Posted on 03/31/2010 9:52:13 AM PDT by presidio9
This Week in Progressive Media
Who is more of a threat, left-wing crazies or right-wing crazies?
For its coverage of the Hutaree Militia story, Firedoglake.com carries Rachel Maddows extensive reporting of the FBI infiltration and capture of the members of the violent Christian militia group. Maddow tries to gauge the seriousness of their threat, describing the oddly named militia as a strange combination of absurd and scary with names out of a Calvin and Hobbes strip but spends 10 minutes exploring who they are and the charges against them. Are they representative of other right-wing groups? A guest on her show, reporter Ed Brayton of the Michigan Messenger Web site, describes them as very dangerous but also so fringe that they constitute the wingnuts wingnuts.
The question of who is worse, right-wing or left-wing radicals, and how to label radicals cropped up again most recently when pundits raced to describe recent Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell as right wing and conservatives lashed back that he was left wing. In a Washington Post op-ed, Eugene Robinson argues that for the past few decades the most serious threat of domestic terrorism has come from those who draw inspiration and rhetoric from the far right.
It is disingenuous for mainstream purveyors of incendiary far-right rhetoric to dismiss groups such as the Hutaree by saying that there are crazies on both sides. This simply is not true. There was a time when the far left was a spawning ground for political violence. The first big story I covered was the San Francisco trial of heiress Patricia Hearst, who had been kidnapped and eventually co-opted by the Symbionese Liberation Armya far-left group whose philosophy was as apocalyptic and incoherent as that of the Hutaree. There are aging radicals in Cuba
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.newsweek.com ...
By far the left wing crazies. WTO riots, convention riots, Copenhagen riots to name just a few. Name a right wing riot.
Why should Eugene’s POV surprise anyone? For Stalin, the enemies were all on the right, too.
Not to mention the fact that if you go back in history and research evey presidential assassin, all of them were Democrat/Anarchist/left wing nut jobs, except John Hinkley who was just a mental case in the clinical sense.
Also, I can't remember the last time someone on the right showed up at a polling center with a weapon, presumably to intimidate other voters.
The Left has far more of them and they are far more violent. Most of the time, they enshrine them in governments.
cf. Che Guevara, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Fidel, Assad, etc. etc.
Only the logic of the propaganda arm of the DNC could come up with this. One group of loonies indicts the entire right wing. Idiots!
Once again NewsWeak demonstrates it leftist bias.
Extremists sitting in the White House, Congress and Czarships are far more dangerous to the Republic than a handfull of radicals anywhere.
Newsweak
Actually, the truth that no one here on FR wants to admit is that all of these so-called "wing-nuts" are libertarians. As such, they are aligned with the "Progressives" on some issues, and to the right of Conservatives on others.
The timing of this bust is so fortuitous, that a part of me is going to be rooting for these nutjobs to walk.
Politics isn’t a straight left, right line. It is more of a circle and the nuts meet up at somepoint. Unfortunately, the Democratic party has moved closer and closer to the extreme meetup point.
How are they violent? The FBI CLAIMS that they threatened to kill someone--a Muslim or a cop, they haven't quite got their story straight yet. But how can they be described as "violent"? They haven't killed anyone, or beat up anyone, or broken any windows, or burned any cars, as far as I've heard. If they had, I'm sure the FBI and the media would be telling us all about it. I looked up their website as soon as they mentioned the word "Hutaree." Personally, I'd be a bit inclined to call them kooks. But violent? Nonsense. There's been a fair amount of political violence around the world recently. All of it came from the left, or from Muslims, as far as I've heard.
Left wing crazies are flying planes into buildings( Joseph Stack), murdering people on university campuses( Amy Bishop), threatening to murder congress members( Norman Leboon) and the list goes on.
Another example why Newsweek is a crap magazine and the opinions contained therein are worthless.
Newsweak: “...because we say so”. < /pravda media >
The reason this type of miscreant gets more media play is that it suits the political agenda of writers like Maddow.
I don't disagree. I just think that the sake of journalistic integrity demands that they stop being referred to as "hard-core right wing." They're not.
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