Ted Auch

I was recently reading through some postings on Dr. Tiller’s assassination (How do you discern between assassination and murder?) and found the below diatribe from the mouth of George Carlin. As usual Mr. Carlin pretty much nailed it on all fronts.

“Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fk in the first place, huh? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own.

Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fd.” (carlin-diatribe)

Say what you will about 3rd term abortions but the fact remains that there is a sector in this country that is very angry and getting angrier. The Tiller murder reminds me of when I started to see this whole thing begin to come to the surface nationally….It all started with John McCain’s pit bull Sarah Palin and her pandering to “real America”. I remember being very disturbed by her use of the 15minute platform handed her by the Arizona senator. I was even more disturbed that he did not condemn her comments.

I contend now given Mr. Tiller’s untimely death, the mowing down of three police officers in Pittsburgh and related hate crimes blood is on the hands of of Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain, along with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They knew the consequence(s) of their words, knew the vulnerability of their audience, and also knew that the latent sense of racism that pervaded their rallies and that such comments would only stoke the dark side of there constituents.This type of mentality doesn’t belong in politics but seems more suited to The Jerry Springer Show. These types of fissures are coin of the realm in right-wing thinktanks and what amazes me is how flippantly people like Mr. Limbaugh and Karl Rove throw around words like socialism and patriotism. We are still in W’s “with us or against us” mentality in this country and nuance seems to have been kicked to the curb oh so subtly.

The individual responsible for killings in Pittsburgh “…feared that the Obama Administration would take away his guns.“(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6069944.ece; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/us/06pittsburgh.html?ref=global-home; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/us/07pittsburgh.html?ref=us)

It seems Mr. Strother Martin’s Cool Hand Luke character Captain was prescient when he said

“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.”

We need some north/south cross-pollination with dialogue centered on understanding the exact mechanisms used by the the Political (PIC) and Media Industrial Complex(MIC) on the right and left to divide and conquer us! They are using our own fears and more importantly our growing apathy and naivete against us. They are doing it quite well and even in this tough economic time President Obama and DC writ large are telling us to get out there and consume. Isn’t this a similar message to that forwarded by Bush immediately following 9/11? The answer is yes and the idea that our savings rate may creep over 6% is very scary to the PIC and MIC as they rely on our insatiable appetite for stuff to power our economy to the tune of 72% of GDP.

As long as we remain divided we will remain perpetually subservient. This doesn’t mean we need to take up arms but rather we must pursue dialogue without ad hominem attacks understanding that religous, social, and economic diversity the engine that drives productivity doesn’t need to be scrapped but rather is in desperate need of refueling.