Conservatives don’t care if sick children and the elderly suffer and die, but that’s not the same thing as wanting to kill them.

Says the “You’re a chickenhawk who wants to kill sick children and the elderly!!!” crowd.

wtf ?

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.

It’s called projection. Whenever the right attacks someone, whatever the charge, you can bet they are guilty of what they accuse their opponents of doing.

I just wish there was a way to fight them at their own game without losing our humanity in the process.

Now, supposedly the 15 year old girl was being arrested for violating curfew. Putting aside the question of why a 15 year old girl dressed like she could be going to church needed to be cuffed and arrested (I don’t know the details), check out the video at about the 2/3 mark (7:22:15). The girl tries to bite the officer, but clearly fails as she has her teeth on him for less than a fraction of a second. The officer then justifies the use of pepper spray by claiming intense pain from the bite. Uh, he lost his temper with an uncooperative, panicked 15 year old, and it’s blatantly obvious.

However, more telling, and apropos of the discussion of how far the right has descended into violent authoritarian dementia is the resulting thread on that bastion of lunacy, Free Republic.

Check out these comments.

Note the dominant belief that the officer wasn’t violent ENOUGH with the young girl and that clearly she was on drugs or something.

Unfortunately, nearly every thread on FR is like this and far from being an aberration, FR is clearly indicative of the vicious, even murderous core at the heart of what now constitutes the conservative movement in the U.S. Mr. Dionne and the rest need to get over the notion that simply because a particular course of action seems unfathomable to them that it must therefore be abhorrent to everyone, even those who have shown time and time again that they suffer no such qualms, particularly when it comes to the consolidation of power.