, I had another image pop into my head.
Use Google Images and search for “Aryan Cross”
I ain’t talking swastika here – do the search and see what you think.
priscianus jr
Instead of trying to figure out their reasoning, or lack of same, you should realize that they are all psychopaths. If you would just zero in on that, you’d understand the whole thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy