Sen. Coburn: Pres, Congress "earned" death threats.

[Patrick Degan]

Appeal to Motive Fallacy, as well as rank bullshit. How typical of you.

Very impressive, the way you sidestep any requirement of evidence by simply launching an ad hominem attack.

Very unimpressive, the way you deny your responsibility for fallacious argument by simple handwaving.

If you're telling me you're not bitter, then how is it that you can't even hold a civil conversation, but rush beyond judgment to fling verbal excrement? You can't even behave in a civil manner, but you want me to believe that you aren't antagonistic. Fat chance.

Continuing dishonesty tends to engender that sort of reaction in me. Again, you have learned absolutely nothing from seven years of getting your sorry ass kicked in on these boards.

Demonstrable observation, not "assertion". Learn the difference.

Determined using what metric? Deviating from what baseline? Even Michael Steel, chairman of the Republican National Committee, barely ranks among registered Republicans and right-leaning Americans in polls inquiring who speaks for the Republican Party.

Determined using the method of actually seeing what the fuck is out there. Determined by seeing how Republican members of congress and Republican senators are using the same script as Sarah Palin's in denouncing Obama's alleged "death panels" in floor debate. Determined by seeing how each of these teabagger protests have followed the same fucking script from venue to venue to venue. You observe the same phenomena enough times and you can actually detect a pattern.

You're clearly defining "hijacked" as "advocating positions and policies that I, Deegan, dislike quite a lot." The idea that a party has been "hijacked" presumes that there is, in fact, a position that it must, or ought to hold.

Pardon me, but are you insane? Are you actually attempting to float the proposition that a political party has no obligation or necessity to hold a position to define itself? Or is this just another attempt at a bullshit dodge so you don't actually have to take responsibility for the position you're trying to defend.

I can label, and have labeled, them as people who have either acquiesced in the takeover of their party by extremists or have actively supported and abetted the takeover of the party by extremists (such as the very GOP senators and congressmen who, on floor debates, cheerfully repeat Sarah Palin's "death panel" bullshit instead of dismissing it for the obvious insanity that it is). Your strawmandering does not erase that, no matter how much you really really really wish it did.

Once again, you insist that every Republican has a personal responsibility to toe the line precisely as it suits you.

Strawman.

People have better things to do than call into radio shows and tell somebody their behavior is childish or disgusting. You yourself routinely prove that there is no Republican lawmakers' monopoly on acting the bile-driven ass. I don't regularly don armor to come and play your nanny.

Style-over-Substance Fallacy.

Also, let the record show that you've failed - at all - to speak to the point that all of these television and radio appearances are a form of public theatre in which participants are selected precisely because of the outrageous things they are likely to say. Spectacle sells. I'm not going to waste my breath with FOX News.

I've failed because you personally declare that I have? No, I don't think so. It's demonstrable that the current of rhetoric on FoxNoise and Right Wing propaganda radio has been driving the extremists into further froths of manufactured rage which has led to at least one actual murder of an abortion doctor by a fanatic who kept listening to O'Really's blather about "Tiller the Killer". In response, you handwave. How predictable.

I've explained before how it is that people have come to believe, honestly, that death panels will be a natural outgrowth of government-run healthcare: a combination of false assumptions about what will emerge at the nexus of cost-cutting and liberal views toward end-of-life solutions.

They've "come to believe it", you fucking moron, because major-league Republicans are repeating that lie endlessly. You keep pretending that there is no causal relationship at work here.

Odd, isn't it? The very party which can organise itself to win elections and generate block-opposition to Obama suddenly cannot organise itself to slap down the very extremists who are now defining the party.

You're repeating yourself

Sometimes necesssary when talking to the intellectually-limited. Perhaps I should also try using simpler words for your benefit as well.

and dodging the point completely.

Look who's talking.

It isn't a question of organization; it's a matter of whether a man in Pretoria is responsible for the ten seconds of idiocy spouted by a man in Seattle. You insist that some moral requirement exists compelling the former to take up intellectual arms against the latter -- even when he can see no reason to think it matters.

No, it's a matter of whether a political party and it's active members, especially those in elected office and therefore having access to the public pulpit, have any responsibility toward what is said in the public sphere. When you've got a major figure in the party spewing outright lunacy about "death panels", the responsible position is to call the bitch on her lunacy, not repeat it in floor debate in the Senate or House chamber. Only you can attempt to twist the issue into knots to deny what anybody past high school should understand: the concept of responsible behaviour.

Why should anybody feel compelled to reply to Sarah Palin's horseshit? Because lies must be challenged. They cannot simply go unanswered. Especially when they bear upon debate which affects the future lives of millions of Americans. Are you really so far gone that this basic equation is beyond your dimmest comprehension?

Lies only matter when they are significant. Fear of death panels? That's real. Sarah Palin? A light-weight with virtually zero credibility even among her own party - a tabloid sensation.

Fear of death-panels is manufactured horseshit and fundamentally dishonest, you endlessly dissembling pile of shit.

Millions of Republicans don't believe that "death panels" are lies. Once again, we go back to this sad situation in which you seem unable to accept that people who hold opinions different from your own have actually come to different conclusions after looking at the same set of facts.

Except they have not come to conclusions based on looking at facts, they've had paranoia stoked by outright lies about what is actually in the text of HR3200.

How convenient, as it allows you to dodge the issue and absolve Republicans of either their apathy or their complicity in the rise of Right Wing extremism within their ranks.

Arguments you continue to make by assertion, ignoring the possibility that these Republicans may see nothing wrong, or else dismiss the militia types as wackos who wouldn't be dissuaded by their disapproval in the first place.

No, arguments based on observable evidence, dissembler. Shall I have to repeat it for you again? Probably will have to, since you're now well underway with your latest Wall-of-Ignorance construction project.

I have observation on my side. I'm sorry if this eludes your feeble intellectual grasp.

Observation of what?

I see you've done nothing to correct that reading-comprehension problem of yours that we identified several years ago on the various Iraq WMD threads.

I see. You're going to play your "absolute evidence NOW or no-proof" game yet again. Seven years of getting your sorry ass kicked in these forums and you still haven't learned a fucking thing.

I certainly agree with Mr. Krugman's position. Fox News, The Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh are irresponsible. I agree that statements like those could, and do, inflame violent extremists. In Beck's case, a boycott, then, would have merit. However, my question was two-fold. Have you got statistics proving that the average viewer of Fox News is in sympathy with the armed "solution" purveyed by militia organizations?

No, your question was goalpost-moving. We now have a clear situation in this country in which the Right have excluded all avenues of news and information from their viewing and listening other than those of Right Wing sources, absorbing only Right Wing messages and "information" and being presented with increasingly hysterical propaganda about Obama.

Interesting, too, that Krugman's evidence regarding actual Republican leaders. Many Americans do count Obama's policies to be a flavor of socialism. They think he's interested in doing more along those lines. I see no reason why the RNC shouldn't say that. It's political exaggeration - the same kind of thing that Democrats did when they called Bush "fascist." Orwell would be rolling in his grave. But is there importance in conveying things the way people see them? Yes, there is. One shouldn't purvey blatant falsehoods. However, the art of politics is exaggeration. I'll criticize your characterization of George Bush as fascist. Will I ask you not to say it so that you don't agitate the lunatic fringe? That's going too far toward framing our discourse to benefit people who aren't anchored in reality in the first place. Voight's speech was full of hyperbole, too. It's no different than on this board. Should Mike go off-line so we don't inflame radicals?

Golden Mean Fallacy. The messages from the left and those of the right clearly are not equal in terms of dishonesty or vitriol. Nobody on the left was ever spewing nonsense about how conservatives "need to know that they can be killed" —unlike Ann Coulter who once said exactly that about liberals. The Left have not, for all their rhetoric about the Republican party, spent years characterising them as traitors and enemies of "normal" Americans the way the Right have been doing regarding liberals and liberalism for the last 25 years and with increasing rabidity. Nor have left-wingers been actually murdering right-wingers, unlike the killers of George Tiller and Alan Berg.

Critics point to popular mainstream cable figures like Lou Dobbs on CNN, who once falsely claimed that illegal Mexican immigrants are spreading leprosy in the US, and Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly, who repeatedly referred to "Tiller the Baby Killer" when talking about Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, who was gunned down two weeks ago in his church.

Dobbs' statements appear more like an honest mistake than racist fearmongering. O'Reilly's characterization of Tiller, while crude and pathetic, isn't anything new or unusual from opponents of abortion. "Baby killer" has lost much of its "oomph" since Vietnam. Otherwise, Jonsson's article is without the evidence required to make your case.

Dobbs' statements were not only fact-free but outright racist: leprosy is rare now and his statement characterised an entire group as a threat based on zero evidence. Not an honest mistake at all. As for O'Really, while it's common for antiabortion partisans to toss "baby killer" around, it is quite a different matter for a man with a nationally-televised "news and editorial commentary" show to not only toss that phrase so casually but to specifically identify one particular figure with that epithet, who is subsequently murdered by a member of O'Really's audience.

Which is actually no excuse, no matter how much you dearly wish to believe it is, since political phenomena do not occur in a vacuum. Nor does it defeat the observation that the party itself —active membership and leadership both— has either acquiesced in or encouraged it's extremist tilt.

It's every excuse, unless we're going to start organizing our political behavior around your every whim. One of the principles of political organization in this country is that people can opt out. That's exactly what quite a few of them choose to do. It also means that talking about "the Republican Party," and people supposedly in sympathy with FOX News and the like, is never a science.

While "opting out" is an option regarding politics in this country, responsibility for spoken words and actions undertaken under a party's organisational banner or in it's name is not an option, that is unless we accept the idea that moral imbecility is now a valid political principle.

[Patrick Degan]

Since Comical Axi has taken up the bizarre position that there is somehow, someway, no connection between Right Wing hate media and not only the manufactured outrage generated by outright lies about Barack Obama and the healthcare reform bill but also the general rise of Right Wing extremism, intimidation, and even murderous violence, and also the equally bizarre position that Republican political figures somehow, someway, neither have responsibility nor even any reason to counter the outright bullshit being spewed by people in their own leadership and organs of communication, and that the very phenomena we're presently witnessing in this society is somehow, someway, occurring in a vacuum with no causal relationship whatsoever at work, it's time to let him have a look at inconvenient reality which, somehow, someway, he will just handwave away from the site of his latest Wall-of-Ignorance construction project:

First, an extract from the 28 July, 2008 Knoxville News Sentinel story of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church shootings:

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

Adkisson told Still that "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."

Adkisson told officers he left the house unlocked for them because "he expected to be killed during the assault."

Inside the house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday's mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of "the liberal movement," and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he stated his "hatred of the liberal movement," Owen said. "Liberals in general, as well as gays."

Adkisson said he also was frustrated about not being able to obtain a job, Owen said.

The letter, recovered from Adkisson's black 2004 Ford Escape, which was parked in the church's parking lot at 2931 Kingston Pike, indicates he had been planning the shooting for about a week.

"He fully expected to be killed by the responding police," the police chief said.

Owen said Adkisson specifically targeted the church for its beliefs, rather than a particular member of the congregation.

"It appears that church had received some publicity regarding its liberal stance," the chief said. The church has a "gays welcome" sign and regularly runs announcements in the News Sentinel about meetings of the Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays meetings at the church.

Owen said Adkisson's stated hatred of the liberal movement was not necessarily connected to any hostility toward Christianity or religion per say, but rather the political advocacy of the church.

The church's Web site states that it has worked for "desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women's rights and gay rights" since the 1950s. Current ministries involve emergency aid for the needy, school tutoring and support for the homeless, as well as a cafe that provides a gathering place for gay and lesbian high-schoolers.

Next, from The Rachael Maddow Show of 7 August, 2009 featuring her interview with former Christian Fundamentalist Franklin Shaeffer Jr. on Right Wing Fundamentalist hate propaganda and additionally the connections between Right Wing media and the increasingly rabid anti-healthcare reform teabaggers:



We now move on to a segement from Bill Moyers Journal from 25 September, 2008 also discussing the subject of how words mean things and have consequences (19 mn video):



Oh, and as for Sarah Palin, the "dying star" of the GOP who's word allegedly doesn't mean anything, is not listened to, and somehow, someway has no connection to the supposed "genuine fears" of "death panels", we have what she said here:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Sure, nobody listens, right? Sure, Palin is insignificant in the debate... wait, what's that? What's that? Why, here's Senator Chuck Grassley at an Iowa townhall meeting just a few days ago:

There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life," Grassley said. "And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

And, of course, it's merely a wholly unforseen coincidence that the Death Panel Myth™ is being repeated by the mouthpieces at FoxNoise:

Gingrich on Palin's assertion: "[P]eople are very concerned" because "you're asking us to trust the government." Interviewing former House Speaker and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos cited Palin's Facebook comment as an example of "opponents ... spreading the idea that the president's plan will encourage euthanasia," even though "[t]he only thing in the bill is that it would allow Medicare to pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on end-of-life issues." Gingrich responded, in part: "I think people are very concerned when you start talking about cost controls, that a bureaucracy -- we don't -- you're asking us to trust the government. Now, I'm not talking about the Obama administration. I'm talking about the government. You're asking us to decide that we believe that the government is to be trusted. We know people who have said routinely, well, you're going to have to make decisions. You're going to have to decide. Communal standards, historically, is a very dangerous concept." Gingrich later added, "[T]he bill's 1,000 pages of setting up mechanisms. It sets up 45 different agencies. It has all sorts of panels. You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in -- in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards." [ABC's This Week, 8/09/09]

Malkin: "What death panels? Oh, yeah, those death panels." Conservative columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin wrote on her website: "Sarah Palin's warning about the effects of Obamacare on the elderly and infirm have been met with derision and ridicule. William Jacobson has a good round-up. Meanwhile, the effects of socialized medicine in Britain -- engineered by government-run cost-cutting panels on which Obamacare would be modeled -- continue to wreak havoc on the elderly and infirm." Malkin concluded, "Death panels? What death panels? Oh, yeah, those death panels." [MichelleMalkin.com, 8/9/09]

Kilmeade adopts Palin's "death panel" terminology to advance end-of-life care myth. On Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said, "[E]veryone's talking about seniors, and they're talking about the middle class and affordable health care. If the upper class is paying for the next two classes, and are seniors going to be in front of the death panel? And then just as you think, OK, that's ridiculous, then you realize there's provisions in there that seniors in the last lap of their life will be sitting there going to a panel possibly discussing what the best thing for them is." [Fox & Friends, 8/10/09]

Beck on Palin's "death panel" claim: "I believe it to be true." On his radio show, Fox host Glenn Beck stated, "So, why is there no more discussion than there is on Sarah Palin and what she said over the weekend that there would be ... [a] death panel for her son Trig. That's quite a statement. I believe it to be true, but that's quite a statement." [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/10/09]

Napolitano called Palin's claim "a legitimate concern from a fair reading of this bill." On his Fox News Radio show, Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano said:

NAPOLITANO: I mean, at first, I thought that Governor Palin was a little over the top over the weekend when she put on her Facebook the potential for panels of health care professionals from the government to talk to you about suicide and euthanasia. But if you read segments of this bill, the language is so loose, it allows the Department of Health and Human Services to set up panels of experts to advise doctors and patients on various things.

Think about it. If it's federal money, the federal government can say, we're not gonna give Grandma a new knee, or Grandma a new kidney. We're just gonna give her painkillers. We're gonna save that money for that knee or that kidney for somebody who's 25 instead of somebody who's 85. That is power that Americans have never conferred on the government. That was Governor Palin's concern, and that is a legitimate concern from a fair reading of this bill, which most members of Congress have not done.[Brian & The Judge, 8/10/09

—to be constantly recirculated in an endless loop to stoke what Comical Axi calls an "honest" belief "that death panels will be a natural outgrowth of government-run healthcare: a combination of false assumptions about what will emerge at the nexus of cost-cutting and liberal views toward end-of-life solutions" instead of what it actually is —demagogery.

[Darth Wong]

Hey Kast:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/20/ ... index.html

Republican opponents respond that the emotional reaction is due to Democratic efforts to rush through legislation that amounts to a government takeover of the health care system. They say the proposals eventually will lead to a system that rations treatment based on an individual's ability to contribute to society.

"We've actually started a national debate about exactly what is at stake here," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said Wednesday.

Speaking on MSNBC, Steele said the town hall meetings across the country are reflecting that debate. However, when asked directly about one of the most controversial statements by some Republicans -- that a House bill would create so-called "death panels" to decide who gets treatment -- Steele refused to acknowledge that such language was misinformation.

I suppose you will say that Steele lacks sufficient "proximity" to the GOP as well now? Just like Grassley and Palin? You'll repeat your bullshit claim that Republicans cannot be accused of being tied to the insane fearmongering and "death panel" bullshit which in turn inflames the hatred and violent impulses of militia as you already admitted?

Or maybe you'll repeat your mantra that silence proves nothing ... even when the party chairman is directly confronted about the issue.

[erik_t]

Palin is a dying star in the GOP? Two days ago, a Marist poll was released showing her getting 20% in a 2012 GOP primary matchup (the highest value was Romney at 21%), and 73% of Republicans think well of her.

Why do we let this jackoff keep lying through his teeth over and over and over? There's no place for discourse with Axis.