blogger interrupted

When Tim McVeigh bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, it was like a lightning bolt out of the blue for most Americans.  McVeigh’s militia background was a new phenomenon to most Americans, because most Americans weren’t particularly aware of right wing terrorism emerging from right wing extremism.  As it became clear McVeigh was a product of precisely this mutant strain of conservatism, we began to look directly at talk radio, because their words mirrored McVeigh’s.

And Rush Limbaugh in 1995 was at his hypocritical finest.  Limbaugh was in ascendance, feeling his oats, and he was one of the first to leap to the conclusion that Oklahoma City’s dead children were the work of some Palestinian terrorist.  He banged on that right up to the moment white angry male McVeigh was arrested.  As the focus then came toward him and his ilk for creating an atmosphere of paranoia in which McVeigh could find solace for his hate, Limbaugh, and all his progeny, cried foul.

Talkshow hosts strenuously rejected the idea that they might bear some responsibility when members of their audience take such inflammatory rhetoric seriously. Limbaugh wrote a full-page column on the Oklahoma City bombing for Newsweek (5/8/95) headlined, “Why I’m Not to Blame.”

“Those who make excuses for rioters and looters in Los Angeles now seek to blame people who played no role whatsoever in this tragedy,” Limbaugh wrote–a strange complaint from someone who devoted a chapter in his book See, I Told You So to arguing that “Dan Quayle Was Right” to blame the L.A. riots on Murphy Brown.

Fast forward to 2008.  In 2008, unlike 1995, every American has email, internet, and uses the internet for information.   And by 2008, every single American voter had gotten email into their inboxes, every day, mirroring precisely the conspiracy theory nonsense about Barack Obama that conservative talk radio repeated incessantly.  

It was forwarded in a swarm, peer to peer, by Republicans advocating for Republicans, to everyone.  No American could escape it.  Even hard core Democrats got it.  It was in the air, raining down every day in a storm of hate.  Some of us called it out in real time, posted the emails, shed light on it, and begged anyone with some moral authority over the discourse to say something, anything, to make it stop.

If you spread these lies, you will get corrected, publicly, and more importantly, in your own inbox, where you seem to want to fight this battle.

Why?  Because we knew where this would end up.  As I wrote in March, 2008.

The unrelenting hatred that is now being spewed on conservative talk radio and on the internet…is being aimed at the most deep seeded racial divide in our country’s history, and is inevitably going to give the lowest forms of humanity in our country a permission slip to act out. In a bar after one too many, on a street corner, in the middle of the night, or in broad daylight…

It is inevitable, repeat, inevitable, that people are going to get hurt. It may be a few, it may be many. And no amount of begging them to tone it down is going to get these “thought leaders” to do so.

Now, after this precise scenario has come to pass, not just predicted by some blogger but by the DHS report which Limbaugh and his progeny mocked and attacked, Limbaugh wants to play the same game.  Despite James W. Von Brunn’s own writing repeating word for word the content of the emails that conservative talk radio used as a script for over a year, Limbaugh thinks he can now call the shooter not a Palestinian terrorist, but a lefty.  He wants no part of the responsibility for his own words.  

Meet the internet, Rush.  Not gonna fly this time.  It’s so profoundly absurd an assertion that even Limbaugh himself knows it.  Watching him deliver this nonsense in video was like watching a twitching insane person claw at the noose around his neck in a fever of desperation.  

Well, too late, fat man.

The paper trail from those emails, to talk radio, to Republicans using them against our president, to the shooter, is unbreakable, constant, and in every single Americans inbox right now.  Even mine.  At golf course club houses, coffee shops, factory floors and office water coolers across America this morning, there is a sudden, probably silent realization that wasn’t there in 1995.  We all had watched James W. Von Brunn’s trigger finger get itchier right before our eyes, without knowing it would be Von Brunn’s. 

In 1995, it was a theory.  In 2009, it’s a proven fact.  The proof is on your computer.  We all know it.  Go ahead and try running from it.   Then look at your inbox, where you will find precisely the words the shooter echoed even as he left his car to enter the Holocaust museum with a shotgun, and ask yourself what you did to stop it.  

I can look in the mirror after doing that.  Wonder how many people can.