You won't get an apology or anything else from the Republican party. If they say anything other than a standard condemnation and note of sympathy to the victims, then the Republicans will be associating themselves with these nutjobs. They don't dare do that.
FYI, fascism is on the right wing political spectrum, not the left. The antithesis of fascism is communism. Just ask Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Lenin.
The GOP is white but I think it wrong to draw a parallel between that and the occasional whack job who goes on a murderous vendetta for some perceived injustice. Right now the GOP is left with the most unattractive spokespeople possible as the party has lost support among moderates. The party has become more extreme, less representative, and less appealing to the average American. My mom, a Republican, isn't bothered by this. She's happy to see the traitors leave the big tent! That's really her attitude. She watches Fox, listens to Rush and Sean, and last night tried to convince me not to go into New York tomorrow because she's worried I'll get avian flu and die. I see the effect of all that fear mongering on her. She complains that the American car companies failed because they didn't push safety as the most important aspect of their cars because safety is the most important thing to everyone who buys a vehicle. She truly doesn't understand that some people don't hold safety to be the single most important factor in buying a car. As for her, she's buying another gigantic SUV when the time comes because she's convinced it's the safest thing to drive even though it isn't. This is all right out of the Rush/Sean playbook.
It's fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. Even health care reform. All the comparisons made are the US vs. Canada and the US vs. the UK and aren't we lucky we aren't them! When I went to Ireland the last time a few years ago she even advised me to only drink the water after it was boiled
.
My mom worries too much. Yet she also reflects the views of many older, white, American voters who have the same life experiences. They do not see the need for America to change its myths and grow beyond the post- World War II economic and military leviathan who controlled the world while everyone else was literally picking-up the pieces of devastation. She's a smart, literate, funny woman who dearly loves her family but she also couldn't sleep for weeks following 9/11 because she worried about my step-sister and other family members living in New York. Even now she's offered to help my step-sister and her fiance with their mortgage just to get them to move out of Manhattan.
My mother is terrified of terror and so are many like her. She's convinced that Bush and Cheney, "kept us safe," despite the fact the largest terror attack in the world happened during their administration. She's convinced everyone in detention is a terrorist and should be tortured. She's convinced any sort of health care reform is a giant mistake that will mean weeks or years of waiting for sub-standard care yet acknowledges that we have to do something. She's certain that Pelosi and Obama want to establish a socialist government that will confiscate everyone's wealth and give it to the poor yet wants amnesty for illegals because the Mexicans at the barn where she boards her horse are, "such hard workers," and being the good Calvinist she was brought-up to be, hard work is to be admired above
all things.
She's not alone. I hear this kind of thing all over the sleepy, well-to-do town I live in despite the fact that more liberal-leaning city people have moved here. These are people she doesn't like and wants to move to South Carolina to avoid. And if people like her are all over my town, how many others are just like her in similar towns all over the country?
You listen to propaganda enough, you tend to believe it even if you try to resist doing so. It's just the way humans are wired. Until the GOP gets control of the reins and actively starts breaking with the Fox/talk radio crowd, they will not achieve the kind of success they seek. America is different from what it was and will not be so again. The members of the GOP like my mom won't ever acknowledge that. They're too old or too trapped in paradigms which worked so well in the past but which are now obsolete. The party of conservatism has become the party of nostalgia and that just doesn't work as the forces of demographics, economics, global politics, and geography force the US to evolve or die.
What many of us witness as a new era is just as equally the death of another; one that is deeply held by many Americans who have no experience of being poor, LGBT, non-Christian, a minority, an immigrant, or living in a country that isn't top dog. They don't understand what is happening and feel threatened. Rather than adapt, they will be left behind to become more fearful, frustrated, and angry. That's where the nutjobs will come from and which is why they seem to be right-wing nutjobs, not left-wing nutjobs.
If you want to see left-wing nutjobs, go back just a bit to the days of union formation and the ascendency of the Communist party in the US when violence wasn't rare. McKinley and Garfield were both assassinated by left-wing nutjobs. Now just isn't the time of the right in its current incarnation and when people feel disenfranchised, that's when they go to the rifle.
