[ By: Peter Birkenhead ]
The menu at the Cabin was long, one of those unwieldy, laminated mega-menus that grace the tables of roadside diners and chalets everywhere, and reflected a classic attention to theme (gumbo burger, gumbo omelet, gumbo). If the menu had been covered in tinfoil, I would’ve had a late-summer tan by the time I reached the dessert page. When our waiter approached, I asked — in what I imagined was a small act of clever, Yankee defiance — if the gumbo was any good.

My friend Gabbie and I had come directly from a tour of a former sugar plantation down the road, in Vacherie, La., called Oak Alley, and I had a crook in my neck. Up until that morning, whenever I heard the word “plantation,” I’d thought “slavery.” When I’d booked the tour, I had done so in the spirit of a visitor to Dachau or Wounded Knee. But the tour itself was given in the spirit of a visit to the home of a tasteful, Southern movie star. Our guide, in a tone equal parts admiring and envious, devoted 90 minutes to the armoires, linens and chamber pots of the home, but almost no time to the people who built, creased and cleaned them. The words “slave” and “slavery” were never mentioned.

“I guess the white people in antebellum drag getting misty about ‘the Golden Age of the South’ might have been our first clue,” Gabbie observed.

We did hear the word “servant” on the tour, two or three times, in the telling of what were meant to be amusing anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the servants’ owners. Our guide was dressed in an elaborate, sky-blue ball gown, and chirped about what fun it was for her to “go back in time and live like Scarlett O’Hara for a day.”

As Gabbie read from the menu in her best Vivien Leigh, her eyes began to widen. She dropped the drawl and informed me that the Cabin had been serving busloads of visitors to Louisiana’s plantation country for more than 30 years on the strength of its reputation for authenticity, which the menu explained thusly: “Our goal is to preserve some of the local farming history, serve meals typical of the River Road tradition, and make your visit a relaxed and memorable one. The Cabin Restaurant began as one of the 10 original slave dwellings of the Monroe Plantation. Through the efforts, ideas, the love, sweat and patience of friends and family, you are able to enjoy a small sampling of Southern Louisiana history.”

The love, sweat and patience of actual participants in the “local farming history,” the original builders and tenants of the Cabin, were not dwelt upon or mentioned in the menu’s text, but their contribution to the restaurant’s ambience was subtly alluded to. As the waiter brought our food I read: “In the grand dining room, the roof is supported by four massive beams ? placed so that the room resembles a Garconnier (the visiting bachelor’s quarters on a river road plantation.)”

And we put our menus down. I’ve enjoyed almost every spoonful of gumbo I’ve had over the years, whether in expensive restaurants, coffee shops or train stations, but I might have had my last one contemplating the events witnessed by the roof beams of a “visiting bachelor’s quarters” on a 19th-century sugar plantation.

When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

Southern apologists earned sudden fortunes in a gold rush of nostalgic forgetting. Within a year of the war’s end, a Virginia journalist named Edward Pollard published a novel called “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,” a breathless, self-pitying fantasy, and the first of many to recast the conflict as a tragedy of fraternal strife and regional repression, to blame the Confederate defeat on the overwhelming resources and underhanded tactics of the North, exalt the Confederacy’s most ruthless generals as paragons of honor, revel in stories of freed people run amok, wallow in tearful, postwar family reunions, and pine for the “Golden Age” of hoop- skirts and happy-go-lucky chattel. It depicted slavery as a benign if not beneficial institution, and relegated further discussion on the topic to the offstage realm of “touchy” subjects, where, for perpetual Northern fear of offending delicate Southern sensibilities, it has languished ever since.

“Have you ever dreamed of waking up to an antebellum room that would be the envy of Scarlett O’Hara? The fulfillment of just such a dream is the essence of the Edgewood experience. Hosts Dot and Julian Boulware offer eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave’s quarters.”

— Country Collections Magazine.

The scores of histories and plantation novels that followed Pollard’s, many produced by members of what came to be known as the Dunning School (after its founder, Columbia history professor William Archer Dunning), an influential movement of celebrity, revisionist scholars — a sort of mutton-chopped Heritage Foundation — helped concoct a broad, new Southern culture of perpetual grievance and nostalgia for a reimagined, antebellum idyll. The primary focus of most Dunning School stories was not the war itself, but Reconstruction, a period that Claude Bowers, an early-20th-century successor to Pollard (and given to similarly Glenn Beck-ian flights of tearful, dissociative rage) called “The Tragic Era.” It was a decade, as he saw it, marked by unrestrained Yankee corruption and sadism, which punished the South for secession and forced black suffrage on an already politically neutered white population. Bowers’ books demonized “fanatic” abolitionists and Ulysses S. Grant, exalted the Ku Klux Klan and Andrew Johnson, and sold hundreds of of thousands of copies.

“When a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him afore he died. They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it. They’d cart them down to the graveyard on the place and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn’t come circlin’ round. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin’.

— Mary Reynolds, former slave, 1936

By 1932, and the publication of “Gone With the Wind” — the ultimate Lost Cause novel and still the most popular book in America, after the Bible — Lost Cause literature succeeded in sacrificing the very meaning of the Civil War to the demands of myth-making. (The 1939 movie sealed the deal.) The culture of forgetting had become a national religion.

Seventy years later, movies like “The Help” — the latest in a long line of tributes to the unsung white heroes of black history, and a gauzy rendering of the civil rights era as a triumph of the human spirit over mean people — have taken up where “Gone With the Wind” left off. A direct descendant of Lost Cause culture, modern nostalgia is souvenir nostalgia, a taxidermical, preservation-fetish that isolates parts from wholes, pulls symbols out of context, and shrinks cultural memories to the size of a 9/11 commemorative coin. (Never Forget!) It’s woven into every corner of the culture, high and low, North and South, as pervasive as sleep. And it is a black hole of memory, the place where memory goes to die.

“One woman thought all the slave houses (now guest rooms) should be torn down, because it was an insult and exploiting slavery and so forth. And I replied, very nicely, that I think she would be destroying history.”

— Mary Hill Caperton, manager of the Quarters, a bed and breakfast in Charlottesville, Va.

The Cabin is only one of dozens of former slave quarters around the country that have been gussied-up into hotel rooms or restaurants. It was exceedingly pleasant and brightly lit, full of cheerful, laughing patrons. Astonishingly tall, wholesome-looking children in middle-school basketball jerseys pointed ketchup-dipped fries at their dad’s brows and made gentle jokes about their hairlines. The Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” bubbled down from speakers in the rafters.

A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the restaurant’s manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of “crawfish,” and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves. “It’s history, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “It’s not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome.”

He had a point. Gabbie and I seemed to be the only ones in the room not smiling, and for a moment the queasiness of chronic self-doubt, the familiar nausea of the self-ostracized, the vegetarian in the steakhouse, made me wonder if it was us. Were we the ones not seeing straight, arching our eyebrows through a life on the wrong side of the looking glass? And then I wondered why I was flattering myself.

Dead-eyed nostalgia, whether practiced by Tea Partyers, advertising directors or me, in my “heritage” running shoes, typing away on a computer built by indentured servants, can be invisible to us. As invisible as the whip — the very old, well-used buggy whip — hanging on the Cabin’s wall must have been to whoever decided it was a good idea to hang it there.

Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.”

— Pat Buchanan

Don’t get me wrong — I like nostalgia, I miss nostalgia. The kind that involves remembering, anyway: mostly private, typically accidental, not always rosy. When my great-uncle told stories about flying bomber missions over Germany, he didn’t merely recall events — experiences that he had a complicated affection for — he wondered about them. His eyes grew pained and befuddled; his chest rose and fell with a fullness no amount of time could diminish. He wasn’t running from himself to an imagined past, he was finding himself in his story, sorting it out, trying to see it clearly.

House (now Speaker) John Boehner recently complained that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats “are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.”

— Think Progress, July 1, 2010 [ REPUBLICAN JOHN BOEHNER: DEMOCRATS ARE SNUFFING OUT THE 'JIM CROW? AMERICA I GREW UP IN; STUPID, GOD-DELUDED SHARRON ANGLE ]

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Of course childhood nostalgia — the kind of remembering you do when remembering is new, when memories are full and dramatic because they’re few, and weightless — is different. Mourning hamsters. Idealizing grandparents. Chronicling summers like they’re centuries. When I had 12 years to look back on, they were eons. When I had 20 I said, “my whole life” and meant it.

But the past I remembered then wasn’t even my own. I sported a ridiculous ’50s trench coat and well-thumbed copies of “On the Road” in the ’80s the way 20-year-olds in ancient Rome probably carried Euripides in their vintage Greek togas. When you’re young, nostalgia isn’t about the past, but the future. It’s a train in the distance, a sound from the old days hinting at the new. When your own past is too frightening to look at, and the future is terrifyingly unknown, you fake your way through the present. I spent my days wanting something I couldn’t name, and because I didn’t have memories to attach to that yearning, I yearned for a time before me. I conjured a past and missed it and bought an overcoat I prayed I’d grow into.

Lincoln’s famous “house divided” analogy was a perfect one for a country in crisis, acknowledging as it did the psychic architecture of the nation, a collection of rooms under one roof. But his deep commitment to an authentic, family-like, postwar reconciliation was not matched by his successors. The North’s implementation of Reconstruction, in its moderate and radical forms, amounted to first coddling, then humiliating, a wayward sibling.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Republicans struck an implicit deal with the South, a sort of economic/cultural tradeoff, in which the South was allowed to construct the edifice of the Lost Cause culture in return for letting Northern investors exploit the South’s resources. For decades after the war, at cemetery and monument dedications, Blue-Gray reunions and Veterans Day parades, Northern politicians and former generals made a point of describing the conflict in the language of the Lost Cause, praising the chivalry of once-estranged brothers, lauding their former enemy’s fierce dedication to their mission, and rarely acknowledging what that mission had been. The relative postwar silence of the North on the issue of slavery, and the flagrant corruption of newly established Union military governments, helped stoke already flourishing Southern resentment and denial. Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories. [ DISGUISING HATE AS HERITAGE: THE NEO-CONFEDERATE TRADITION OF REFIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR ]

Commemorating 150 Years of Treason: The Glamorization and Sanitization of The Confederacy

Confederate Nostalgia: ‘Racists’ Attend $100 Per Head Secession Ball To Whitewash Slavery

Nullification & Secession: Treasonous Confederate Themes Back in Fashion

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

Just like Pollard and Bowers before them, modern-day, Lost Cause-ers like Pat Buchanan reversed the tide of postwar popular opinion about a conflict, this time in Vietnam, by pining loudly for a law-and-order Eden that had been despoiled by protesters. And now the wholly invented fiction of hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Southeast Asia is believed by more Americans than remember what My Lai was.

The same pattern has repeated itself many times, from Morning in America to WMD, from the Swift Boaters to the Tea Party. The decade following the Civil War amounted to a tragic, missed opportunity for the South to engage in a different kind of remembering. Even a little grown-up nostalgia could have gone a good, long way. The illness implied in its suffix, the sickness of the heart that a powerful longing produces, can be as necessary and cleansing as a storm. But of course that’s what the Lost Causers were afraid of, are afraid of still, and have always been quick to nip in the bud.

WASHINGTON — President Reagan said Thursday that he has decided not to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his trip to Europe next month because he wants to focus on peace rather than the past. He added that he believes West Germany’s present sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, is “unnecessary.”

— The Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1985

During a tour of Houmas House, another Louisiana River Road plantation, as our guide told a story about the acquisition of a particularly expensive set of silver by the proprietors of the estate, we wandered to a window, and noticed a ramshackle structure in the distance, maybe 70 yards away. Unmarked, unrenovated, unattended, a dilapidated cottage with a small front porch, half reclaimed by grass. A former slave cabin? Our guide said yes, and that plans to renovate the structure were in the works. She added that we were free to go out and take a look, once the tour was over.

Later that day, at Destrehan, a former sugar plantation a few miles down, the guide neglected to mention that it was the site of the largest slave revolt in American history.

When I asked Angela da Silva, a professor of black history at Lindenwood University, and owner of the St. Louis-based National Black Tourism Network, for her thoughts, she said, “Jesus coming down off the cross couldn’t get me to stay in some gentrified slave cabin with a jacuzzi in it. The misery and pain that happened in those cabins ? This is about shame. People who own these places want the history to go away. But it won’t go away. And until we as black people insist on the story being told, no one has any incentive to change their business model.”

Da Silva grew up just a few miles from the Baker plantation in Missouri, where her family worked as slaves from 1837 until the end of the war. She learned almost nothing in school about slavery, she says, but her grandmother told her stories that she remembers to this day. As she spoke about sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother until she was 10, and waking up in the middle of the night to ask questions about her ancestors and life on the plantation, her voice softened, and she cleared her throat. I could hear her slow, full breathing over the phone.

“Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

— U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Founding Fathers’ Owned Slaves; The ‘Evils of Slavery’ & Michele Bachmann’s Lies

Slavery is rarely mentioned on any private plantation tour. Proprietors typically insist that innovative architecture and interesting design justify their focus on the “Big Houses,” but that argument can be awfully hard to fathom. Leaving aside obvious exceptions like Monticello, surely the most notable thing about most plantations is not who lived there, who designed them or what they look like. A beautiful home made beautiful by slaves is not important for its beauty. To elevate aesthetic elements over history in the public presentation of slave estates is to demote people once inventoried like candlesticks to a status even lower than that of things. It’s an obscenity.

There is a small museum on the site of the I.G. Farben Building in Germany (a building that, it should be noted, is considered an architectural masterpiece), the former headquarters of the company responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of prisoners at its notorious “factories.” It’s dedicated to the memory of a former prisoner, and exhibits photos and documents from Farben’s disgraceful past. Tour guides at Auschwitz itself do not include the commandant’s extravagant house on their schedule. The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust, but that our country’s “original sin” has not been fully, culturally processed.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.

Dana Milbank writes in his piece: ‘The Herman Cain crack-up‘ — The Hermanator is now the hunted. Herman Cain, the long-shot Republican presidential candidate turned frontrunner, has done just about everything wrong since news broke Sunday night that his former employer had paid two women to settle sexual harassment complaints against him. [ READ MORE ]

Yesterday, reports indicate that — the Perry team is behind the “sexual” problems of Uncle Cain. LOL!

Women Crawling out of The Pizza: Herman Cain Laments ‘Despicable’ Rick Perry Campaign Tactics

Rick Perry’s Camp Responsible For Exposing Herman Cain’s Sexual Shenanigans

   [ ENLARGE ]

   Picture By: Cain and Todd Benson

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Jon Stewart Mocks Rick Perry’s Bizarre Campaign Speech

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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The Right-Wing Response
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Dick Morris Pockets Money From Cain In The Morning, Defends Him On Fox At Night. [ READ MORE ]

Hannity’s Response To Sexual Harassment Charges Against Herman Cain: Bill Ayers

Fox Contributor Gallagher On Cain Allegations: “The Left Hates Blacks Who Are Conservative”

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Mid-Week Right-Wing Smears & Lies
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Limbaugh’s Latest Smear Of First Lady Michelle Obama: “The First Linebacker“

The Big Picture: October 28, 2011 — This week Lisa Reed looks at a few disgraced figures back in the news as Glenn Beck is rehabbed on The Today Show while Mark Sanford is hired by Fox News. Plus, Pat Buchanan’s bigotry tour winds up while the war in Iraq winds down.

An anonymous soldier writes on Tumblr: “Burned the whole lot of them on my Commander’s orders.”

U.S. forces stationed in a remote area of Afghanistan recently received about 20 copies of Bill O’Reilly’s book “Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama.”

Their orders upon receiving the books: Burn them, according to a tumblr account maintained anonymously by a soldier.

Some jerk sent us two boxes of this awful book (SPOILER ALERT: George Washington ? Patriot; George Soros ? Pinhead) instead of anything soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan might need, like, say, food or soap. Just burned the whole lot of them on my Commander’s orders.

[ READ MORE ] [ HOLLYWOOD REPORTER ]

The video below, first uncovered by Gawker, shows copies of Pinheads and Patriots being included in Operation Shoebox packages.

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The All-Spin Zone: O’Reilly Makes A Hash Of Obama’s Economic Record — In a single segment of his show, Bill O’Reilly made a series of false or misleading claims about President Obama’s economic record, arguing that Obama’s embrace of spending greatly expanded the deficit, that the stimulus was “didn’t work very well,” that increasing taxes on the rich won’t “put a dent” in federal debt, and that the United States is on a path to Greek-style economic disaster. None of these claims stand up to scrutiny. [ READ MORE ]

O’Reilly Smears Occupy Wall Street Protesters As “Loons,” “Anarchists,” “The Fringe“

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In Other Right-Wing ‘Hate’ News…..
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1. Officer Faces Civil Rights Charges in Stop-and-Frisk Arrest — Allegations of racism in NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program are nothing new — 93 out of every 100 residents were stopped by police in one community.

How Does It Feel to be Stopped and Frisked?

2. White Supremacist Pat Buchanan: Blacks Have Lost The American Identity They Had During Segregation

3. Amnesia? Fox News Invents More Media Bias, Ignores Own History Of “Nazi” Name-Calling

“Sarah Palin, a former Alaska Gov. and reality TV star, turned down an invitation today to the New Hampshire primary debate on June 13.

In response to the invitation, Palin said to WMUR: ‘That’s quite soon. So, no I don’t think I’m going to be there. Thank you for asking though.’ [ READ MORE ]

Palin’s excuse for turning down an invitation to join the June 13th debate is bogus. It’s not too soon; in fact it’s almost too late for any serious candidate to join the presidential field.

This is yet another piece of evidence that Palin has no intentions of running for president. The former beauty queen is having too much fun “writing” books, starring in reality shows, mentoring Bristol on how to cash in on her fame, and teasing the media.

Palin would only join a debate if it were conducted like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” The former beauty queen would feel comfortable only if she could call a friend or an expert, or asked the audience for guidance before answering a question.

The June 13th debate is going to be a dull affair without Palin, don’t expect any fireworks from the likes of Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty.

Follow Robert Paul Reyes on Twitter: http://twitter.com/robertpaulreyes

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Fox Supports Sarah ‘DEATH’ Palin 1110%
The Big-Wigs At ‘Fixed News‘ Have Cornered The
‘Ding-Bat Audience‘ Lock, Stock and Barrel

This includes the ‘Ding-Bat BLONDES‘ manning the propaganda tools at Fox. Here we see them mixing up comedian Tina Fey with Sarah Palin …OOops! [ ENLARGE ] [ MORE HERE ]

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Wallace: No “Fair-Minded Person” Could Say Palin Isn’t “Potentially A Serious Candidate For President“

Wallace: Palin “Talks In Great Depth” And With “Expertise” In Her Fox News Sunday Interview

Sarah “DEATH” Palin, Who Started The “Death Panel” Lie, Criticizes Democrats For “Trying To Spin” Ryan’s Medicare Plan

BONUS VIDEO:

White Nationalist Pat Buchanan [ A RACIST ]: Evangelicals Would Support “Romney, Who’s A Mormon” Over “Barack Hussein Obama, Who’s An African American Of The Left”

   By: Melissa McEwan
[Trigger warning for violent rhetoric of many different stripes.]

Both sides are, in fact, not “just as bad,” when it comes to institutionally sanctioned violent and eliminationist rhetoric. An anonymous commenter at Daily Kos and the last Republican vice presidential nominee are not equivalent, no matter how many ridiculously irresponsible members of the media would have us believe otherwise.

There is, demonstrably, no leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin, former veep candidate and presumed future presidential candidate, who uses gun imagery (rifle sights) and language (“Don’t Retreat, RELOAD“) to exhort her followers to action.

There is no leftist equivalent to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group which was created from the mailing list of the old white supremacist White Citizens Councils and has been noted as becoming increasingly “radical and racist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the CCC as a hate group—and is nonetheless considered an acceptable association by prominent members of the Republican Party, including a a former senator and the last Republican presidential nominee.

There is no leftist equivalent to Glenn Beck, host of a long-running nationally syndicated radio show, former host of a show on CNN and current host of a show on Fox, best-selling author, DC rally organizer, and longtime user of eliminationist rhetoric, including equating universal healthcare to rape, joking about victims of forest fires being America-hating liberals, comparing Al Gore to Hitler, condoning the murder of Michael Moore, accusing Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, equating immigration reform with burning US citizens alive, publicly endorsing violent revolution, and winkingly telling his viewers not to get violent, all of which amounts to a speck on the tip of a very big iceberg.

Playlist: Glenn Beck – Fox News’ Fraudulent in-House Baboon

Playlist: Sarah ‘Death’ Palin — The ‘DISASTA’ From Alaska

There is no leftist equivalent to Ann Coulter, best-selling author and syndicated columnist, who has been a panelist on Fox’s Hannity 28 times and was on Hannity & Colmes an additional 18 times, who has been a guest multiple times on The O’Reilly Factor, Geraldo at Large, Larry King Live, Huckabee, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hardball, and other cable news shows, has made appearances on The Tonight Show, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Daily Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher, and has co-hosted The View, and has also said that a baseball bat is “the most effective way” to talk to liberals, as well as: “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.” And: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” And: “In [Clinton's] recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he ‘did it,’ even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate.”

Playlist: Ann Coulter — Compost Throwing Psycho-Talker

There is no leftist equivalent to Bill O’Reilly, Fox News television show host, nationally syndicated radio show host, and best-selling author, who has appeared on The Tonight Show eleven times, The Late Show with David Letterman six times, The Daily Show six times, Live with Regis and Kelly five times, The View four times, Good Morning America three times, and Real Time with Bill Maher twice, among other national shows, and has lied about and stalked his critics, said that progressive bloggers should be dealt with “with a hand grenade,” said Air America hosts were traitors and should be “put in chains,” as well as: “And if Al Qaeda comes [to San Francisco] and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Playlist: Bill O’Reilly (Osama Bin O’Reilly)

There is no leftist equivalent to Rush “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for” Limbaugh, nationally syndicated radio show host and invitee to the Bush White House.

Playlist: Rush ‘FAT’ Limbaugh

There is no leftist equivalent to Pat “Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path” Buchanan, a regular MSNBC contributor and syndicated columnist.

There is no leftist equivalent to Michelle “In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror” Malkin, a regular Fox panelist, best-selling author, and prominent conservative blogger.

There is no leftist equivalent to Pat “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians” Robertson, host of The 700 Club, who was a guest on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes five times.

There is no leftist equivalent to Michael “Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war” Reagan, or Michael “Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I’d like to see done to these people” Savage, both nationally syndicated radio show hosts.

There is no leftist equivalent to the Minutemen and other radical and eliminationist-spewing anti-immigration groups, some of whom have been subcontracted to work the border by the US government.

Playlist: American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia

There is no leftist equivalent to radical and eliminationist-spewing anti-choice groups, who openly target doctors and call for their assassinations—and had a success just last year in the murder of Dr. George Tiller—and whose leaders get featured in whitewashing profiles in the Washington Post.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is not an argument there is no hatred, no inappropriate and even violent rhetoric, among US leftists. There is.

This is evidence that, although violent rhetoric exists among US leftists, it is not remotely on the same scale, and, more importantly, not an institutionally endorsed tactic, as it is among US rightwingers.

This is a fact. It is not debatable.

And there is observably precious little integrity among conservatives in addressing this fact, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Palin takes the absolute cake for audaciously asserting that her rifle sight imagery was really “a surveyor’s symbol,” and not even having the decency to sheepishly acquiesce that, even if that were true (and not evident bullshit), it’s understandable how a reasonable person could look at her “surveyor’s symbol” alongside the word “target” and get the wrong, ahem, idea. No, it’s all just a wall of total denial in the Palin camp, when she’s not whining about being a victim herself of people who have the temerity to actually hold her accountable for her carelessly casual violent rhetoric. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And then it’s deny and play the martyr.

But it’s not like Palin’s ideological allies are covering themselves in glory, either. There’s no call for accountability, no call for reflection, not among conservatives. Just the usual game of deflection and projection, as they desperately try to find a way to make this liberals’ fault.

Bill Kristol took to the airwaves this morning to call criticism of Palin “a disgrace” and accuse liberals of “McCarthyism.” Commentators on Fox News, meanwhile, blame President Obama for not changing the tone in Washington, like he promised. Which would be hilarious, were that redirection of blame not a key part of conservatives’ strategy to dodge responsibility for the eliminationist rhetoric that certainly contributed to the tragic events of this weekend.

When, a few months ago, there was a spate of widely-publicized suicides of bullied teens, we had, briefly, a national conversation about the dangers of bullying. But in the wake of an ideologically-motivated assassination attempt of a sitting member of Congress, we aren’t having a national conversation about the dangers of violent rhetoric—because the conversation about bullying children was started by adults, and there are seemingly no responsible grown-ups to be found among conservatives anymore.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence of the violent rhetoric absolutely permeating the discourse emanating from their side of the aisle, conservatives adopt the approach of a petulant child—deny, obfuscate, and lash out defensively.

And engage in the most breathtaking disingenuous hypocrisy: Conservatives, who vociferously argue against the language and legislation of social justice, on the basis that it all “normalizes” marginalized people and their lives and cultures (it does!), are suddenly nothing but blinking, wide-eyed naïveté when it comes to their own violent rhetoric.

They have a great grasp of cultural anthropology when they want to complain about progressive ideas, inclusion, diversity, and equality. But when it comes to being accountable for their own ideas, their anthropological prowess magically disappears.

Only progressives “infect” the culture, but conservative hate speech exists in a void.

That’s what we’re meant to believe, anyway. But we know it is not true. This culture, this habit, of eliminationist rhetoric is not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in a culture of widely-available guns (thanks to conservative policies), of underfunded and unavailable medical care, especially mental health care (thanks to conservative policies), of a widespread belief that government is the enemy of the people (thanks to conservative rhetoric), and of millions of increasingly desperate people (thanks to an economy totally fucked by conservative governance).

The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability.

And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of “both sides are just as bad,” and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with mental illness who are potentially dangerous somehow absolves us of responsibility for violent rhetoric, as opposed to serving to underline precisely why it’s irresponsible—it will be inevitable again.

Let’s get this straight: This shit doesn’t happen in a void. It happens in a culture rife with violent political rhetoric, and it’s time for conservatives to pull up their goddamn bootstraps and get to work doing the hard business of self-reflection.

This is one problem the invisible hand of the market can’t fix for them—unless, perhaps, it’s holding a mirror.

Playlist: Republican | Tea-Party Racism

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About The Author(s): Melissa McEwan — is the founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, which she launched as Shakespeare’s Sister in October 2004 because George Bush was pissing her off. In addition to running Shakesville, she also contributes to The Guardian’s Comment is Free America and AlterNet. Melissa graduated from Loyola University Chicago with degrees in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology, with an emphasis on the political marginalization of gender-based groups. An active feminist and LGBTQI advocate, she has worked as a concept development and brand consultant and now writes full-time. She lives just outside Chicago with three cats, one dog, and a Scotsman, with whom she shares a love of all things geekdom, from Lord of the Rings to Lost. When she’s not blogging, she can usually be found at her piano or dancing like no one is watching to a Smiths’ tune.

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