Terrorists

I had been trying to get a handle on just why the Marcotte/Shakespeare/Edwards event was making me as angry as it has -- Chris Bowers's post over at MyDD has helped clarify it for me.

He draws a line between what the low-level Wingers do to those whose politics they don't support and the terrorist activities of the anti-abortion movement -- in fact, as he points out, what happened to Marcotte is terrorist activity. What the low-level wingers do is de facto terrorism.

During the brief media frenzy surrounding my googlebomb campaign in October of 2006, I myself received about five dozen death threats that looked not unlike the ones Amanda posted at Pandagon. Also, when Michelle Malkin tried to attack two college students for engaging in anti-war protests, the college students also received dozens of death threats. Considering of this, it now seems pretty clear to me now that every right-wing media campaign against a mid-level Democrat or progressive is always accompanied with numerous threats of violence. It seems to be a ubiquitous back-up tactic of the American right-wing in the event that their media pressure fails to work, just as it failed to work against the Edwards campaign, and just as it failed to work against me when it came to the Googlebombs. As it the case with abortion providers, if you can't beat them using democratic means, and if you can't defeat them using your vast media empire, use death threats as a final tactic to force relatively powerless individuals to bend to your demands.Terrorism and the threat of violence against American citizens remains a key political tool for the American right-wing.

http://chris_bowers.mydd.com/story/2007/2/14/12055/3589

Read his whole post. It's convincing.