Conservative Gunman Committed Terrorism Against Liberals

In his statement to the court upon sentencing, the Knoxville Tennessee shooter who killed 2 and wounded 4 people in a Unitarian Church reveals why he did it - to kill those Damn Dirty Liberals. (Full PDF)

"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

Echoing Palin and Joe the-Unlicenced-Not-A-War-Correspondant Plumber and their hateful "Socialist" talk, this man truly believed that he was the first footsoldier in a war to take America back from The Hated Left.

And guess who wrote his hit-list for him?

Local News Coverage of Sentencing for James Adkisson:


More from "the Manifesto"

"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

"I thought I'd do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

Here we have O'Reilly and Bernard Golberg threatening to assult Media Matters - for merely documenting things they really did say!

O'Reilly: "I want to send them a cake, but I want something to be inside the cake, and I might be put in prison if that happens."

Here's Goldberg again, suggesting that O'Reilly should go down the the New York Times with a Baseball bat.

Bernard Goldberg: If NY Times attacked me like it attacks O'Reilly, "I probably would have gotten a baseball bat and gone down to the New York Times with it and found the person that wrote the editorial, but that's me."

Yeah, well it's not like someone like O'Reailly might ever really fly completely off the handle. Well, almost:



Besides O'Reilly and Goldberg you also have Ann Coulter who'se suggested in the past torture should be a televised sport, that All Arabs should have bombs dropped on them, and Liberals should be sent to Gitmo.

Which brings me to this week's scandal about No Such Agency [NSA] spying on "Americans." I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.

And people wonder why I'm not a big fan of most conservatives.

Frankly, if you've ever watched Fear Factor or Saw - you know that torture already is a national spectator sport.

Throwing out violent threats against Liberals and/or anyone that confronts , threatens or challenges thems is a regular right-wing strategy.

It may be rather easy for fairly rational people to blow-off these types of comments and suggestions of violence against Liberals. There is of course, the Free Speech defense - but I do recall almost 20 years ago when the right-wing certainly didn't much care for the "Free Speech" view.

They completly ignored that idea when the band Body Count led by Ice-T dared to release the song "Cop Killer" (which is actually a statement Against Police Brutality and warning that the Rage in L.A. was rising to the boiling point and the Rodney King Riots), Republicans and members of the Fraternal Order of Police phoned in Death and Bomb Threats against their Record Label forcing them to pull the song from the album with threats of violence.

The criticism escalated to the point where death threats were sent to Warner Bros. Records executives, and stockholders threatened to pull out of the company. According to his own words in his book The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a Fuck? (1994) Ice T decided to remove the song from the album of his own volition. Eventually, the album was re-issued with "Cop Killer" removed. Ice T left the label in 1993, following disputes over the album Home Invasion. The performer stated of the controversy that "When I started out, [Warner] never censored us. Everything we did, we have full control over. But what happened was when the cops moved on Body Count they issued pressure on the corporate division of Warner Bros., and that made the music division, they couldn't out-fight 'em in the battle, so even when you're in a business with somebody who might not wanna censor you, economically people can put restraints on 'em and cause 'em to be afraid. I learned that lesson in there, that you're never really safe as long as you're connected to any big corporation's money."

Ice T Interview from Australian TV exlains what his song was really all about, and you can tell how the interviewer isn't trying to hear him.


Arguably Ice T wasn't speaking literally. He was telling a story - "It's a song from Madman", just like Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sherrif", it's Self-Defense. It was a fantasy - much like Goldberg and the baseball bat. Neither of them is really planning on carrying these actions out, anymore than Dirty Harry or the Terminator are likely to going around shooting people. Ice T has even performed several acting roles as a (non-brutal) police officer himself in films such as New Jack City and NBC's Law and Order. Clearly he knows the difference.

Time and time again prosecutors have refrained from prosecuting musicians (and film-makers) for suggestions of violence, even when people have actually carried out the actions described in their songs and films. (Although they did try to prosecute Ozzy Osborne for "Suicide Solution" and Judas Priest after some young men committed suicide - those cases all failed!) They generally realize, rightly I believe, that such an argument tends to reduce some responsibility, and guilt for the perpatrators themselves. It's allows a killer to use someone else as their scapegoat.

We shouldn't blame Catcher in the Rye for the shooting of Lennon, or the Beatles themselves for the Tate/LaBianca killings.

Common sense needs to apply here.

But what should happen when the perpatrator specifically names the person who inspired his actions, the reason for his targeting of a specific type of individual and both they and their inspirational figure further attempts to incite others to follow in the footsteps of violence against those targets?

We aren't talking about the right of self-defense with James Adkisson, he wasn't being attacked! His actions weren't justified in any manner. But he also admits he was specifically incited to commit Murder for ideological reasons, just like Eric Robert Rudolph who was inspired to Bomb the Atlanta Olympics and Women's Health Clinics by virilent anti-Abortion rhetoric, and Timothy McVeigh was inspired by The Turner Diaries after Waco, the Weapons-Strength Anthrax sent to Pat Leahy and Tom Dashcle or the Fake Anthrax that was sent to Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart. These action are not completely random. They are intended to intimidate.

At a certain point violent rhetoric crosses the line and is not Art, it's not Humor, it's not Satire, and it's not free speech when it becomes a direct and deliberate incitement to VIOLENCE - At a certain point, It's Terrorism.

Plain and simple.

Vyan

Do you Waste (Waste)
All the time that you have
Do you Take (Take)
Everything you can get
Do you Fake (Fake)
Every feeling you show
Do you Hate (Hate)
Everyone that you know

(Chorus 1)
I can't change you
Unless you change yourself
I can't make you
Into someone you don't wannabe?
Who do you Wannabe?

Will you Fight (Fight)
For what you believe in?
Do you Share (Share)
Everything you don't need?
Do you Make (Make)
All the luck that you get?
Do you Love (Love)
Even those that don't love you?

From the song "Wannabe?" - by ME!

Justifying the Inexcusable

24 - Split Up and Go After The Family


In this scene from Fox's "24" Jack Bauer talks two FBI agents into helping him kidnap and torture an innocent woman and her 10 month-old in order to get information from her Husband, a traitor Secret Service Agent. We're not talking about torturing some killer or terrorist here - they're talking about torturing A BABY!

But the truth, which so many people fail to realize is there are NO EXCUSES for Torture. None. EVER. Regardless of who it is.

Bauer presents a classic false choice - "Follow your conscience or let the 1st Gentleman Die" which is the same as what Senator Cornyn asked Attorney General Eric Holder: "Assume You Have No Option (other than to use Waterboarding)". You always have a choice, and you're always responsible for your actions. In this case they already had phone records and GPS tracking data they could have used to find the President's Husband in time.

There absolutely was a third and even a forth choice - refusing to DO THE RIGHT THING is not a valid reason for doing the wrong thing.

Holder v Leahy


Holder V Cornyn.


The UN Convention Against Torture, Signed by Ronald Reagan says this:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

The is no wiggle room here, there are no valid excuses or justifications available. It's a crime - Period.

During the Randy Rhodes show I just listened to Pat Leahy discuss how we need a "Truth Commission" to at least found out what happened, while John Conyers says - We Need TO PROSECUTE after release a 400 page document on the various abuses of the Bush Administration (that we know about!)

This week, I released "Reining in the Imperial Presidency," a 486-page report detailing the abuses and excesses of the Bush administration and recommending steps to address them. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. popularized the term "imperial presidency" in the 1970s to describe an executive who had assumed more power than the Constitution allows and circumvented the checks and balances fundamental to our three-branch system of government. Until recently, the Nixon administration seemed to represent a singular embodiment of the idea. Unfortunately, it is clear that the threat of the imperial presidency lives on and, indeed, reached new heights under George W. Bush.

As this report documents, there was the administration's contrived drive to a needless war of aggression with Iraq, based on manipulated intelligence and facts that were "fixed around the policy." There was its politicization of the Justice Department; unconscionable and possibly illegal policies on detention, interrogation and extraordinary rendition; warrantless wiretaps of American citizens; the ravaging of our regulatory system and the use of signing statements to override the laws of the land; and the intimidation and silencing of critics and whistle-blowers who dared to tell fellow citizens what was being done in their name. And all of this was hidden behind an unprecedented veil of secrecy and outlandish claims of privilege.

I understand that many feel we should just move on. They worry that addressing these actions by the Bush administration will divert precious energy from the serious challenges facing our nation. I understand the power of that impulse. Indeed, I want to move on as well -- there are so many things that I would rather work on than further review of Bush's presidency. But in my view it would not be responsible to start our journey forward without first knowing exactly where we are.

We can't "Move On" unless we fully understand where we've been and how to make sure we never go back. We can't afford to sweep all of this under a rug, because we know from doing just that after the Nixon Administration - it just sits there and festers!.

Obama doesn't need to address this, Holder doesn't need to address this - we need an Special Counsel to be appointed in order to do a fair and reasonalble analysis of the Bush Administration Crimes. A Top to Bottom Review - there is no other way, and there is no excuse!

If he doesn't fully investigate and prosecute - we'll be right back here in another 30 or 40 years. No More!

Vyan