Scott Brown you’re a typical Republican. You can fool some in the MSM, but not us!!!

It was clearly terrorism in both cases if terrorism is defined as “violence against civilians in pursuit of a political agenda”.

But the story here isn’t the contrast between a mildly successful terrorist (Stack) and an unsuccessful terrorist (the panty bomber).

It’s the way propaganda can so easily warp the language/perceptions of a whole nation and its media. At least since the 1970s “terrorism” has been defined as “a tactic used by Muslims” and everybody in the USA seems to have accepted this without any question.

It’s almost as if I looked up “peace” in the dictionary and it said “war”.

No kidding. Back in 1995, the media wasn’t yet afraid to call it “terrorism” when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. (It helped that FOX News Channel didn’t exist yet.) But even then the righty portion thereof still made excuses for him. I suspect that if Timothy McVeigh were to have done his attack now, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin would be calling him a freedom fighter.

Shouldn’t we Dems be wearing black in memory of our late Party? Thanx Obama!

yeah anyway.

Sorry for the OT but this is relevant since this is the dude that said we had to destroy Ben-Luc to save it

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a four-star general who served as a top adviser to three presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own, died Saturday of complications from an infection, his family said. He was 82

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a four-star general who served as a top adviser to three presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own, died Saturday of complications from an infection, his family said. He was 82

I’m in charge here.

Yours,

Satan

No kidding. Back in 1995, the media wasn’t yet afraid to call it “terrorism” when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Actually they were, for the first few days.

If you remember, before they caught McVeigh, Steve Emerson and a number of other Liknudnik “Terror Experts” were all over the media claiming how the bombing “demonstrated the inside of the Muslim brain”.

Here’s a link.

http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/05/steve-emerson-wowser/

In 1995, right after the Oklahoma City Bombing, Emerson was quoted on air stating that he believed the bombing showed “a Middle Eastern trait,” he came to this conclusion because according to him it was done “to inflict as many casualties as possible.”

He went on to insinuate, with out providing any evidence, that Oklahoma was a hotbed of radicalism, “Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East.”

I’m actually amazed at how silly Emerson was, fwiw, since McVeigh hit OC on April 19, clearly timed to coincide with Waco.

But of course Emerson paid no price for this breathtaking piece of stupidity.

Well then, they weren’t afraid to call it terrorism as recently as last year, when talking about who Obama’s “pals” are. /S

Now he can take his place next to Colby in hell.

now maybe those souls can rest in peace.

Oh, that’s my whole point.

When they think that black or brown guys did it, it’s automatically terrorism (especially if the the black or brown guys aren’t Christians). But when white people — especially white conservative males like Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and William Krar — try it, it’s not.

When brown guys do it, motive isn’t important — stringing ‘em up is. But when white guys do it, suddenly their motives become not only important, but worth heeding.

The same people who would never countenance Hamas’ claims that suicide bombings are needed to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are the ones who nodded solemnly and in agreement with Timothy McVeigh’s claims that he did it in revenge for Waco. (Even though Vernon “David Koresh” Howell torched his own compound with no outside assistance — and had in fact been planning to do so for a month.) They not only heeded his claims, but thought them justified in a way they would never allow for Hamas.

ding, ding, ding – we HAVE a winner! Not only did FOX Snooze not exist, but I think even though the Fairness Doctrine had been abolished in 1987, the whole ‘attack dog media’ had not taken off yet.

Exactly. Remember how the Cons all turned on a dime when it was revealed that a fellow Con (and not an Arab furriner) did it?

Suddenly, they either went into denial (by insisting that the Muslims and/or the Feds did it — an angle that World Net Daily still pushes) or they went all touchy-feely, saying that we must try to understand this poor boy. In other words, language very similar to that used by Scott Brown and FOX News about Joe Stack.

It was still largely confined to AM radio, though they were making inroads, particularly in the then-new internet. Matt Drudge would be used by the get-Clinton crowd to put anti-Clinton smears into media play so their ally Michael Isikoff could write them up.

Who the hell is in charge now?

But when white guys do it, suddenly their motives become not only important, but worth heeding

Actually non-white guys can do it too, as long as they’re working for the right people.

The Nicaraguan Contras were very obviously terrorists, once again, in the classic definition of the word.

But, if you remember, Al Haig’s old boss Reagan said “I’m a Contra too.”

You can even be a Muslim, non white browned skin sort of person and not be called a terrorist, as long as you’re working for the right people.

In fact, you can even be the SAME Muslim, non-white brown skinned sort of person that today they’d call a terrorist, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulbuddin_Hekmatyar

And it’s not only the right doing it. If you went to the Daily Kos yesterday you would have seen a diary extolling “our glorious victory” in Afghanistan and how it’s going to help Obama win in 2010 and 2012. The diary, had, of course, no historical context.

It was clearly terrorism in both cases if terrorism is defined as “violence against civilians in pursuit of a political agenda”

The U.S. government commits violence against civilians in pursuit of a political agenda every day. Terrorism, Terrorists and the War On Terror are all made up terms used to destroy the rule of law and consolidate the power of the Oligarchs. We really should stop the conversation whenever these bogus terms come up.

The underpants bomber is an anti-imperialist. Since we Americans are citizens of the Empire we rightly consider him an enemy. Stack went postal. He is a domestic criminal, guilty of a murder/suicide.

In ancient Rome, when a crime was committed within a household, the testimony of a slave was not admissible in an adjudication UNLESS the testimony was obtained under torture. Freely volunteered testimony was not worthy of consideration. Perhaps the neocons and CPAC folks (constitutional originalists to the core–when it serves their purposes) believe this quirk of Roman law is enshrined in the US Constitution. Furriners, brown folk, and islamo-whatevers are obviously to be considered on a par with slaves, after all. Right? Hence the Shoe and Underwear Bombers should be tortured as a matter of course for any intelligence to become valid, whereas the Austin Aviator Joe Stark (a true patriot!) may simply be politely questioned, as was Timothy McVeigh.

It would seem that it comes down to skin color:
…
FOX News doesn’t think this is terrorism

Yes, he’s sounds like a terrorist to me but I think skin color is only part of it, there’s more to it than that.

Mainstream media basically labels Mr Stack as a Teabagger type. That’s bad news for Fox News considering they have embraced/hijacked the teabaggers and they cannot be seen as supporting/causing terrorism.

There’s a battle on for the “soul of the teaparty”. Fox News is an important part of the neocon right’s efforts to take over the teaparty. So Fox can neither drop the teabaggers nor can they call Mr Stack a terrorist.

Neocon Michael Gerson’s recent piece in the Washington Post is a good example of the twisted pitch that the neocon’s are making for the soul of the teaparty:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021803414.html

Chomsky is exceptionally good on the hypocrisy over the definition of “terrorism” and how the whole “war on terror” started in the 1980s.

What makes Joseph Stack interesting is that he really doesn’t fit into either category, pro US Government Terrorists (Contras, Muslims back in the 1980s) or anti US Government Terrorists (Muslims in the 2000s).

He’s not even a partisan right wing terrorist. His target was the IRS, a typical right-wing target. Most “conservatives” don’t see the IRS as a legitimate part of the US government.

But his “Jihadi Video” in the form of a suicide not struck a lot of left wing chords as well as right wing chords.

The underpants bomber is an anti-imperialist.

Anti-Imperialism is a philosphy.

Terrorism is a military/political tactic.

Terrorists can and have been Zionists, anti-imperialists, imperialists, communists, free-market capitalists, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists.

Some Mulsims use terrorism repetitively; white dudes don’t.

Some Mulsims use terrorism repetitively

And the worst perpetrators of repetitive terrorism are the Israelis

In that case, they’re called wars.

I don’t know if this is only race. I think it’s also about choice of targets.

I wonder what Fox News would have said if Stack (or any other white, Christian American) had flown a plane, not into an IRS building, but into the Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City?

Or what if McVeigh had blown up a private, pre-kindergarten in Connecticut for the rich instead of a nursery school full of black kids in Oklahoma City?

I’m betting Fox doesn’t know quite what to do with Stack.

Attacking the IRS is well in keeping with the Republican tactic of attacking some parts of the government (the IRS, the public schools) but defending others (the military).

But I also sense that Fox and the right is a bit nervous about some of the more violent fringes of the radical right, as evidenced by Glenn Beck’s recent attacks on the 9/11 Truth Movement.

OK not terrorism, war crimes.

Neocon Michael Gerson’s recent piece in the Washington Post is a good example of the twisted pitch that the neocon’s are making for the soul of the teaparty

Actually my guess would be that Dick Armey and the tea parties were set up to spin the populist, anti-government rage on the right in a safe direction.

If you remember, when Ron Paul was part of the Republican primary in late 2007, Fox News savaged him.

I actually remember Paul talking about how we have to ask “why” Al Qaeda attacked “us”. Rudy Giuliani threw a hissy fit and the media spent days trying to spin it as a Rudy Guiliani victory over Paul.

But then something happened, Guiliani’s campaign collapsed and Ron Paul maintained a steady popularity among a certain niche of the far right and left.

So there was a real danger for the ruling class of the anti-government anger on the right going in the wrong direction. They needed to spin it against the “right” targets.

I still think terrorism is actually a tactic in which the goal is to produce terror which causes the enemy to become confused, dispirited, and ineffectual. Unless the produced terror is valuable for those purposes, the acts are otherwise irrational. Unless you believe his note (that he wanted to inspire further action and change in the government), I think his act was one of stupid bitterness and anger and blaming his own failures on something or someone else. I think it was actually about the same as “going postal.” His vague and poorly reasoned manifesto, however, seems close to the foam-mouthed, incoate, rantings of some versions of Teabaggers. The danger, to me, is that the right wing media encourages and applauds these people, almost like code promises of 67 virgins. I agree with Frank Schaeffer that they are “trolling for assassins.”

I agree with what you say, PW, but I don’t think this guy was a true terrorist; merely a common, not completely successful, mass murderer.

Hmmm. Why do the names “Lloyd Blankfein” and “Jamie Dimon” spring to mind as I read this?

OK not terrorism, war crimes.

Terrorism is a smaller subset of the larger strategy, which is “war”.

Terrorism is a “tactic” used in “war” the way the “long pass” is a tactic used in “football”.

Why can’t people seem to understand this? There’s no opposition between war and terrorism. Nor is war terrorism. War is a political tactic. Terrorism is a type of war.

When the US government does it they call it called “low intensity conflict”.

When the Israelis use terrorism the media labels it “anti-terrorism”.

Terrorism isn’t always “bad”. The French Resistance used it against the Nazis. Sam Adams used it against the British.

“Anti-terrorism” isn’t always “good”. When the Czech Resistance assassinated Heydrich, the Nazis were the “anti-terrorists” and the Czechs terrorists.

But then, of course, the Nazis used “terrorism” to fight “terrorism” (ie Lidice).

And so on.

Fox was glad they had Tiger to focus on the next day.

Hmmm. I wonder.

Yeah, now that you mention it, Tiger is a terrorist– you can tell by the color of his skin.

You are correct of course. But the word “terrorism” was twisted by American propagandists and is now useless. Much like partisans have destroyed the meaning of the words “liberal” and “conservative”.

The IRS suicide pilot was a seriously disturbed individual who resorted to terrorism out of personal despair and isolation. The Christmas Day suicide passenger was a seriously disturbed individual who resorted to terrorism due to the malignant manipulation of his religious zeal by organized enemies of the United States. Those who class the former as an isolated domestic tragedy and the latter as an ongoing danger from abroad are not automatically racists. Beware the echo chamber of your own political prejudices.

who class the former as an isolated domestic tragedy and the latter as an ongoing danger

It depends.

Scott Roeder (the guy who shot George Tiller) had deep connections to the anti-abortion movement. So he’s both part of an organized movement and part of an ongoing threat.

Joseph Stack, on the other hand, seems to have acted in response to a general political climate, as a “lone wolf”.

But I don’t know if this makes either Stack or Roeder different from the typical Muslim terrorist.

Some Muslims terrorists are part of well organized terrorist organizations. Some others will just hear a speech in a mosque and decide to act as “lone wolves”.

Once again, seperate the tactic from the politics.

Somewhat off topic: Having worked for 20 years in a similar building, which included floors occupied by the FBI and IRS, I am astounded that there weren’t hundreds of casualties. I await news stories explaining, and I’m sure we’re in for years of conspiracy theories.

Why do the names “Lloyd Blankfein” and “Jamie Dimon” spring to mind as I read this

I think sloppy definitions of “terrorism” only play into the right’s hands.

Blankfein and Dimon are plutocrats, capitalist pigs, aristocratic scum sucking dogs who, in any sane society (France in 1793) would be guillotined.

But are they “terrorists”? Have they used “terrorism”?

I can think of one specific instance.

A Pennsylvania congressman (Paul Kanjorski) has said that Congress was threatened with “martial law” if they didn’t pass TARP.

By which, I think the Bankers were telling Congress that they’d manipulate the economy in order to insure violence in the streets if they weren’t paid off.

That, was a “terrorist threat”.

The Underwear Bomber Plot was an “inside job”. Underwear had no passport. He was escorted to security by an unknown person, and security escorted him aboard the airliner. His bombing performance was videotaped. Our neo-con controlled national security authorities now admit they lied and the airline passengers were telling the truth.

As part of the additional scrutiny, federal agents are conducting extensive background checks on every passenger who flew to Detroit on the Northwest flight in case one of them might have been sent as a “spotter” on the mission.

Federal agents also tell ABCNews.com they are attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.

Authorities had initially discounted the passenger accounts, but the agents say there is a growing belief the man have played a role to make sure Abdulmutallab “did not get cold feet.”

Oh, yeah. Saddam was our best bud, so long as he was actively warring against Iran. But when the Iran-Iraq War finally ended, so did much of his perceived usefulness to us — as the stupider, more ego-ridden neocons didn’t realize that removing Saddam allowed the Shia allies of Iran to come to the fore. These clowns were held largely in check during Bush II’s first term — Bush the Elder just wanted to punish Saddam (by tricking him with the Glaspie Gambit into thinking the US would allow him to take back the breakaway province of Kuwait), not topple him — but when Iran sent the grifter Chalabi to infiltrate the neocons, it was game over, baby.

Once again, seperate the tactic from the politics.

Exactly. Skin color is not relevant. Actions and their motivations are what matter to the analysis.

Bush the Elder just wanted to punish Saddam (by tricking him with the Glaspie Gambit into thinking the US would allow him to take back the breakaway province of Kuwait), not topple him

I think the Soviet Union was also a factor in 1990 that it wasn’t a few years later. Bush the First was operating under the assumption that the Cold War placed limits on American power.

A lot of the balls out right wing anger against Clinton had to do with the fact that Clinton was continuing to operate in a restrained (well, relatively restrained since he did kill 500,000 Iraqi children) instead of just recognizing the fact that Russia was flat on its back and it was time to invade.

But then Bush the Second invaded Iraq and got hammered by the Sunni resistance. The Israelis invaded Lebanon and got their asses handed to them by Hezbollah.

So the American ruling class realized that small militias (eg Hezbollah) were actually more dangerous than Soviet built state armies (eg Sadat’s Egypt or Saddam’s Iraq) and they reigned in the neocons and brought back Gates and the Kissingerites.

So Bush the Seconds second term and Barack the First’s first term are quite similar to Clinton and Bush the First.

And the neocons are fuming, hoping for Palin or a more neocon friendly president in 2012, whereupon they’ll Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran.

The fact that these idiots are spouting their racist, American/centric views should not be surprising, or all that comment/diary worthy. We get it. This quote from Brown’s interview with Cavuto is worth noting.

Brown:…But the way we’re trying to deal with things and have been in the past, at least until I got here is, there’s such a logjam in Washington. And people want us to do better. They want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way.(emphasis mine)

This is quite a statement coming from a guy firmly entrenched in the “government is the problem not the solution” crowd. We need to kick these guys hard and often in their ideological crotch when we get a wide open shot.

Wow. Never heard of that guy. Too bad my not having heard of him doesn’t constitute “paying a price” for right wing loons.

I like the name of that site you linked to: “Loon Watch.” Definitely need one of those.

Bull f-ing s_-t.

Just because Stack was perhaps “seriously disturbed” doesn’t change the fact that the method of demonstrating his anger that he chose was influenced by the string of similar attacks on government symbols in recent decades, and it certainly was influenced by the rhetoric against government as the root of all evil from the right wing loonies (in which I include the current mainstream Republican party).

Without the rhetoric and the examples of the Murrah Building, 9/11, the murders at teh Holocaust museum, and sundry other attacks on innocent people to publicize private grievances, he wouldn’t have flown his plane into a building. He might have crashed into a field, if he chose suicide by plane, or a lake, or a desert, etc. It is unlikely it would have occurred to him in the context of say, 40 yrs. ago, to take government employees with him. But today nuts like him consider innocent government workers part of the “evil” of government iitself.
The ‘analysis” used by these Fox News/Scott Brown/George Will types takes a sharp divergence when the perpetrator in question is Muslim or black. Try some unbiased analysis, yourself.

The ‘analysis” used by these Fox News/Scott Brown/George Will types takes a sharp divergence when the perpetrator in question is Muslim or black

It’s one variable.

How about if we take two hypothetical terrorists.

1.) Black guy, born again Christian, acts more or less alone, blows up a Planned Parenthood Center, kills three people, but an incoherent rant on the web saying “he did it for the babies” is tied to him.

2.) White guy, blond, blue eyed WASP, left wing radical, pictures of him marching in Answer marches, takes an automatic rifle into the Israeli embassy and shoots three people.

Which one would Fox label a “terrorist”?

Scott Brown is an ass-clown. The people of Mass. should be ashamed and embarrassed that they thought this was the best choice to represent them in the US Senate. He is an immature, thoughtless, low-intellectual horsepower airhead. And the Republican party and the right wing is rallying around him like he’s going to be the next President? My God in heaven, what has this country come to.

Both. Deny it all you want, for Fox and its ilk, race trumps ideology.

Yup, and it’s especially dangerous for the ruling elite for the left and the right to start to come together in a backlash against the neocon aspects of thier policies.

I do remember Paul making a fool of Guiliani in the debates using the CIA’s own statements on the issue of terrorism/foreign policy/blowback. One of the few(maybe the only) highlight moments in an otherwise dead Republican primary debate.

To me, the crowds that Beck and Armey attract seem far more potentially violent than the original Ron Paul teaparty crowd. The most aggressive I’ve seen out the Ron Paul types was a bunch of college kids chasing Sean Hannity around calling him a liar and chanting “Fox News sucks”.

I wondered what had happened to this aspect of the story. I would like to hear more from the man and woman who insisted they were sure of what they had seen at Schiphol that day. I really admire them for persevering when it must have been that the “authorities” were trying to paint them as overwrought, or imagining or mistaken.

But..but.. he has a pickup truck.

what has this country come to.

A capitalist heaven where greed is the mantra

FDL is progressive, not communist. Fox is conservative, not racist. There is a difference. Only Scott Brown and George Will know what lurks in their hearts, but treating domestic murderers and foreign enemies differently is not automatically the result of racism, just because one was white and one was not.

Both. Deny it all you want, for Fox and its ilk, race trumps ideology

I think you’ve got two things in play here.

1.) You’re correct that Fox is racist. But it doesn’t mean “race trumps ideology.” Fox LOVES people of color (eg Michelle Malkin) who spout the right conservative talking points.

2.) On the other hand, I think part of the reason the “war on terror” became so popular so fast among so many Americans was that at the heart of it is a racial anxiety about America being no longer majority white. If you read some of the anti-immigrant press, you’ll see that a lot of Minutemen types think standing on the Mexican border with rifles is a way of stopping Al Qaeda from sneaking across the border. In the minds of a lot of Minuteman types, there’s an absolutely seamless connection between illegal immigration and Muslim terrorism.

So I half agree with you. But I think the choice of targets is crucial to discuss. Once again, does ANYBODY think that if a WASP male took a classroom full of bankers kids in Connecticut hostage in order to protest the Israeli assault on Gaza, he WOULDN’T be labeled a terrorist? Does anybody think that if Stack had crashed his plane into the Goldman Sachs Building in Jersey City and he had been a long time member of a Marxist organization he WOULDN’T have been labeled a terrorist?

Well, Clinton did effectively attack Russia itself. He sent in neo liberal economists and bankers to help loot the crap out of the place.

He basically invaded with bankers and economists rather than troops and bombs.

It’s almost as if there’s 2 factions within the elite that have the exact same goals. They only differ in method. Some prefer bullets, others bankruptcy. Both are quite lethal. Mao’s “great leap forward”(and off a cliff) is an example of economic devastation killing tens of millions.

Our globalized financial disaster today almost feels like a financial/economic world war.

It’s almost as if there’s 2 factions within the elite that have the exact same goals. They only differ in method.

Yeah. I voted for King Barack I only because I actually believed McCain would start a war with Iran.

But I wonder sometimes. Bush actually told the Israelis to stand down when they came to him for permission to bomb Iran. And they did.

I’m almost hoping Obama actually does attack Iran before 2012. Then the whole tricky moral dilema about whether Kissingerites are better than Neocons will be irrelevent and I can pull the lever for Nader or McKinney or just not vote.

Our globalized financial disaster today almost feels like a financial/economic world war

It feels to me as if the plutocrats and bankers decided to do whatever ugly shit they had to do when it became clear Obama was going to beat McCain.

A one term liberal president who would be the scapegoat for the consequences of two terms of Bush, and a one term liberal president you could surround with bankers and light neocons would be perfect.

Arundhati Roy believes a similar thing happened in India in 2006.

http://www.alternet.org/story/36643/

What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the elections. So you’re thinking, “Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who has the approbation of all these people?” Continues to be in power in Gujarat. Nothing has happened. It’s a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still economically boycotted Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes. Police won’t register cases. One or two important cases are looked at by the Supreme Court, but the mass of it is still completely unresolved. That’s the situation, anyway, and while you’re orchestrating this communal killing, you’re also selling off to Enron and to all these private companies, and so on the one hand you’re talking about Indian-ness and all this, and this nationalism in this absurd way, and on the other, you’re just selling it off in bulk.

But during the elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a bit. But the Congress campaigned against the neoliberal policies that it had brought in, actually.

But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media’s own stocks began to drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy, and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that’s coming to vote was outside the stock market now. And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress, spokesmen had to come out and say, “We will not dismantle this neoliberal regime.” And today we have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is part of the Washington Consensus.

Nobody said it was ironic. My statement is evidence-based.

On edit, further: It may well be automatic with some of these folks, in that their beliefs are so deep-seated, so thoroughly part of their world-view, that they react entirely unconsicously.
But unconscious racism is not in any way not-racism.

Most of these folks can’t help themselves. Some may really believe they are making rational distinctions. Their inherent racism however causes them to make the distinctions, not reason, not evidence.

Not to be gratuitously insulting, but from your repeated arguments this morning, I begin to wonder if you might be among that group. Sorry, I withheld judgment at first, but you are following the argument pattern I am referring to.
When you have time, seriously, I suggest rigorously examining your attitudes to race, ethnic groups, and perhaps to political groups. That is the only way to root out unconscious bias. Assuming one is not biased is apt to be wrong without such self-examination.
And, again, my statements above are evidence-based, not just my opinion.
Apparently, ymmv. Sorry about that. Your arguments fail to persuade.

Michelle Malkin is a person of color, but she is not black.
That makes a difference for many racists. Black is the line they will not, or rarely will, cross.
Sure, Michael Steele is head of the RNC, but his rarity is the point there.

Asians, after all, are the “good minority.” Ask any Asian-American. Malkin does not prove that Fox ain’t racist.

Like I said in answer to your 48, I don’t deny that. In your @48 example, the response is “both.” But if the alleged perp is black, Muslim, or god-forbid, “Hispanic” (have there been any of those?), the default position is going to be “terrorist.”
A white WASP perp has to have those qualifiers you mentioned to fit the definition of “terrorist” for Fox, et al.

There will always be exceptions, but they do not negate the existence of the empirical rule.

That makes a difference for many racists. Black is the line they will not, or rarely will, cross. Sure, Michael Steele is head of the RNC, but his rarity is the point there.

Condi Rice
Colin Powell
Alan Keyes
Clarence Thomas

Come on. The list goes on and on.

Once again, there’s absolutely no question that the ludicrous inflation of Al Qaeda into a threat the size of the Soviet Union has a lot to do with white anxiety about third world people.

It’s even more intense in Europe with all of the conspiracy theories about Eurabia.

In the mind of the typical wingnut, the fear of immigration and the threat of Islamic terrorism are inextricably entangled.

But my point was that it’s not simply racism. The recent governor’s race in New Jersey (where a big, emotional issue was state aid to Newark and Camden’s schools) was simple racism.

But I think when it comes to foreign affairs and terrorism, you have to account for the fact that the empire needs “good” people of color to be their puppets. So you can’t be a balls out white nationalist.

I think of course Fox is being racist here. Fox is racist like I breathe. But I think the more interesting side of this story is the target and the question of how violent the radical right wants to get.

I honestly believe there’s probably a debate going on between people on the radical right who really would like to see Obama get shot and people on the radical right who think it would just lead to a backlash agasint the Teabaggers and allow Biden to pull a Lyndon Johnson and get the most liberal program possible through congress.

I can also see Brown getting called to the carpet and screamed out for this little gaffee by SOME people on the right and turned into a hero by OTHERS.

Remember, no Democratic Senator, not Feingold, not Sanders, not Boxer ever spoke at an anti-war rally from 2003 to 2008, never, not once, EVER.

And here you have Scott Brown openly embracing not only the radical right but radical right wing terrorism.

That’s way more interesting than simple racism.

evidently, for fox news, it’s also not terrorism if the person you are trying to kill is guilty of something, and we all know the i.r.s. is guilty of collecting taxes, and taxes are bad. therefore the very understandable double standard for fox news.
taxes bad. bomb taxman, understandable.

The constant flinging of racism accusations only undermines the word’s ability to label the real article, in all its unforgiveable ugliness. The attempted suicide passenger is a self-confessed member of an international organization that has declared war on the United States. The suicide pilot was not. Noting this difference does not constitute racism, even if one happened to be white and one did not.

I never considered his comments racial, this race card is being played too much (not that I don’t think he is one, he probably is, but that’s not what’s at work here) What’s at work here is WORSE than racism:
This is open support of terrorism. Not any terrorism either, but an AIRPLANE being flown into a fucking BUILDING! An Al-qaeda method- and just like al-qaeda, he made sure there was plenty of fuel onboard for the fire. That way the building can collapse! He’s surely studied how well it worked on NYC. And then a SENATOR of this nation, of the national government, explained away this terrorist attack as “reasonable” due to tax rage, an attack on the federal government itself- of which he is part!

So where is the president about this? WTF did he say??? Did he not object to a senator making statements in support of terrorism??? What the hell is going on? Did he even say a damn thing? Besides offering his “condolences”. Something is wrong with this world when members of our government support terrorists on tv. I’m amazed by how fast this just dropped out of the news. But I can catch 24/7 Olympics coverage on NBC.

The clip shows a crass politician mangling an attempt to change the subject to himself, which was amply demonstrated throughout the remainder of the clip, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the suicide pilot and everything to do with his overly inflated ego. There was no justification of terrorism. Shrieking absurd accusations does not sway critical thinkers.