Pitt: 'Dog-whistle politics' incite violence

I'm glad Pitt can hear the "dog whistles" like I can. The right wing is clearly inciting some nut job to take up arms and kill our lawfully elected President. Train your ears and listen up!

The Dog Whistles

By William Rivers Pitt

July 23, 2010 | t r u t h o u t

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Dismiss it too easily or too quickly, however, and you'll miss the dog whistle buried in the message. I hadn't heard of the term "dog whistle" until I saw a disturbing post on the web forum DemocraticUnderground, but the term perfectly describes the phenomenon. Wikipedia describes the term thusly:

Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is an analogy to dog whistles built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can.

The DU post referring to a "dog whistle" was highlighting a recent broadcast of Pat Robertson's "700 Club." During this particular broadcast, author Eric Metaxas was being interviewed about his new biography of attempted Adolf Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas' book paints Bonhoeffer as a prophet of God who was doing holy work through his plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer, a trained theologian who resisted the Nazis based on his Christian faith, has been a revered figure in many religious circles ever since his death, so a book calling him a holy prophet isn't wildly out of line on its face.

But here's the thing. During the interview, descriptions of fascism and tyranny were used extensively. Again, given that the topic dealt with Hitler and Nazi Germany, the use of this language isn't immediately improper...except when it's in the context of the kind of rhetoric used by Pat Robertson, Fox News and bloggers like Andrew Breitbart to describe President Obama. The interview basically stated that it is the holy work of any good Christian to assassinate a fascist tyrant, and given the serial ways these right-wing media people have used those exact terms to describe the president, it is a pretty short leap to realize the "700 Club" was essentially sending the message that whoever puts a bullet in Obama will be considered a saint on the level of Bonhoeffer.

Another Repug begging for a bullet in Obama's head

Tancredo is a loser and a nobody but still a hero to many in the far-right GOP and Tea Parties because of his anti-immigrant stance.

Now he's getting into the act like other extremist losers Limbaugh and Gingrich, just begging some gun nut to draw the "obvious" conclusion about what needs to be done to neutralize

"The greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life; everything we believe in. The greatest threat to the country that was put together by our founding fathers is the man that's sitting in the White House today."

Think I'm exaggerating? Come on. Every red-blooded American knows what the USA does when faced with a threat: we kick its ass. And Obama is allegedly the greatest threat America has ever faced.

Tancredo: Obama Is A Bigger Threat To The U.S. Than Al Qaeda Or The Soviets

By Ethan Axelrod

July 8, 2010 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/tom-tancredo-obama-a-bigg_n_640142.html

Limbaugh: Obama wants 'payback time' against U.S.

So when some nutjob takes a shot at our President and maybe is successful, remember the words of Rush Limbaugh and all the others who whipped him into a frenzy of fear and hatred. Words like, "Our greatest threat (and this is saying something) is internal."

Rush is begging and praying for some well-armed gun nut to take that wacky -- and might I add, baseless and unproven -- belief to its logical conclusion.

If there is a successful attack on Obama, then Rush, Beck, Hannity and the rest will have blood on their hands. Just like they have blood on their hands for whipping people into a hysterical war fever back in 2002-2003. They never raised a gun or dropped a bomb to kill anybody, but they are just as responsible for those never-ending tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan as any U.S. policymaker.

It's not enough anymore for conservatives to say, "Obama is wrong," or "Obama is a liberal asshole" even. We're thick-skinned enough to deal with that. No, they have to claim they can see into our President's heart and soul and know the man's hidden true intentions, which are, as they say, to destroy America from within because Obama hates this country. Not a shred of evidence to prove that belief, not one word from Obama to support that, but they sell this vile lie day in, day out anyway, and all you teabagging-Repug zombies buy it. For shame!

While others say Obama hates America because he's a secret Muslim, a Manchurian candidate, Rush's explanation is much simpler for Americans to understand: because Obama is black and he wants revenge on the White Establishment. This is sick but fascinating. Why are whites so eager to believe this lie, when there is not a shred of evidence to support this nutty belief? I'll tell you why. White guilt. Yeah, I know, only liberals are supposed to suffer white guilt, but I've thought and thought about this and there's no other plausible explanation, my friends.

Conservative white Americans cannot imagine that a black man who ascended to our nation's highest office would not carry a grudge for all that whites have done to blacks "all these 200 years." They can't imagine him not hating white people for the way that they have hated blacks, for the way that many continue to hate and fear blacks, especially black men. They can't imagine that a black man, somehow defying the odds and getting elected, would not immediately turn on his oppressors in a vengeful rage.

So you see, although their fear tells us nothing about the man Obama is, it tells us very much about their racial beliefs and guilty feelings. White guilt is alive and well in the hearts of U.S. conservatives, and it's poisoning our politics.

It's Payback Time: The Obama Economy is Purposeful Disaster

July 2, 2010 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

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I do think that's true, but I think we face something we've never faced before in the country -- and that is, we're now governed by people who do not like the country, who do not have the same reverence for it that we do. Our greatest threat (and this is saying something) is internal.

We have plenty of external threats, enemies across oceans, but we have a threat inside as well. This is something that I've never felt. I never feel that we had a president actually governing against the country, against the will of the people. I know we've had liberals. Clinton and Hillary were, and are. They're pedal-to-the-metal liberals. But they didn't want to destroy things. This bunch does, and they make no bones about it -- and when destruction does happen, they don't lift a finger to fix it.

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I think that he's been raised, educated, and believes on his own that this country has been (as you know) immoral and unjust. It has stolen. It's unfairly large; it's an unjustifiable superpower. We have become as large as we are not because of any uniqueness or exceptionalism or greatness but because we've simply discriminated against the real people that made the country work, all the minorities. People around the world, we've stolen their resources, and now it's payback time. That's what we're getting.

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Why aren't we growing jobs in this country like we used to? Why aren't we? It's not hard to do. There's all kinds of textbook evidence, real-life historical evidence of how to do it. We're not doing it; we're not doing it on purpose. It's payback time. All the people who are unemployed? It's time for you to find out what it's like to be an American all these 200 years. "Yeah, greatest country on earth, superpower? Right. Well, might have been for some people, but you're going to find out what it's been like for 200 years for some of us to be an American. It's payback time." That's what's going on here.