This past week, one Kossack alleged that conservatives' preferred response to the Boston Marathon bombing wasn't for law enforcement to track down the culprits and bring them to justice, but rather for mobs of their fellow right-wingers to engage in lethal violence against Muslim Americans.
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.
cskendrick: Conservatives love to get 'elbow-deep' in blood
...The left doesn't trust people we see as too violent. The right doesn't trust people who aren't as violent as themselves...
And guess what we see when we look at the right: Adam Lanza. Timothy McVeigh. Alex Jones. Glenn Beck. Dick Cheney. Liz Cheney. George W Bush...We see belligerent people with a record of abetting salacious violence against people they can't stand - or actually getting their arms elbow-deep in the blood and splashing about in the charnel like it was a kiddie pool...
It's a sad time when we can refer to hundreds wounded and a handful slain [in the Marathon bombing] as 'could have been worse'. Yet even this is not bad enough for our right wing brethren.
Because at the end of the day, rule of law worked, albeit in forms we never should have grown accustomed to over the past 12 years, and yet did. The law enforcement approach to counterterrorism worked...
Compassion worked. Marathon runners trotting past the finish line and on to the hospitals to give blood is one of the most awesome testaments to peaceful perseverance I have ever witnessed
Courage worked. A second bomb had gone off. NO ONE knew if there were more... And people stuck around to help.
In other words, Civilization Worked. Cops, medics, persons with first aid training, people capable of stripping cloth for improvised bandages, getting water, getting friends and family sorted out, getting word out that Help Is On The Way.
And that's not bad enough for wingers. They wanted the mob. They wanted mob justice...
If the mob had prevailed and not civilization, hordes of concerned well-armed citizens would have descended on various homes and neighborhoods, all with conspicuously high concentrations of Muslim inhabitants...
...If I have to put a label on what the combination of proposed goals and methods would have engendered, I'd say: Bosnia. Bosnia-level badness.
And I think we'll see more and more open calls for just that from our friends on the right...
Pericles: Maybe Dzhokhar's just a juvenile delinquent
Here's my hope for the Boston Marathon bombing: Maybe it can mark the end of the 9-11 Era...
...[I]t's understandable (though still not excusable) that America came out of 9-11 looking for somebody to blame, and wanting to mess them up as badly as we could. If we killed or maimed or tortured innocents in the process, so be it. Collateral damage. Our people had been innocent too.
9-11 was a monstrous act that we couldn't resolve in our hearts, so it turned us into monsters...
...We may get what we never had for 9-11: an explanation and a motive. We may come to look on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a troubled teen-ager, rather than a demon we see whenever we close our eyes and keep trying to kill by projecting him onto others.
Along the way, we may exorcize another demon who has haunted us too long: the Terrorist Superman, who...requires superhuman security measures and inhuman methods of interrogation. The monster who can only be fought by other monsters.
And that forms the essence of my hope: Maybe, after the events of this week, we don't have to be monsters any more...
mankoff: The Tsarnaevs, worse than Osama
...[The Tsarnaev] brothers apparently made no attempt to publicly justify their actions. By contrast, Osama bin Laden spoke on many occasions about the link between 911 and America's role in the Mideast. It is true the news media refused to print transcripts of his messages and substituted the nonsensical and self-serving theory that bin Laden hated us for our freedoms, but at least he made an attempt and made concrete, if abstract, offers to stop terrorist acts in exchange for changes in US policy. He may have committed evil acts, but they were not nihilistic by nature...
Troubadour: Exposing the Eric Cartman right
...[A]s demonstrated by American political history, for every republic founded on the principles of fundamental human equality and liberty, there are countless perverse minds who would call it "tyranny" to free slaves and "freedom" to have a government that doesn't interfere in their attempts to rob, murder, or oppress others. We know those perverts as conservatives.
In place of empathy for the defenseless...conservatism gives a purely theological substitute in the form of Forced Birtherism...a fetishized, ritualistic "defense" of a nonsentient fetus to get human compassion out of the way so it won't be a distraction from the sadistic reality of the conservative agenda.
In place of equality, conservatism offers mutual hostility and the universal right to victimize those less powerful than yourself...
And of course, there's "liberteh" - the conservative counterfeit of liberty, which exclusively concerns the ability to act out the above principle of malevolence and never works in the opposite direction...
About the only real, genuine thing in conservatism is fear: The only motive that isn't either a perverse counterfeit of morality, or a psychotic reaction against being confronted with the falsehood of their beliefs. Fear of the Other, fear of the truth, fear of losing, fear of others doing to them what they want to do to others, fear of being held in contempt by peers, fear of uncertainty, fear of change, even fear of fear. Just the most debased, reptilian, robotic psychological processes that are still possible in a human brain that at best resent reality and at worst are physiologically incapable of recognizing it...
