Connecting the Crazy Dots: Assange, Recruiting Kids, The Tucson Massacre and General American Bloodthirstiness

The Right noise machine is working fulltime to deny complicity in the Tucson massacre.

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There is, it cannot be denied, a tendency on the part of many Americans to grab for their guns, if not actually, then figuratively.

BELOW LEFT: Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, one of the sane voices in the entire mess, and of course viciously attacked by Sheriff Arpaio, an unreconstructed rightwinger and racist, and the whole gaggle of rightwing talk radio criminals constantly inciting the masses toward fascism.

No charges were filed.

BELOW RIGHT: Federal Judge John Roll, one of the random victims.

BELOW LEFT: Cynical multibillionaire David Koch and his brother Charles are credited with seeding the Tea Party phenomenon across America.

But nobody needs an assault weapon. And nobody should be able to carry a concealed weapon around town, crazy or not.

More importantly, though, this obsession with killing and war has to stop.

We need to recognize that the people who call for ever higher military budgets, who justify blasting the sh*t out of a poor country like Afghanistan, the people who argue for bombing Iran, and the police departments that send cops to demonstrations armed with assault weapons, as well as the politicians and the fascist radio and TV pundits who call for killing political opponents, are all every bit as sick and twisted as a lone gunman who goes to a Safeway parking lot and shoots a Congresswoman in the head.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, collectively-owned, journalist-run online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, LINN WASHINGTON and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
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