Apparently, a mentally ill man drove by a building where Patty Murray was debating her opponent in Spokane when Murray supporters witnessed Johnny J. Sieler waving a meat cleaver out his car window and shouting threats directed at Murray, safely inside the building. I guess he drove by three times before police finally apprehended him. Of course to Crooks and Liars’ David Neiwert, this is indicative of a bigger problem. People are listening to the GOP.
Interestingly, this incident is only the latest in a string of violent threats at Democrats — and particularly President Obama — cropping up very recently, and in all of them mental illness appears to be playing a significant role.
We already know what this means: The right-wing pundits who have been throwing gasoline on these people’s fundamentally irrational fires will insist they have nothing to do with this — this is just crazy people.
Of course, as we’ve observed on many occasions, this is simply a cop-out:
These claims also brush over the nature of mental illness. Of course, schizophrenics will often pick out the focuses of their obsessions purely at random — from, say, Beatles or Metallica lyrics, artistic works by never intended to inspire any kind of action, let alone violent ones. However, rhetoric intended to inspire action — particularly scapegoating rhetoric that simultaneously invokes fear and paranoia, most notably if it purports to represent secret, hidden, and suppressed information — has a far greater potential power to affect mentally ill people, because it has an acute appeal to their particular worldviews.
Neiwert’s co-author, karoli makes the same intellectually vacant claim;
This is what a daily diet of toxic spew from the likes of Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Americans for Prosperity emails can do to a person. I’m on two tea party lists. They send out emails 3-4 times per day, all apocalyptic, all promising we live in a doomed country with a pretender in the White House.
Yep, that’s what it was – GOP campaign commercials drive lunatics over the edge. Neiwert lists several cases of crazy people threatening Democrats -mostly threatening the president, but I don’t remember Neiwert or karoli warning and worrying about these particular cases;
Tampa Bay Times, November 28, 2007; [Delores Jean Baines] faces up to five years in federal prison for a letter she mailed to the White House in July 2006, telling the president she bought a gun, that he lived like a king, that she hated him.
A sentencing date had not yet been set.
Baines told the court she wrote the letter when she was struggling with mental illness, employed but living “outside.”
Associated Press, 4/7/2006 ; A Palestinian man faces federal charges of threatening President Bush over comments made while getting mental-health care, according to an indictment made public this week.
News of the indictment raised questions Friday about how to treat such comments by mental patients.
Federal grand jurors indicted Arafat Nijmeh on March 23 on two felony counts of “knowingly and willfully” threatening to harm Bush — first by telling two workers at his treatment center that he wanted to castrate Bush, then a day later to Secret Service agents notified by the center.
The indictment says Nijmeh told the agents that his threat “is not too harsh, considering what he has done to my country. If not that than maybe something else, you know?”
Nijmeh, 26, later said he was joking.
J. Steven Beckett, a University of Illinois law professor, said Nijmeh’s statements at the Alton Mental Health Center might be “delirious rantings of a mental patient.”
Fox News, February 18, 2008; After a one-day bench trial on Wednesday, Dost was committed to federal custody for treatment and further evaluation, U.S. District Court records show.
Several witnesses had told authorities that Dost said he planned to assassinate Bush. Authorities said Dost made the comments to four other job applicants during an orientation for USA Truck at a Fort Smith hotel in April 2006. A company employee alerted the FBI.
Associated Press, Dec 31, 2008; David A. Nelson, 45, was arrested in November after members of Portland’s Joint Terrorism Task Force connected him with bomb threats made between March and October.
In a plea deal filed in U.S. District Court, prosecutors will drop additional charges and recommend Nelson face five years of probation, with the conditions that he submit to mental health treatment and not make any threats, The Oregonian newspaper reported.
What Neiwert is really trying to say is that the GOP should just shut up and not campaign. It didn’t work when Clinton tried to shut down criticism by blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing. It didn’t work when Kerry and Gore blamed the right for hate crimes (both real and imagined) during their campaigns. It won’t work this time.
