Republican Mass Killing Masked by Shooting Media Hoopla
By William Boardman -- Reader
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What do patriot movement shooters in Las Vegas have in common with Virginia Republicans and Virginia Democrat Phillip Puckett?
They kill people.
They just do it in different ways, with different degrees of effectiveness, and different intensities of news coverage.
The Millers, Amanda, 22, and Jerad , 31, the husband and wife team that murdered three, two of them police officers, were using their constitutionally protected guns to kill people on June 8. Then they had the decency to kill themselves, too (to be precise, Mrs. Miller shot Mr. Miller before shooting herself, although now police claim credit for killing him). They appear to be over, even though they left a note expressing the hope that this was "the beginning of a revolution."
The Millers are fundamentally crazed, grandiose, uninteresting, suicidal, young people, pretty ordinary except for their lethality. But that violence is enough to get them disproportionate news coverage in our if-it-bleeds-it-leads media culture.
Whether or not the Millers have touched off a revolution remains to be seen, of course, but it hardly seems likely. And the killing they've done doesn't come close to the scale of the deeper, much more lethal, continuing revolution led by Republicans since 2009. That revolution doesn't use guns to kill people. That's so Bush-era. Post-Bush Republicans prefer to kill people quietly, as in Virginia, by denying them medical care.
In a sense, preventing the poor and sick from getting health care is a longstanding, traditional Republican value. Nationally, Republicans have pretty much always been willing to put millions of Americans at risk in order to benefit their ideological masters and patrons. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that their sworn duty (if they're elected) to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare" are inseparable parts of an integrated purpose, not a political menu from which they have the liberty to pick and choose
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