What is most disturbing about Pete Santilli and Right Rant Radio

 

“I want to shoot [Clinton] right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain.”

               - on the air comments of right wing radio host Pete Santilli

 What's more upsetting than whether this man would actually do it (although the Secret Service cannot stand by and hope that he won't) is that he would even think about it in such sadistic detail. We must be the only species that thinks up ways of hurting other members of our species in such graphic detail and every now and then actually carries out those fantasies. 

And why? It is not as thought Secretary Clinton or President Obama personally harmed Mr. Santilli. They didn't take his money or his guns or his bible. They didn't even force him to get a background check before he buys his next vagina-shooting firearm (vagina? why the vagina? this sounds like the sort of horror dreamed up in some central American right wing dictatorship, the kind that drops nuns working for social justice out of a helicopter far out at sea). They simply are public officials trying to do their jobs the best way they see fit in an admittedly imperfect world of incomplete information and differences of opinion among intelligent people about the best way to prioritize scarce national resources. 

Can the far right not understand that there is a difference between losing an election and losing your country, or that the differences that separate a moderate centrist like President Obama from the more reasonable members of the Republican party are still (unfortunately) fairly small? I just don't understand the outrage and I am not saying that there are not appropriate times for outrage, but can't we all agree that the most appropriate targets of outrage are those who start elective wars, engage in widespread torture in secret camps scattered through Eastern Europe and in Cuba, and deregulate a financial industry just in time for it to blow up the world's economy? If an umbrella or a failed attempt at background checks can throw these people into such a violent temper tantrum, I shudder to think what would happen if we really did have to take some assertive, government-led action, such as against a seceding Alabama county or to restore order in an area devastated by a natural disaster.