Good Odds that Rupert Murdoch Will be Responsible for the Next Timothy McVeigh or Assassination Attempt

The Constitution guarantees free speech. It does not guarantee huge megaphones to people who incite hatred and/violence against elected officials, judges or ordinary citizens.

If terrorist events or assassinations occur as a result of their blabbering on our airwaves, these people should be held responsible and, trust me, they will be.

by Mark Karlin (Buzzflash)

Yes, with the civil war talk on the program of the recently acquired FOX News demagogue, Glenn Beck, inflammatory talk by Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh's nativist rants that equate Obama to something akin to an amalgamation of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, the right-wing media is stirring up the dangerous angry white male resentment to a dangerous frenzied pitch.

And we all know where that ended up with Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement of the '90s, which was enabled by the right-wing media barons -- such as Rupert Murdoch -- to create a literal armed militia movement against the government of the United States.

Call it treasonous, call it demagoguery, call it treachery: it is what comes down the pike when the wealthy Democratic elites are more content to fund organizations that criticize the apocalyptic, brown-shirted Murdoch media barons rather than buying up media and delivering an alternative message that emphasizes loyalty to the truth, Constitution and democracy.

Sure, we love Media Matters, but they are just a fly on a donkey's butt as far as Rupert Murdoch and the gang are concerned. Media Matters will get an occasional correction of factual errors -- if they pull out all their guns for one, but it's too little a compensation for the energy put into the effort. And the people who take in the corporate media remember the misleading assertion, not the rare convoluted retraction.

The reality is that the only thing that matters in media is owning it. Murdoch knows that and couldn't give a horse's fart for what Media Matters has to say, nor does CBS which just hired a Democratic-hating Republican stalwart as their senior communications executive.

Nor do any of the mainstream corporate media: including radio, television and print. They will just keep on doing what they are doing because they own it and they know what they want: an oligarchy.

The troops for this formidable army of images, mistruths, and emotional manipulation are the angry white males, the guys who have felt displaced by minorities and women and immigrants ever since the Civil Rights and Feminist upheaval began in the '60s.

And these displaced white guys are armed to the teeth, courtesy of the NRA and the senators and representatives who lie down like doormats for the gun lobby in Congress.

And bristling with guns -- including the .50 caliber sniper rifle that is legal in all but California -- they feel enabled and patriotic in rising up against the legitimate Constitutional government of the United States.

As rabid as Hannity and Beck and Limbaugh may seem, their ratings have actually gone up since Obama's election. The white male who has been shafted by the wealthy elite, pick-pocketed and left in humiliation, falls prey yet again to the siren song of the Murdoch/Ailes stable of Goebbels disciples and their cohorts such as Limbaugh and Savage.

This is no exaggeration. Glenn Greenwald discusses it as do the superlative FOX trackers at FOX Newshounds.

And its impact is seen drilling down to discussions on Sean Hannity's website of armed rebellion, military coup, and secession.

Those Obama supporters who think I am being hyperbolic have a short sense of history. This is what we saw in the Clinton administration that led to the domestic terrorist Oklahoma bombing and trumped up impeachment.

And before the right-wing media was as consolidated as it is today, we saw our liberal leaders gunned down one by one in the '60s, resutling in the election of Richard Nixon -- and the beginning of the well-funded corporate mainstream media consolidation owned by people beholden only to the oligarchy, not the American public.

Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few in number, far too few.

And Murdoch may do his own non-apology about his New York Post's thinly veiled racist incitement cartoon of two white police officers shooting a chimp representing -- in full bigoted Murdoch fashion -- Obama.

But when the armed angry white males decide to act because of the Murdoch/Limbaugh et al. incitement to rise up ringing in their ears, the blood will be on the hands of Rupert and his fellow right-wing corporate media barons -- and he won't be sorry for it.

He'll only feel one thing: Mission accomplished.

Let The Sun Shine In......