I'm usually averse to using confrontational phrases like you see in the title of this piece. At one time, I held the opinion that nothing good was to be gained by using such strong grammatical imagery, however, after reading this story on David Neiwert's "Orcinus", I'll change my view for the moment.
This is a story you need to read. That the hook for the story could happen in a place such as San Francisco tells you pretty much all you need to know in terms of the rough road ahead. I could almost understand if something like this happened in a small city in the midwest. But San Francisco?
This is how it begins. One little step at a time.Go read the rest of it. It's that important. The connections between the different organizations that have emerged specifically to propagate this kind of crap and the Bush administration are so close as to negate plausible deniability from either the Bush administration or the groups themselves.
A death threat here. A fistfight there. An act of vandalism here. An assault there.
Keep adding them up, and pretty soon something takes root. Something dark and hateful.
Consider what's been happening in the past few weeks, as bad news has mounted atop of scandal for George W. Bush and his dwindling base of supporters.
Two weeks ago, there was the vicious attack on gallery owner Lori Haigh in San Francisco's North Beach area. Haigh'd had the audacity to display a painting by artist Guy Colwell that depicted the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
George Bush could do something about it - crimes of intimidation (particularly against freedom of expression) are a federal issue. I don't know if the feds are involved in the followup, but they should be, and Bush should be ordering John Ashcroft to get personally cracking on this one.
...in a perfect world, of course. And in a perfect world, they'd actually care to do something. And make public statements condemning such actions. In a perfect world, of course.
But I digress. Here's what's just as important as the story itself: we in the blogosphere need to be highlighting these latter day intellectual lynchings. Yeah, OK, they're killing the intellectuals in Iraq - and if I'm not mistaken, this also occurred in Nazi Germany.
The thuggery will get only more blatant as the hits on Monkey Boy™ become more frequent and severe. It would be a mistake to think that the wounded mutt (and/or his supporters) wouldn't strike back in the interest of self-preservation.
This is how it begins. One little step at a time.
