The American right wing was in top form Thursday morning. By "top" I mean as low as it could go. Surely.
We must keep close tabs on this low-going American right wing. After all, it now runs certain primitive jurisdictions like South Carolina and Arkansas.
On Thursday morning the American right wing instinctively called the Charleston church shooting a persecution of Christians, not blacks. It blamed the slain minister and state senator himself for voting in the state Legislature against concealed weapons in church. And it assailed President Obama--President Obama--for political exploitation of the tragedy.
What happened was that a creepy racist neo-Confederate subhuman boy went into an African Methodist Episcopal church Wednesday night and sat, welcomed, through Bible study, then shot dead the preacher and eight others. He told a woman he was sparing her so she could describe what he'd done.
So there is an early morning program called Fox and Friends on Fox News. The format is that three hosts leave in the green room whatever brains they possess, sit on a curved couch and blather through an orgy of right-wing senselessness.
On Thursday morning, when news of the massacre was known, but details were not, the Fox and Friends crew spouted the applicable right-wing hooey.
The hosts labeled the tragedy an attack on steadily persecuted American Christians. They welcomed as a guest a preacher who gladly assumed as much and said preachers need to pack heat so they can shoot back and protect their flock from these people who are going around steadily persecuting American Christians.
One of the Fox and Friends hosts lamented that, yes, sadly, some people will jump to conclusions and cite race as a factor.
Really? Jump to conclusions? Whoever heard of such a thing?
Fox and Friends didn't jump to any conclusion. Its biased conclusion already existed, having been assumed and executed long ago by the very design and self-caricature of the network's mission.
In a couple of hours the police would explain that the little subhuman racist creep killed those nine people because they were black. The woman he spared as a witness said he declared as he did his murdering that he had to do it because blacks are raping the women and taking over the country. An acquaintance said the little subhuman racist creep had talked of wanting to do something big to incite a civil war.
Meantime, speaking of primitive jurisdictions ... An NRA board member in Texas by the name of Charles Cotton declared as moderator of a gun-nut Internet forum that the murdered South Carolina preacher and senator, Clementa Pinckney, was to blame.
"He voted against concealed-carry," Cotton wrote in response to a post and in a screen shot captured by the liberal site called Think Progress. "Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue."
Actually, the bill passed the South Carolina House and got buried in a Senate subcommittee. Pinckney never actually voted on it.
That innocent people died because they were hated for being black by a little subhuman racist creep whose daddy had given him a gun, and that the blame for shooting deaths of innocent people rests most logically with the person with the gun doing the shooting, or even with the culture in which a gun was easily available to him ... well, an NRA official is naturally averse to those notions.
Meantime, the right wing says the real cynical exploiter in all of this is the president of the United States.
That's because Barack Obama dared in response to the massacre to make such wholly factual statements as that racism is part of the nation's dark history, that other countries don't endure such incidents in such frequency and that a bad person got a gun too easily in part because there's no political will in Washington to try to keep guns out of crazy killers' hands.
In predictable fashion and rapid succession, right-wing websites deplored that Obama didn't have the decency to let the bodies cool before blaming America as usual and trying to exploit the tragedy to take away our Second Amendment rights and disarm the country.
So let's do a little scorekeeping: Obama said three things, and they were factual--that America has a dark history on race, that mass killings happen with greater frequency here than elsewhere and that our political culture won't permit any restriction on handgun proliferation. Fox and Friends said one thing, that the shooting was another example of persecution of Christians in America, and was wrong.
Fox and Friends jumped to a biased conclusion. Obama despaired of reality in utter exasperation.
Less gullibility and more exasperated despair--that's the ever-elusive solution we desperately need.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/21/2015