The man who murdered people in a Planned Parenthood clinic was a “gentle itinerant loner”, accorded to the New York Times. He went to church, read the Bible cover to cover, and had an assortment of guns, so I guess he couldn’t have been that bad. He just wanted to be left alone.
At least they don’t say he’s crazy, the usual go-to excuse when a white man goes on a misogynistic murder spree. Progress! But they still don’t take that necessary next step of noting that someone who tries to intimidate people with violence is, of course, a terrorist. Terrorism is only a word to be deployed against Muslims, it seems.
But still, you can read between the lines. You know how after a psychopath is caught, there’s usually a litany of interviews with former neighbors saying how he was such a perfectly normal, ordinary guy? Not with Robert L. Dear.
Mr. Davis said he was unsurprised to see Mr. Dear, whom he described as “a pretty poorly adjusted guy,” emerge as the suspect in the Colorado shooting.
“I think I would have thought he was a guy who would go on a rampage,” he said. “We were very wary.”
The most chilling line to me was just a few words from Dear:
On Cannabis.com, the writer said in December 2005: “AIDS, hurricanes, we are in the end times. Accept the LORD JESUS while you can.”
Have you ever noticed that while Americans will freak out over Muslims praying on an airplane, we think nothing of the huge army of death-cultists in our midst, people who are certain the world is going to end soon (and welcome its destruction!) and who want to steer our representatives and policy towards Armageddon? No big deal. A bunch of smiling used car salesmen live among us, own whole television networks, serve in congress, and they grin and assure us that our death is imminent and well-deserved, and we shrug and ignore them until one snaps and opens fire with his constitutionally protected semi-automatic rifle.
It’s so reassuring to know that the New York Times will report our demise in its blandly neutral tone, as long as the shooter is good white Christian.
In thinking about this terrorist act, I’m reminded of Mike Huckabee’s calls for only allowing Christian refugees into the United States, as if being Christian is some guarantee that an individual will not commit an act of terrorism.
Did the Colorado Springs cops buy Robert Dear a hamburger on the way to his booking?
Cross-posted from the Moments of Political Madness Thread.
More bits and pieces concerning Robert Lewis Dear:
He was arrested on “peeping tom” charges twice.
His wife, Pam Dear, reported that he locked her out of their residence, and that he hit her. She did not file charges.
Dear had ongoing, various disputes with neighbors that culminated in threats of violence toward the neighbors.
Regarding the animal cruelty charges, apparently Dear shot a neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun.
From Daily Kos:
Did the Colorado Springs cops buy Robert Dear a hamburger on the way to his booking?
He shot members if the cop tribe. So, probably not.
Cross-posted.
Senator Bernie Sanders and others have pointed out a connection to the violence at the Planned Parenthood clinic and the statements of Republican presidential candidates.
Politics USA link
Cross-posted.
Journalist Frederick Clarkson talks about the shooting at Planned Parenthood:
Mother Jones posted an article that covers the current Planned Parenthood shooting and goes on to summarize most of the recent uptick in violence against PP clinics.
Details at the link.
More indications that some rightwing media stars use hyperbolic language that could be interpreted as promoting violence:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/10/09/the-violent-repercussions-of-conservative-media/206080
Comments on Fox News demonstrate that the shooter has a lot of supporters.
Link
Here is a sampling of the heated, and factually incorrect, rhetoric that preceded the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado. These quotes are from our elected officials:
Link
Summary of the shooting in Colorado, in cartoon form.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/28/1455025/-Yes-He-s-a-terrorist
Think Progress link
These gentle murderers, eh? They’re the worst kind.
Is it just me or are “gentle itinerant loner” and “occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbours and women he knew” completely contradictory points?
The people celebrating this act of terrorism are fucking sick.
Lynna @6:
“…bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences.”
I will offer that this was not an un-intended consequence. I believe Daleiden knew exactly what would happen when he posted his lies, and now he got just what he wanted.
As a lifelong copy editor, no way would I let that graf slide by. You can’t be a “gentle giant” while even occasionally committing violent acts. To Pierce R. Butler: Since one of the dead and several of the wounded were officers, I’m sure they treated him like the slimeball he is. If that hadn’t happened, though, they might have swung by Chick-fil-A.
Dreaming @15
Yeah, I was going to ask about that myself. It’s like they didn’t even read what they wrote.
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia,
You can hear that often when domestic abuse ends up on the news – neighbors claiming that the perpetrator was a quiet, nice, gentle neighbor who wouldn’t hurt a fly… he’d just slap his wife a bit when he had some drinks in him but that was none of their business.
You know who else lived alone in an isolated hut and committed terrorism?
No, not Hitler. Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph.
Gentle and violent. FFS, people don’t seem willing to think about the smallest things anymore.
Caine @ 21;
It fits perfectly with the Republican application of an Orwellian social model. ‘Ignorance is strength’ and all that…
Nope. Until he shot at a police officer he never targeted anybody worth mentioning.
beatrice
Don’t forget the added speculations of how she must have driven him to do that.
Family tragedy…
It took Republican presidential candidates a long time to comment on the Planned Parenthood shooting. Donald Trump was tweeting about his poll numbers, Rubio was urging people to shop at his merchandise site, etc.
Now that they are bothering to comment, they are repeating all the lies about Planned Parenthood. They are all repeating the false claims made in the bogus videos, namely that PP sells baby parts for profit.
Trump said:
Classic Trump. He says something awful, and then leaves himself some wiggle room.
Fiorina is one of the worst offenders here. She took the bogus videos as a starting point and from there went even further to describe live-born babies being dismembered.
Link
I did wonder whether that first line in the NYT was poorly drafted or dripping in cynicism.
Still, now we get into the phase of focusing on the murderer and the susprised non-surprise of the acquaintances who ignored all of those risk markers that would have seen him locked up long ago if his skin was a little darker. The victims will be forgotten, other than that one of them had a badge.
And look over there! – as the right wing shifts attention back towards dead white “babies” and killer muslims (try to ignore the dead muslim babies and the killer whites).
Lynna, OM @24
Fiorina has a real hatred for Planned Parenthood. She lies about the video and, when called on the lie, doubles down on it, pretending that the fictitious video does too exist and she’s seen it.
@26
I see a pattern among republicans…
Regarding the discussion up-thread of Fiorina’s lies, and of her doubling down on those lies.
Fiorina saw a video snippet that was not taken in a Planned Parenthood facility, and from that non-PP snippet she compounded the problem by misinterpreting what she saw.
She described the snippet as “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’”
A video interview with a former employee of StemExpress does exist. In that interview, the former employee claims to have seen a fetus with a heartbeat, and claims to have heard her supervisor making plans to procure the brain for medical research.
Unrelated, yes unrelated, stock footage videos (or photos) of a fetus outside the womb were used by the dunderheads from Center for Medical Progress who made the bogus videos. They used footage they claimed was from an abortion, but it was not an abortion. Nope. That stock footage was from a miscarriage. The footage of a miscarriage, (and possibly photos of a stillbirth,) was coupled with the discredited interview of the StemExpress employee to create the impression that an aborted fetus in a Planned Parenthood clinic was kept alive while plans were made to harvest the brain.
The stock footage of a miscarriage/stillbirth was not connected in any way to an abortion, and was not connected in any way to harvesting tissue for research purposes. It was also not connected in any way to Planned Parenthood.
Furthermore, a dedicated search for any video that actually matches Fiorina’s graphic description turned up nothing. There is no video from a PP facility that fits Fiorina’s description.
The stock footage of the miscarriage was most likely provided to Daleiden (unethical doofus who put together the bogus videos) by a group or groups that make a living supplying icky images to anti-abortion activists.
You all are missing the important nuance.
As a loner he was gentle.
It was only in the presence of other people, especially women, that he was violent.
The New York Times – so precise! So nuanced! So informative! Whatever would we do without them?
trigger warning/content note if you’ve gotten this far in the thread without needing one…
From Lynna, @10,
This shit is even worse than the comment you quoted next to the effect of “who cares if he’s only shooting liberals?” It’s this ability to conceive of something as a life-or-death issue where all the good is on one’s own side even as one commits murder that makes horrific atrocities possible. Picturing these folk standing over others firing automatic weapons into cowering victims and screaming, “All life is precious, motherfucker!” might seem a caricature, but it is the substance of what’s actually happening, whether Dear screamed those words or not. They are no less existentially certain of their divine right to murder than bin Laden was.
NYT home page right now (at least the international edition):
The terrorism bit is starting to seep in…
CD @ 30:
It isn’t, when you consider their stance on the death penalty. Life is indeed precious, if it happens to be growing inside one of those mobile incubators. Outside of that, not so much.
Numberobis @ 31:
I’ll believe that when one of them states, unequivocally, that this is terrorism, not a form of terrorism. There’s a wealth of denial in those two words.
Not to derail, but I wanted to mention the names of the two other people that were killed, along with University of Colorado Officer Garrett Swasey:
Ke’Arre Stewart 29 and Jennifer Markovsky 36 have been identified as the two other victims killed during Friday’s attack in Colorado Springs. Stewart was originally from Texas, Markovsky, a married mom of 2 was originally from Hawaii. According to the Denver Post article Stewart was an Iraq war vet, his friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help his wife and 2 children pay for funeral expenses…
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_29179986/iraq-war-veteran-idd-victim-planned-parenthood-attack?source=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/30624684/family-waianae-woman-among-those-killed-in-colorado-springs-planned-parenthood-shooting
No kidding. It wouldn’t really be an issue with me, if the subject at hand were not a particular incident which just happened but the various forms or manifestations or methodologies of terrorism. If the terrorists are Muslims, on the other hand, then the simple thing to say is “this is terrorism,” no forms, no contextualizing, no other bullshit to soften up the message somehow. Perhaps it’s not intentional, but they just seem to be some extra words that only serve to interrupt the flow between “this is” and “terrorism.” I thought maybe it just came across that way to me. But if somebody said “this is, uh, errrr, well, like, you know, guuuuhhh, a version of terrorism” then it’s not a problem with the literal words themselves, but I would wonder what the fuck all the inane blithering and hesitation was about.
Because he is Christian. If he were Muslim it would be linked to his misogynist religion. Because he’s Christian, his misogynist religion gets a pass and it’s just one of those completely unaccountable things that happen occasionally.
That’s a particularly strange quote from the pro-forced pregnancy crowd. It acknowledges that a fetus is NOT, in fact, an independent life. ‘Cradle to grave’? You can’t keep a fetus in a cradle.
It’s always been clear that the self-proclaimed “pro-life” crowd doesn’t give a shit about fetuses and embryos. Start talking about preventing miscarriage and they suddenly change the subject or talk about “god’s will” (because, apparently, medicine is not a concept with them and preventing any deaths besides homicides is a waste of time). Ask about any policies that might support pregnant women and improve the health of the fetus and they have no interest…unless it also involves punishing women: mandatory drug testing and incarceration for anyone who fails they get behind, automatic health insurance for pregnant women, not so much. No, their agenda is clear and it’s not helping fetuses.
dianne @ 36;
Quoted for truth. One of the things that forced birthers have in common with rapists is that their apparent motivation is not their true motivation. Just as rape is not about sex but rather about dominion and control, so forced birther rhetoric is not about ‘protecting embryos’ but instead is about punishing women for having sex and trying to contort society into a form that makes it easier to keep women compliant and ‘in their place’ as such things are defined by the religious right.
And both groups have a tendency toward an obsessive, irrational hatred of women, but that goes pretty much without saying.
I love how people keep saying “We’ll never know why he did it!”
But he told police “No more baby parts!”
So I think we know why he did it, and it wasn’t because he was some kind of leftist transgender activist either.
#15:
I thought the same thing.
Any chance this is a deliberate attempt at irony/sarcasm/cynicism/whatever by the NYT?
One can always hope, but I think it’s just part of the “he was such a nice guy, no one could have possibly anticipated this” narrative that surrounds almost all white, male murderers in the US.
“someone who tries to intimidate people with violence is, of course, a terrorist”
This is a terrible definition of a terrorist. Is every mugger, robber, etc a terrorist? The word is abused enough without further widening. Some measure of political motive is surely required to justify the terrorist tag?
re @41:
note the plural, as in “people in general”, not just the person at the moment [a mugger is intimidating a person, not people]. Meaning, to leave an impression on the people who only observe the event, in order to induce a change in their opinion of the issue the terrorist is addressing.
agreed