Gary Kamiya Is Off Today

The Devil, strike that, the culture made me do it!

Gary Kamiya strikes out today with his piece on cop killer Richard Poplawski.

The sub-headline asks "amid the deafening din of the right wing's anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is (Poplawski)?"

Kamiya should have stopped at the editor's sub-headline in his 1,100-word piece.

Kamiya's internally incoherent argument is a brew of sloppy reasoning with a misreading of Hobbes' social contract theory thrown in.

Kamiya attempts to connect rightwing killer, anti-Semitic nut-job Poplawski to rightwing, mainstream nutty political culture.

Writes Kamiya:

As his friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Associated Press, Poplawski feared 'the Obama gun ban that's on the way' and 'didn't like our rights being infringed upon.'

Such obsessions don't come out of a vacuum. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP have been whipping up hatred and fear of Obama and 'liberal Democrats' for years. Joined by the National Rifle Association, which has run false and irresponsible ads claiming that Obama is planning to take away Americans' guns, they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government' mixes with a maniacal fetish for guns. Poplawski is the diseased fruit of that ugly tree. ... Theirs is a Hobbesian world in which law enforcement cannot be trusted to stop criminals. Hence their favorite slogan, 'When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' Poplawski proudly subscribed to that belief.

Hobbes Loved the State

To begin with, the social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes believed in the necessity of a strong state—a society in which protection and security triumphs over individual will—lest the individuals' lives be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". (Leviathan, yuck!).

Yet, Kamiya identifies Hobbes with the right-libertarian's skepticism of state and police power. If Kamiya has read Leviathan, he didn't understand it.

Myself I share the libertarian's skepticism of state power [this skepticism is healthy if one beleives in a classical liberal democracy], though I don't own or particularly value guns.

Feared Obama, So Poplawski Killed Three Cops

Kamiya writes of Poplawski, "He is responsible for his action. You can't tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs."

Right, so what then does a pathological murderer have to do with the rightwing, whack culture? Not much.

But Kamiya tries to insinuate a causal connection: Feared Obama because of Rush and Fox , so Poplawski killed three cops.

Is Kamiya saying that Rush, Fox and the like are also anti-Semitic, like Poplawski? That they advocate killing cops so Obama does not take their guns, like Poplawski?

Kamiya instead lamely suggests that "they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government'", qualifying his earlier admonition that you can't tar conservatives with a whack like Poplawski out of existence.

So the rightwing are political culture polluters, says Kamiya. Maybe then we should police and outlaw these culture polluters, right?

Look, Rush and Fox are slime because they have little regard for liberty, care about power and not people, and their political rants are poorly reasoned. But in this regard of uninformed, poorly reasoned polemical tracts, they have a friend in Gary Kamiya today.

- via mal contends