How bigotry works

The Tennessee Highway Patrol raided a cockfight in rural southeast Tennessee. Naturally, the AP doesn't say where in Polk Co., but one look at Benton, TN, the tiny town listed in the dateline, tells me that AP doesn't have a stringer there:


This is really a dog bites man story - happens about once a year. In fact, googling cockfighting benton tennessee shows some signs that this ho-hum news has taken at least a month to travel the 70 miles to Knoxville.

This story is only worthy of comment because of the reflexive bigotry it elicits from at least one commenter on Knoxnews:

Surprised there were no illegal immigrants retained in custody. --ccjs (June 27, 2010 11:24 a.m.)

Yes, many of the Latin American illegals come from cultures that still permit cockfighting, but that may be one thing that makes them feel right at home in East Tennessee. Thirty years ago, I worked for a guy who spent every weekend fighting his "chickens." Word was that he had good sources in local law enforcement, so that he never showed up to a cockpit carrying his stake and his roosters if it was going to be raided.

Good old white boy crime is normal, doesn't call for comment. Brown, broken-English crime, though, that's different!

Hold your wrist out, young man

Of course, in this IOKIYAR world, the four wingnut lawbreakers who pretexted their way into Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-BP) office got probation and minor fines after pleading to a misdemeanor.

Meanwhile, the Democratic scion who guessed Sarah Palin's password and posted it on the web was convicted of a felony and awaits sentencing that could bring him years in prison.

Then of course, there's the disparate media and legal treatment of Eliot Spitzer (D-ho) and David Vitter (R-ho ho ho).

And of course Rush Limbaugh gives hypocrites everywhere an even worse name.

Wants me dead

The evil man who massacred churchgoers in Knoxville, my hometown, would kill me if he had the chance. There are others, too, and he appeals to them to act.

It's sobering.

Defense to blogosphere: drop dead

A Circuit Court judge back in Knoxville where I grew up is entertaining a defense motion to force the local paper to moderate comments or prevent anonymous comments. Really. Never mind the First Amendment. The judge is not just laughing and giving the motion the back of his hand.

Comments in the News-Sentinel are no doubt filled with bigotry, bile, and prejudgement of the case. But I'm sure the jury pool was already poisoned. The defendants are black and charged with a heinous crime of carjacking, multiple rape, and murder against a white couple.

That jury pool was completely capable of poisoning itself just by breathing. Read any comments thread anywhere in the country and you'll find the haters spilling over from talk radio.

Should the judge engage in unconstitutional prior restraint, here's my offer: Come here and comment.

My guarantee for the racists: I'll ridicule you for the small size of your brain, your heart, and your balls. I may even whack your comments, though I've only deleted one comment here ever. Just because the Constitution guarantees you free speech doesn't mean you're free from my abuse of your ignorance and hate.

Best of all, though, the judge can't touch me here in Massachusetts. It's the new reality. Get used to it. And if he could touch me, well, we don't get to keep these rights if we're not willing to stand up for them. I'm willing.

No enemies to the right

One reason the frothing lunatic wingnuts believe there's a liberal media is that they are so far to the right that anything even in the conservative part of the mainstream looks liberal to them. Here's a comment on a story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that dares to acknowledge the geological age of the earth:

One more example of the anti-God, extreme liberal bias at KNS.

It's really no surprise that this fundie has the handle GWB4Ever.

The KNS, by the way, is a completely Republican newspaper, though it remains lightly tethered to reality.

(h/t smalc on KnoxViews)

Killing liberals

I've been in the Unitarian-Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, that was desecrated by shotgun blasts and blood and untimely death yesterday. It was a long time ago in an earlier building further west on Kingston Pike, and it was for meetings of the Sierra Club, not for services.

I don't know any of the dead or wounded who have been named so far, but if I still lived in Knoxville I probably would, since liberals are rare (and wonderful) there. Beyond the sympathy I have for them as kindred spirits, though, they were just people in church on Sunday morning, and I'd feel it a tragedy no matter what church David Adkisson had defiled.

The political context of this attack, however, leaves me angry and bitter. Already, in comments here and there on the web, the non-Christianity (or, really, post-Christianness) of the TVUUC is coming in for criticism, as if that matters at all. So, I'll try to keep my self-control, as the assaulted congregation has somehow managed to do.

The shooter picked out that church, came there intent on murder-suicide, and did his evil deeds in order to kill liberals. And one of his reasons was that his food stamps were running out! Another was that his care at the VA hadn't been good enough - I guess he didn't read the Washington Post to get a clear idea who has neglected that. In the end, killing those tolerant of gays was his crazed mandate.

I have expressed before the fear that armed wingnuts would violently reject liberal electoral victories. Conservatives have ridiculed me for this. Let me be clear: Adkisson is a nut, not necessarily a conservative in any coherent way (not that most conservatives are coherent), but he is not representative of conservatism or conservatives.

What Adkisson probably has done is bathe in the baptismal font of hatred and bile that is the wingnut commentariat. When Ann Coulter talks about killing people, even guilty ones, to scare liberals, when Jesse Helms "jokes" about assassination of the sitting President, when Michael Savage advocates hanging for lawyers at Guantánamo and hints at the murder of Barack Obama, when Michael Graham fantasizes about whacking the Clintons, when Bill O'Reilly countenances the destruction of San Francisco, and so forth, you can't really blame a liberal like me for worrying a bit about our adversaries and a few of their fringe hangers on who are both nuts and armed.

There are a couple of other, more positive things, that I notice from this story. Despite the lack of any dogma in UU that guarantees a reward from God in heaven, the unarmed congregation both sacrificed for the greater good and subdued the attacker quickly and courageously. They didn't dither or cower the way conservatives have claimed they would. Instead, they moved to save what they could of what they love.

Update: CNN obtusely headlines its story on Adkisson's motives with the least interesting motive, "Church shooting suspect angry over job search, police say." Why would that be?

Update: David Neiwert's classic post on eliminationist rhetoric.

Update: More from CNN, with motive mentioned only once.