The right-wing pundits have been busy whipping a fresh batch of eliminationist rhetoric this week.
Leading the parade, as is often the case, was Ann Coulter, appearing on Bill O'Reilly's show on Monday:
Coulter: Well, apparently, this one random nut who shot Tiller -- I don't really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.
... I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don't want to impose my moral values on others.
... OK, their logic is, if you don't believe in abortion, don't have an abortion. If you don't believe in shooting abortionists, don't shoot an abortionist.
Coulter actually was just regurgitating this week's column for cable consumption:
I'm not justifying it, but I understand when you take democracy away from people, some of them will react violently. The total number of deaths attributable to Roe were seven abortion clinic workers and 40 million unborn babies.
... I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?
Following the moral precepts of liberals, I believe the correct position is: If you don't believe in shooting abortionists, then don't shoot one.
As Fred Clarkson observes:
So that's four times in the past year and a half that she has coyly or not so coyly justified political assassination: Before prominent religious right audiences; in a nationally syndicated column, and on national television.
Meanwhile, as Blue Texan at FDL observes, Joe the Plumber was joining the parade with an open wish for the lynching of Sen. Chris Dodd:
Wurzelbacher has a reputation for being a blunt, politically incorrect speaker. Referring to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., more than once, Wurzelbacher asked, "Why hasn't he been strung up?"
...Referring to the Constitution as "almost like the Bible," Wurzelbacher said of the Founding Fathers: "They knew socialism doesn't work. They knew communism doesn't work."
The real prize, however, belongs to Col. Jim Ammerman, leader of the Full Gospel Chaplaincy. as Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action reports,
As noted in the Newsweek story, last fall - as the presidential election was heating up, retired Colonel E.H. "Jim" Ammerman, in the official September 2008 newsletter [ PDF of newsletter ] of his Department of Defense approved chaplain endorsing agency, published a letter which suggested, per the advice of a fabricated Abraham Lincoln quote, that four US Senators should be be "arrested, quickly tried and hanged!!!"...
The alleged crime ? - voting against a Senate bill that would have established English as the official language of the United States. Newsweek did not reveal the names of the four senators. But a May 20, 2009 Huffington Post story by Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Researcher Chris Rodda does: Democratic Party senators Dodd, Biden, Clinton, and Obama.
How influential is Ammerman? As Wilson explains, very:
Through his Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, retired Colonel "Jim"Ammerman presides over more than 270 active duty military chaplains, perhaps 7-8 percent of the active duty chaplain force.
Ammerman says he was a friend to the late General William Westmoreland, claims both Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee and Word of Faith televangelist Kenneth Copeland as current friends and states that his agency works with three and four star generals and has allies at the highest levels of the Pentagon as well as in the US Congress and Senate.
Ammerman himself, as you can see from reading Wilson's piece, has been hawking "New World Order" conspiracy theories for some time now. But what's especially noteworthy about this is that he and his fellow ideologues are most concerned about ... illegal immigration.
Take, for example, a sermon from one of Ammerman's chief cohorts, fellow preacher James Linzey:
"I want Americans, I want everybody listening, to go out and buy 5 weapons and 5,000 bullets - for your own protection, for self defense. Because I believe that foreign soldiers will come to our houses, to rape our wives and teenage daughters and kill the men right in front of them - and then the women will bear children of an ethnic stock different from what they are...
...this whole illegal immigration thing is a ploy. It's done deliberately. It's not done by accident. This is not a matter of `Oh, they're coming over the border because they can't get a job in Mexico.' - NO. The world bankers did the same thing to Mexico that they are now doing to America. That's why they're coming up here. Now they want to make us the same ethnic group through intermarriage, and rape, and killing the caucasians."
Considering that President Obama yesterday met with key congressmen about immigration, and pledged to push through a comprehensive-reform bill, the trigger the far-right extremists have been looking for may be just around the corner.
