Matt Yglesias on the Austin pilot and the "new rules":
As you probably know, a white guy entranced by an extremely version of Tea Party-style right-populist paranoia deliberately crashed an airplane into an IRS building in Texas yesterday. I’m not especially interested in debating semantics, but I think it’s very clear that if this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes that the right wing would be pissing its pants and demanding that anyone who refused the label the attack “terrorism” be put up on treason charges. But the new rules seem to be that politically motivated violence when undertaken by white people isn’t terrorism.
I couldn't agree more, had Joseph Stack been a Muslim the next two weeks would be spent listening to neo-cons demanding an apology by everyone from the administration to the entire Muslim community (much like we saw with Hasan in Ft. Hood) Or had he harbored generalized "leftist" views, the media led by Fox News and the right wing noise machine would demand individuals to be forced to state their political ideology on all forms of identification. It stands to reason the likes of Bachmann, Inhofe and DeMint would call for the impeachment of Barack Obama in the ensuing months. However that is not who is in charge, Yglesias goes on to applaud how the situation is being handled currently by officials. Calm and calculated.
He adds:
We shouldn’t be indifferent to the risk of death by Islamist terrorism any more than we should be indifferent to America’s unusually high rate of non-political homicides or to America’s alarmingly high infant mortality rate or its large number of deaths in car crashes. But it’s important to try to think about all these problems in a rational spirit, and adopt reasonable policy responses.
You know, grown up stuff.
I am Frank Chow and I approved this message
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