Parrotting Hate

Pouriel Courrier International’s coverage of the Tuscon is limited to a factually bereft opinion blog posting from The Nation:

For forty years I have known this state. I had never witnessed a hatred so fierce and so openly expressed by policymakers and commentators during the past year. Au printemps dernier, de nombreux observateurs ont d'ailleurs mis en garde contre cette violence inédite en Arizona et dans le reste du pays. Last spring, many observers have warned against this unprecedented violence in Arizona and the rest of the country.

That “warning” having been a factless attempt to imply that anyone opposed to Health Insurance reform/nationalization as a racist...

What happened to my Arizona where I grew up in the 1970s and where I continue to visit my family? As Gregory McNamee, a journalist, writer and social critic born in Tucson wrote: "What seems clear at this time of great confusion, is that nobody should be surprised by this turn of events. The gunfight erupted in Tucson that is the logical consequence of all the hatred that surrounded the last election, in which Gabrielle Giffords - a respectable centerist member of a centrist district - has been vilified, demonized and called a socialist communist, fascist, a traitor, a destroyer of jobs and much more.

Adding to that a dose of satisfying blood libel that Europeans are so fond of:

Anyone who uttered these words or paid others to pronounce them have blood on their hands Gabrielle Giffords. After shooting, we all declare that we will not accept any lie, or hatred or violence. If we do not now, then when will we? "

Which, oddly enough, has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the shooter has ever said or done in his life, from two writers whose links to the state are limited to now thinking of it as “flyover country”.

Jared Lee Loughner’s “inspirations” are a lot simpler than that: he is a 9-11 truther, an atheist, anti-semite, and is obsessed with what are supposed to be the secrete plots of states to control money, and even language. In short, he is more like the average French reader of Courrier International than he is of the left’s favorite hate-idols, Jan Brewer, Sarah Palin, or Rush Limbaugh.

Adding fuel to the “hate-fire of peace and love”, Biggers goes on to say:

During the trip, a friend from Tucson reminded me that it is less than a year at the initiative of the Republican Governor Jan Brewer, Arizona is one of only three U.S. states to allow citizens over 21 years to carry concealed weapons without permits. The alleged perpetrator of the shooting is aged 22 years. According to the New York Times, "a witness, former emergency physician now working in a hospice said: I think it was a semi-automatic weapon, he had to take twenty bullets ".

While he’s acting like his expedition is an anthropological observation of primitves in the wild, maybe he should see if Jared Lee Loughner had that weapon a year ago, and why he’s raining a point about a concealed pistol lay when he used an assault weapon.

To clarify one point made to me by a retired French Paratrooper who himself owns a bunch of auto- and semi-automatic weapons: he’s certain in his belief that in France that there are more weapons than people. Odd how the perfunctory, ritualistic Gallic repetition of the disarmament-of-America argument avoids this tender fact.

Otherwise Courrier International’s “concern” for America amounts to hatred of it, using any tiny example to bolster some case that they recycled from items published years ago in the opinion press, founded or not.



To decrypt: the French use the word “ultra” as a pejorative indicating the subject to be an insane radical. The implication of the photo is that the soldier shown in it is a headache to Barack Obama. Apparently to the Ultra-imposition-loving French intelligentia, the people, such as they are, are getting in the way of Obama being the leader that they want him to be, and otherwise not to be served by government at all. The implication is such that the editors think one should expect a third-world style military putsch against him originating in the military. Because, after all, whatever the facts, the inspired and brilliant old-Europe types just know what Americans are like.