MANHATTAN — So perhaps Jon Elliott wasn’t exactly cool as a
cucumber when he took to the airwaves early Tuesday to announce
fellow Air America host Randi Rhodes had lost several teeth in an
cold-blooded assault while walking her dog on the streets of New
York City. Maybe Elliott, who prides
himself on being “The Most Dangerous Liberal in America,”
sounded a little bug-eyed crazy. Fair enough. But with the
proverbial Reichstag in flames and the fascist takeover of the
United States clearly under way, neither calm nor
restraint were buzzwords of the day.
“Is this an attempt by the right wing hate machine to silence
one of our own?” Elliott — no doubt only “dangerous” in the most
loving, progressive way possible — breathlessly asked his
audience. “Are we threatening them? Are they afraid that we’re
winning? Are they trying to silence intimidate us?”
The answer for many was a resounding, “Yes!” Over at Rhodes’
official messageboard, more than a few suspected a “Nazi Brownshirt” attack. “If you’ve
watched The Sopranos you know how easy (and cheap) it is
to buy that kind of hit,” one intoned darkly. “IF this was a
political hit from Blackwater or whoever, there is going to be the
wrath of G-d on the perpetrators,” another added. The proprietor of
TalkingRadio wailed, “These whack jobs appear determined to
whatever it takes to silence the opposing point of view.” And a
visitor to Think Progress, the blog of the Center For
American Progress — a self-declared “nonpartisan organization”
paradoxically fighting against the “Radical Right-Wing Agenda” —
posited Rhodes was “probably beaten up by some nutball in the
Mallkin [sic] Mongoloid Mafia…that’s the type of viscous [sic]
rabid people they are.”
When it was suggested that perhaps assigning blame before having
all (any) of the facts might be a bit premature, an angry commenter
at Watching
the Watchers — “Independent Media Criticism That Bites”
(presumably they mean “With Bite”) — snarled that there was “no
reason not to suspect conservatives.”
“They’re vicious, violent, and unprincipled, just like
unaffiliated muggers,” he wrote, adding, in retort to one
conservative who protested, “We are not animals,” “Well, you’re
sure not human…not if you can still call yourself a conservative
after seeing what your people really have in mind for this country.
I won’t say ‘our country’ as I’m now ashamed to admit that I was
born American, and technically still am one, although I’ve washed
my hands of your nightmare psychologically, and soon, physically as
well.”
This prompted yet another commenter to relate a lesson from his
father — a “very smart man,” we are assured — who taught him long
ago, “people like these right-wing pundits have souls that look
like maggot-infested corpses, you know, like the ones you always
see in horror movies.”
PROGRESS! MAGGOT-INFESTED OR NOT, a liberal acknowledges the
existence of a conservative soul! Nevertheless, the
ex-pat-in-waiting and maggot hunter were hardly alone. Here are but
two choice cuts from the exchange that followed:
Adolph Hitler’s right wing thugs regularly ‘mugged’
opponents and members of unpopular groups even before he came to
power….Given Randi Rhodes courageous outspokenness about the
sinister intentions of the right wing, it is not unreasonable to
suspect that this non-robbery assault is an attempt by
Neo-conservative thugs to silence her views.
And:
Have you ever noticed that when one of ours shoots one
of theirs (Reagan, Ford, Wallace), it’s always an amateurish
lunatic like Squeaky Fromme or John Hinkley [sic] acting alone and
without a plan or a mind, and that little or no blood spills, but
that when they come after one of ours (Malcolm, JFK, MLK, RFK), it
is a flawlessly executed surgical strike from triangulated
professional snipers who leave no witnesses or other loose ends
behind, just the corpse of a formerly great liberal leader and an
unwitting patsy to take the fall (Oswald, Bremer,
Sirhan)?
A Democratic Underground member went so far as to
divine from the assault the opening salvos of
“an ideology war between conservatives and liberals that will rip
this country apart…a war that will be bloody, and claim
lives….Hell, maybe this is what has to happen before we can start
to take our country back.”
THE ONLY PROBLEM WAS, this hadn’t actually happened. As
the New York Daily News soon reported, not only had Rhodes “never filed
a report and never claimed to be the victim of a mugging,” but her
own lawyer insisted the talk show host’s injuries were the result
of a fall, not a “hate crime.” (A fall outside a bar?) Air America followed this up
with a short statement, which read in part: “The reports of a
presumed hate crime are unfounded.”
End of story, right?
Wrong.
Despite the contentions of Rhodes’ own lawyer and Air America
Radio — not likely members in good standing of the Vast Right-Wing
Conspiracy — Rhodes’ fans refused to let the hate crime narrative give up
the ghost. “We are likely to be more accurate on this board than
the entire domestic news industry,” one aficionado declared at
Rhodes’ official site. Another seconded that dismissal:
“Unfortunately the AAR statement was so vague it only worsened the
situation.”
Vague? The reports of a presumed hate crime are
unfounded seems to be the sentence-length antonym of
vague. And even leaving aside whether a person whose
profile lists his location as “The 13th Floor of
the Tower of Terror” and auto-signs every post with the refrain,
“Republicans will never be happy until they have completely
destroyed the earth and ended all life as we know it” is going to
be more accurate than the entire domestic news industry,
is he going to be more accurate than Rhodes’ lawyer and
uber-liberal employer?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say…probably not. There
is, however, something bigger going on here, encapsulated
in the determination of Rhodes’ fans, against all facts to the
contrary, to hold-tight to the pipe dream of right-wing fanatics
hiring Blackwater agents to beat her as she walked her dog: They so
wish it were true. As with global warming alarmism, these sorts of
messianic martyr fantasies about neo-Nazi conspirators aligned
against liberals’ salvation program for the masses are delusions
designed to assure people clearly desperate for meaning in their
lives that they are historically significant figures living in
historically significant times. History, sadly, is not made within
the virtual walls of online echo chambers.
NOT LONG AFTER the first (erroneous) report of an attack, a Rhodes
fan let it be known that she hoped police would find the attacker
and somehow induce him to “explain what circumstances in his
background led to his rage.”
“This knowledge may help us all avoid attacks on the street in
the future,” she wrote.
At the time, no doubt, the expectation was the explanation would
be Rush Limbaugh or College Republicans. Now that
the culprit is nonexistent or inanimate, depending on how one
classifies culprits, the question of what caused “his” rage is
moot. Or, considering the complete psychological profile our
left-wing friends had already worked up, is it more a case of an
answer looking for a question?
Either way here’s wishing Ms. Rhodes a speedy recovery and
here’s hoping her supporters find a way to get to the bottom of
their own rage, which they so adeptly project on others.
