Free Speech and Inflammatory Rhetoric

[WinePusher]

With the recent tragedy in Tuscon Arizona, many on the left have been blaming this on conservatives and their supposed "inflammatory rhetoric." Conservative leaders such as Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Sharon Angle and others have been their primary targets. They have focused particular attention on Palins bullet map and the call to use "second amendment remedies" by Sharon Angle.

But let's look a little closer at this. The DNC used a bullet map similar to Palin, people on the left like Ed Schultz and Mike Malloy have called for the death of some presidents and conservative leaders, a documentary was made about killing Bush by a leftist, and Obama himself has made inflammatory remarks with violent connotations. The left also was so concerned about jumping to conclusions about Fort Hood, but jumps to conclusions about the political affiliations of this psychopath in the absense of evidence.

1) Are second amendment remedies to problems ever justified? Remember that the point of the 2nd amendment was to combat a tyrannical government.

2) Are conservatives to blame for this?

3) Are liberals being hypocrties by jumping to conclusions over this, and not jumping to conclusions over Fort Hood. Are they also being hypocrites for charging conservatives with violent and inflammatory rhetoric while leaving their own ranks uncondemned?

[East of Eden]

Sure, Fox can be trusted...to tell you what you want to hear, but not what truth is. They distort, you believe.

Grumpy

I understand you prefer the old days then the biased, liberal MSM presstitutes had the playing field all to themselves.

[nygreenguy]

First, I would like you to list the specific examples of the Stuff Obama and Mr. Shultz said, and until I see that...

The following is taken from another forum where another user documented the violent speech that comes out of liberal talkshow hosts and politicians.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun ... Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl." --- then candidate, currently President of the United States Barack Obama.

This is absolutely different from what those on the right are saying. Barack used a metaphor.. Saying stuff like second amendment solutions and bringing an M-16 are NOT metaphors. These people really mean guns, and used in a violent way.

Ed Schultz Threatens to 'Torch' 30 Rock, Then Breaks Down in Tears
...
"I'm going to torch this [expletive deleted] place!" he screamed during a meeting in the MSNBC newsroom according to the New York Post. "[expletive deleted]!" he added for good measure.
...
According to an unnamed source, Schutlz was dragged into a meeting with MSNBC president Phil Griffin, where Schultz was told that he would be fired if he did it again. He broke down in tears.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/lachlan-ma ... down-tears

Ed said that in a meeting. Hes not going on his show, or to rallies inciting violence in others.

Once again, another failed comparison.

MSNBC is equivalent in every single way shape and form to Fox, except ratings. Liberal Radio Hosts such as Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, and Ed Schultz are equivalent in every way shape and form with Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin, except ratings. The left also has bitter partisans on their airwaves except their power is small because they have a small audience.

You have yet to prove it. Until you prove that they incite violence and use violent rhetoric like the right does, your point is moot.

Opened up a debate for what? You mean over violent and over the top rhetoric? If we're going to debate that then we'll need some solutions and I can see none that will be efficent and not stifle free speech.

Thats ok, conservatives never have been know for being problem solvers.

[East of Eden]

The following is taken from another forum where another user documented the violent speech that comes out of liberal talkshow hosts and politicians.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun ... Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl." --- then candidate, currently President of the United States Barack Obama.

This is absolutely different from what those on the right are saying. Barack used a metaphor.[/quote]

So when conservatives use metaphors, they're not really metaphors?

Ed said that in a meeting. Hes not going on his show, or to rallies inciting violence in others.

Once again, another failed comparison.

Ed Shultz needs treatment badly. Here's an Ed Schultz classic from his show:

SCHULTZ: You're damn right Dick Cheney's heart's a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him.

Is that a metaphor?

Thats ok, conservatives never have been know for being problem solvers.

Here's a conservative in the act of solving a big problem:

[nygreenguy]

So when conservatives use metaphors, they're not really metaphors?

When they do. Problem is, their distinction between metaphor and a suggestion isnt that clear. "2nd amendment solutions" is pretty hard to take "metaphorically"

Ed Shultz needs treatment badly. Here's an Ed Schultz classic from his show:

SCHULTZ: You're damn right Dick Cheney's heart's a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him.

Is that a metaphor?

Its clearly so absurd, its not meant to be taken seriously. This is nothing to do with inciting violence, and it makes much more sense if you look into the overall context of the statements.

Stupid? Yes. Inciting violence? Not at all.

Here's a conservative in the act of solving a big problem:

Reagan had not a thing to do with that wall coming down. It was going to come down regardless of what that idiot said. He knew it was coming down and decided to politicize it.

[Grumpy]

East of Eden

I understand you prefer the old days then the biased, liberal MSM presstitutes had the playing field all to themselves.

I do miss the old days before Rupert Murdock slithered into the country. While newsmen and women might have had a bias, they were not deliberately lying about the facts. Fox lies.

Of course, I remember Walter Cronkite and integrity. Yes, I miss those days.

Grumpy

[East of Eden]

Reagan had not a thing to do with that wall coming down. It was going to come down regardless of what that idiot said. He knew it was coming down and decided to politicize it.

Nonsense. I well remember liberal morons being appalled at that statement, you know, Reagan was 'saber rattling', a 'warmonger', trying to start WWIII, and all the rest of their idiocy. Even Russians who were on the scene then say Reagan had a lot to do with our Cold War victory. Apparently you know more than they.

Now that was real change.

[Grumpy]

East of Eden

The Soviet Union fell because our military industrial complex was better at financial warfare, they just could not keep up with our spending ability. Saying Ronald Reagan had much to do with that seem equal to saying a rooster made the sun come up.

Ask yourself why, if we won the war and became the only super power, we are spending more on our military than we ever did then? There are fewer men in uniform, but the weapons systems arguably useful in a cold war world are more expensive and more gold plated than ever before. Cost effectiveness would have had fleets of A 10s in Iraq/Afghanistan(at about 5 million apiece), not stealth fighters, bombers and F 22s(all at near a billion apiece on average). Yet the A 10s are Guard bait and Congress has trouble cancelling an amphibious tank that the Marines say is obsolete in any modern battlefield and a huge waste of resources. And remember the trouble they had getting proper armour for the men? I guess the vest makers just didn't have enough juice on Capital Hill, they were small fry.

Capitalism won the Cold War. That the Soviets threw their hands up when Reagan came into office was a done deal by the time of the election. Gorbachev had as much to do with it as Reagan. Reagan's Star Wars was just the straw that finally broke the Soviet's back, the people then tore down those walls.

Superman is a fantasy, and I never saw Ron in a cape.

Grumpy

[East of Eden]

East of Eden

The Soviet Union fell because our military industrial complex was better at financial warfare, they just could not keep up with our spending ability. Saying Ronald Reagan had much to do with that seem equal to saying a rooster made the sun come up.

Ask yourself why, if we won the war and became the only super power, we are spending more on our military than we ever did then? There are fewer men in uniform, but the weapons systems arguably useful in a cold war world are more expensive and more gold plated than ever before. Cost effectiveness would have had fleets of A 10s in Iraq/Afghanistan(at about 5 million apiece), not stealth fighters, bombers and F 22s(all at near a billion apiece on average). Yet the A 10s are Guard bait and Congress has trouble cancelling an amphibious tank that the Marines say is obsolete in any modern battlefield and a huge waste of resources. And remember the trouble they had getting proper armour for the men? I guess the vest makers just didn't have enough juice on Capital Hill, they were small fry.

Capitalism won the Cold War. That the Soviets threw their hands up when Reagan came into office was a done deal by the time of the election. Gorbachev had as much to do with it as Reagan. Reagan's Star Wars was just the straw that finally broke the Soviet's back, the people then tore down those walls.

Superman is a fantasy, and I never saw Ron in a cape.

Grumpy

Here's an article from Slate, not exactly a conservative source, that disagrees with you:

Ron and Mikhail's Excellent Adventure
How Reagan won the Cold War.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, June 9, 2004, at 7:29 PM ET
So, did Ronald Reagan bring on the end of the Cold War? Well, yes. Recently declassified documents leave no doubt about the matter. But how did he accomplish it? Through hostile rhetoric and a massive arms buildup, which the Soviets knew they couldn't match, as Reagan's conservative champions contend? Or through a second-term conversion to detente and disarmament, as some liberal historians, including Slate's David Greenberg, argue?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Gorbachev factor"too often overlooked in this week of Reagan-hagiography"was crucial. If Yuri Andropov's kidneys hadn't given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko had lived a few years longer, Reagan's bluster and passion would have come to naught; the Cold War would probably have raged on for years; indeed, Reagan's rhetoric and actions might have aggravated tensions.

Still, at some point, some Kremlin leader would have had to mount a major reassessment of the situation. The Soviet system was dysfunctional; its empire was collapsing; the cupboard was bare. And Reagan's surging military budgets, without question, brought this internal crisis to a head.

Here was Gorbachev speaking at a session of the Politburo in October 1986, days before he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to offer Reagan a groundbreaking disarmament plan, including a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals. If he didn't propose these cuts, Gorbachev told his colleagues:

[W]e will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities. If the new round [of an arms race] begins, the pressures on our economy will be unbelievable.

This was not a sudden development. Three years later, in a November 1989 phone conversation with Egon Krenz, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party, Gorbachev recalled when he first became a member of the Politburo and some of its members wanted to look at the state budget: "But Andropov said, 'Do not get in there, it is not your business.' Now we know why he said so. It was not a budget, but hell knows what." The precise effect of Reagan's "Star Wars" speech"his high-profile and insanely impractical plan to build an antimissile "shield""is hard to gauge. On the one hand, documents reveal that Gorbachev asked Yevgeny Velikhov, his chief science adviser, to evaluate whether Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, as it was formally called, would pose a threat. Velikhov replied that the project was fanciful and that the Soviets could build countermeasures"or deploy additional offensive missiles to saturate the Star Wars system"much more cheaply than the United States could construct additional defenses. However, at the same time, perhaps succumbing to pressure from his own military-industrial complex, Velikhov advised that it might be a good idea to build more missiles, just in case.

This analysis may have calmed Gorbachev a bit, but not entirely. At a Politburo meeting in March 1986, Gorbachev said, "Maybe we should just stop being afraid of the SDI! Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But [the Americans] are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI. That is why they are putting pressure on us"to exhaust us."

If somebody says, "Maybe we should stop being afraid of the bogeyman," it usually means he is afraid of the bogeyman. It's pretty clear that in the spring of 1986 Gorbachev and all those around with him were at least a little afraid of the SDI bogeyman.

The next month, April '86, brought the Chernobyl disaster, which, among other things, made Gorbachev realize that information had to circulate more openly (the beginnings of glasnost) and made him think that the ultimate enemy may be nukes themselves.

He didn't realize it, but Reagan viewed nukes the same way. Samuel Wells, a Cold War historian at the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has examined all the relevant documents, put it this way in a phone conversation: "His staff, for all of the first term and most of the second, kept this out of the press, but Reagan was terribly, deeply opposed to nuclear weapons"he thought they were immoral."

Reagan's vision of SDI"a shield that would render nuclear weapons obsolete"was scientifically preposterous but, by all accounts, genuine. Many of his hawkish aides (most notably the still-active Richard Perle) scoffed at it; they liked SDI because it would scare the Russians and, if it worked, might give us nuclear superiority. But Reagan believed what he said.

At their face-to-face summit of October 1986 in Reykjavik, Reagan went far beyond Gorbachev's proposal of a 50 percent strategic-arms cut. To the alarm of some aides, who were not let in on the discussion, he suggested that the two sides get rid of nuclear weapons altogether and jointly build an SDI system to guard against a nuclear revival. Gorbachev initially dismissed the idea. "I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously," the minutes (which were declassified by the Soviets 12 years ago) show him saying. "You don't want to share even petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools, or equipment for dairies, while sharing SDI would be a second American revolution"and revolutions do not occur all that often." Reagan replied, "If I thought that SDI could not be shared, I would have rejected it myself."

The Reykjavik talks finally fizzled. Gorbachev said he'd accept the zero-nukes plan if Reagan pledged not to test nuclear weapons in outer space (a crucial element of SDI). Reagan wouldn't accept that condition.

However, Gorbachev returned to Moscow persuaded that Reagan"who had earlier struck him as a "caveman""honestly had no intention of launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, and he made this point clear to the Politburo. He could continue with perestroika, which involved not just economic reforms but"as a necessary precondition"massive defense cuts and a transformation of international relations. He needed assurances of external security in order to move forward with this domestic upheaval. Reagan gave him those reassurances. Subsequent conversations between his foreign minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, and Secretary of State George Shultz reinforced his confidence.

In the last couple years of the Reagan administration, Reagan would propose extravagant measures in arms reductions. His hawkish aides would go along with them, thinking the Soviets would reject them (and the United States would win a propaganda victory). Then, to the surprise of everyone (except perhaps Reagan, who meant the proposals without cynicism), Gorbachev would accept them.

In the end, Reagan and Gorbachev needed each other. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold. Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that made his foes and skeptics in the Politburo think the cutbacks might be worth it.

Gorbachev wasn't the only decisive presence. If Reagan hadn't been president"if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him or if Reagan had died and George H.W. Bush taken his place"Gorbachev almost certainly would not have received the push or reinforcement that he needed. Those other politicians would have been too traditional, too cautious, to push such radical proposals (zero nukes and SDI) or to take Gorbachev's radicalism at face value. (There's no need to speculate on this point. When Bush Sr. succeeded Reagan in 1989, U.S.-Soviet relations took a huge step backward; it took nearly a year for Bush and his advisers to realize that Gorby was for real.)

The end of the Cold War may be the most oddball chapter in the history of the 20th century. How fitting, then, that the two most oddball leaders, Gorbachev and Reagan, made it come to pass.






As far as your point that the military spends too much and does so unwisely, I agree, but that's pretty much true with whatever government does.

[micatala]

FIrst, I will simply offer my own opinion that Reagan deserves at least a small amount of credit for helping end the Cold War, but I think the major factor was Gorbachev. He was the first Russian leader who had not lived through the horror of WWII, and who did not look at the west as seeking to "finish off what had been left unfinished" at that time.


Back to the civility issue, here is another example of what I would call disappointing political rhetoric.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/2 ... 11774.html

Democratic TN congressmen Cohen uses Nazi analogies in his criticisms of Republican statements on health care.

Have Republicans lied about the health care bill?

Yes.

Is it necessary or helpful to drag in allusions to Hitler's propaganda minister to make this point?

No.

[East of Eden]

FIrst, I will simply offer my own opinion that Reagan deserves at least a small amount of credit for helping end the Cold War, but I think the major factor was Gorbachev. He was the first Russian leader who had not lived through the horror of WWII, and who did not look at the west as seeking to "finish off what had been left unfinished" at that time.

Highly doubtful Gorbachev would have 'surrendered', for lack of a better term, without Reagan's hard consistent pressure on them, all the while being criticized by the left for 'warmongering', etc. To liberals, Reagan demanding that Gorbachev 'Tear this wall' was a 'gaffe'.

Back to the civility issue, here is another example of what I would call disappointing political rhetoric.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/2 ... 11774.html

Democratic TN congressmen Cohen uses Nazi analogies in his criticisms of Republican statements on health care.

Have Republicans lied about the health care bill?

Yes.

Actually, Palin was right about the death panels.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/death-pa ... was-right/

The Democrat lie about the health bill was that it won't add to the deficit. Only if you use Enron accounting.

Is it necessary or helpful to drag in allusions to Hitler's propaganda minister to make this point?

No.

So why hasn;'t Obama repudiated this outrageous statement by a prominent member of his own party? By prominent I mean he's a member of the House, not dogcatcher of Apaloosa County. Was he serious in his Tucson speech?

Here's another example of liberal media bias, if anyone needs one. After the Tucson shooting the MSM targeted conservatives 8-1 over liberals.

http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/reality ... 34318.aspx

The attempted media hit job on Sarah Palin was criminal - there was absolutely nothing to link this kook to her movement. He is a Bush-hating druggie atheist who doesn't listen to talk radio - not exactly the profile of your average Palin fan. This was done immediately after the shooting from the same crowd who said let's not rush to judgement about the motive of the jihadist, 'Allah Akbar' shouting Ft. Hood killer.