From Anger To Action?

For those of you like me who are staring at the U.S. in horror and fascination after a couple recent political shootings--the murder of a Kansas abortion doctor and the killing of a guard at a holocaust museum--here's a relevant article on Salon by Joan Walsh. Walsh explores the connection between the venom of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of right-wing television's angry men and the murder of abortion doctors and attacks on holocaust museums.

Here's a longish excerpt:

And there's clearly been an uptick in rhetoric suggesting that white men are having their rights abridged by the Obama administration, especially since his pick of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. In a debate with Buchanan a couple of weeks ago, he told me that what was happening to white men was exactly what happened to black men — he didn't give me any examples of lynching — and that it was open season on white men. Wealthy Sen. Lindsay Graham suggested an average white guy like himself wouldn't get a fair shake from Sotomayor, and now even the new face of the GOP, Michael Steele, has said the same thing. If I were a marginal, unemployed, angry, racist white man right now, I'd be hearing a lot of mainstream conservative support for my point of view. Can that help create a climate for more violence? I don't know. I hope not, but I don't know.

Full story here. Good reading if you're interested in the ongoing psychosis of conservative, white, Christian America.