Neocon-neolib occupied government and its culture of state violence: first they came for the Muslims, then they came for the tea partiers...

From:
The Uses of Political Violence
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo

Rep. Peter King (R-New York) is the kind of in-your-face demagogue that only the state of New York could have elevated to high office. From his perch in the 3rd congressional district, in Long Island, King holds forth like a cruder version of Rudolph Giuliani, if you can imagine it. Yet we don’t have to imagine it, because it will be on full display when Rep. King, in his capacity as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, presides over hearings on “the radicalization of the Muslim-American community.”

Those hearings portend a circus, in the course of which we’ll be subjected to a very public airing of the malignant views of people like Robert Spencer, Pamela “the shrieking harpy” Geller, and Frank Gaffney, a rogues gallery of anti-Muslimologist “experts” whose hate-filled rantings will further poison the atmosphere of an America itching for a lynching.

Although the neoconservatives were generally discredited in the wake of the Iraq war, when the complete failure of their policies – and prophecies – became all too apparent even to many of them, the dead-enders among them have sought to make a comeback by transferring their war on Muslims from the Middle East to the home front...

Yet there were and are those who have a direct interest in establishing all sorts of links where none exist: the Obama administration to further its foreign policy goals and justify a war, ambitious prosecutors who want to score points and make a name for themselves, and cretins like Rep. King, who have an ideological agenda they want to pursue to the very end, which is the prospect of us treating American Muslims much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated the Japanese-American community during World War II. Indeed, one particularly vicious neocon wrote an entire book justifying the Japanese internment camps in order to set up American Muslims for a similar scenario...

Which just goes to prove, once again, that there are two sets of laws in latter-day America: one set for the powerful, and another for the powerless. Political violence is something that the US empire encourages when it is in its interests to do so, and condemns when its interests are threatened by unauthorized free-lancers. In every case, our rulers seek to use this kind of violence as their instrument, and this operating principle is underscored by the reaction, in some quarters, to the assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The dead bodies were still on the ground in the parking lot of that Safeway store in Tucson when the left wing of the blogosphere was howling for “tea party” blood, blaming everyone from Sarah Palin to Ron Paul for the heinous crime. “Hate speech” had “incited” the assassin, one Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old nutbag who lived not far from the murder scene. The local sheriff used his fifteen minutes of fame to opine that none of this would’ve happened if not for certain people “on the radio.” The Huffington Post was ablaze with commentary linking Loughner to the “tea party” – because, after all, both Loughner and the tea partiers are “anti-government”! Having just been walloped, big-time, in a national election, the “progressives” were quick to call for “right-wing” blood. A Democratic official told Politico on Sunday that “they need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers … just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”...

The attempt to characterize Loughner as a tea partier has absolutely nothing to do with anything he said or wrote: indeed, quite the opposite is the case. If we look at his YouTube videos, they are simply incoherent, ranting about how Loughner is into “conscience dreaming,” and railing about government “brainwashing” – typical paranoid ravings without any real political content, either right or left. A series of tweets by a former friend, one Caitie Parker, show that when she knew him, in 2007, he was a radical leftist – and his YouTube video featuring a flag-burning (hardly a tea party-ish type of activity) is certainly suggestive of that, although I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusions one way or the other...MORE...LINK