Adkisson News Watch

First of all, a possibly related story. A man burst into Democratic Party Headquarters in Little Rock Arkansas and opened fire, killing the party Chairman. Police don't have an information on the motivations of the suspect, so it could be totally unrelated. But you'll forgive me if I'm a little twitchy about Democratic Party Headquarters getting shot up.

Secondly we have an article by Warner Todd Huston at News Busters that is remarkable for it's callousness and idiotic analysis. It opens by pretending that Rush Limbaugh shot up that Church in Knoxville. Har har har. Yeah apparently we liberals are idiots for seeing a link between this act and conservative rhetoric.

But, even her example of Limbaugh's words are a far cry from advocating murder. For that matter, O'Reilly, Hannity, et al, all frame their discussions in the political arena, none of them saying that people should do anything other than vote the right way.

Even Savage, renown for saying "liberalism is a mental disorder," has never to my knowledge advocated violence. In fact, if he truly believes that liberals have a mental disorder the solution to that is medical help, not execution! Help, not death. the compassion of wanting to help the sick hardly seems to be a basis for a killing spree.

Yeah let's all take a moment and consider the Compassion of the Savage.

What Huston pays scant attention to in their rhetoric is the use of military imagery and the description of liberals as the enemy. Conservatives like Hannity and Limbaugh portray Democrats and Liberals as enemies to be destroyed. Now they regularly make it clear that they mean that in a rhetorical sense, but the language is still telling. If you believe, as Limbaugh, Hannity, and presumably Huston do, that Liberals are traitors working to weaken and ruin this great nation, that they are conspiring to kill infants, that we want to hand the nation over to it's enemies, well is rhetoric really enough to defeat such evil? If a mind warped by whatever demons lurked in Jim Adkisson's soul latched onto the idea the Democrats are baby-killing America-betrayers, well it's not to hard to predict what would happen.

Poor Huston then pulls out some examples of bad Democrats. Like one Democrat posted a shirt at Cafe Press which had a map and the lines "Save America - Kill Republicans." And there was some Grafitti in New York that said "I Kill Republicans." OK, both are in incredibly bad taste if they are jokes and psychotic if they aren't.

But come on! That's your comeback? That's your example of hateful Liberals? She then talks about how the AFL-CIO described a veto of President Bush's as hurting and killing children; maybe over the top language, but certainly on par with what Hannity is saying right now about Obama. Public figures step into the Arena. They gotta take their lumps. The difference is that Hannity takes time from slamming Obama to slam all Liberals; it's not just Obama that is hateful. It's all liberals; it's all Democrats.