That's Not Going To Go Over Well: Rachel Maddow Calls Rightwing Terrorists 'Terrorists'
This one's long, but it's worth watching. Rachel Maddow brings us an in-depth look at the extremist roots of Frazier Glenn Miller, the suspect in the Overland Park, Kansas shootings over the weekend, and we learn that not only was he persuaded by the FBI to inform on his white supremacist pals back in the late 1980s, he's stayed in touch with other neo-Nazis since -- including contacts with the man convicted of the 2011 attempt to bomb a MLK Day parade in Spokane and with Craig Cobb, the freak who was trying to turn Leith, North Dakota into a white supremacist enclave. He's no lone wolf, says Maddow, he's part of a network.
And so, the question: Why have we had a full-on freakout about jihadis in this country, but every instance of rightwing extremism gets treated as sui generis, a complete surprise that is somehow disconnected from all the others? Back in 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security suggested that rightwing extremism might be something to be concerned about, the non-extreme-but-still-rightwing media machine went into Full Anguished Howl mode, accusing the DHS of planning to persecute everyone who watched Fox News, because nobody who calls themselves a patriot has ever done terrorism, except for the ones that did, but they weren't True Patriots anyway, and as everyone knows, all terrorists are leftists or something.
Like racism, Maddow is the extremist for pointing out the extremism of the right wing extremists. Oh, and she drives a Subaru, hint hint.
Didn't we have an election less than two years ago where the "issue" was whether Obama called the attack on Benghazi a "terrorist" attack by "terrorists" quickly enough? Why so reluctant to slap a label on it now?