I've held off commenting on the TVUUC murders until now

[bunkerbuster1]

for a bunch of reasons, mostly because in the emotional roller coaster that so many that I know have been through, going from shock to rage to wherever-else, I haven't got past "rage" yet.

But of all the things about which I feel I should be outraged, what's angered me nearly as much as anything on how the media's handled this is how our local Atlanta-metro media hasn't handled it.

I rarely blogwhore, but here's my blog post on the topic , and I'll share a bit of it with you now, because maybe I need to share to get past the rage. Maybe someone here can tell me why our so-called liberal AJC couldn't be bothered to care about this.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that nobody from the Rag's stable of local and syndicated pundits bothered to comment, even in passing, on the two murders committed inside a UU church while elementary-school children were performing last Sunday.

Nothing from Bill Shipp, nor Todd Cline, certainly not Darrell Huckabee nor was anything forthcoming from Nate, who surely loves his stepkids, but not enough to fret so much about anyone else's, I guess.

That nothing appeared from the desk of the AJC's Jim Wooten, on the other hand, actually kinda shocked me a bit. Nor from Cynthia Tucker, nor anyone else. As far as I was able to ascertain, there was precisely one (1) AP wire story published about the incident; not one mention about it on their editorial pages, no follow-ups, nothing more.

At the end of the day, though, these are just a couple of dead liberals, shot and murdered in a church for the crime of being liberal, in a state that shares a border with ours. Nothing worth fretting about, at least not locally.

According to the minds of my local print media, there is no point in asking what role the radical right-wing rabble-rouser class might play. No point in wondering what equating terrorism with liberalism, as Sean Hannity did in the subtitle to one of his best selling books, might do in the minds of those who've been less than financially and socially blessed in the past ten, twenty years. (The murderer owned a Hannity tome.) No point in questioning whether calling liberalism a "mental disorder", as does Michael "Savage" Weiner, might justify culling the herd in the mind of an actual sufferer of mental illness. (The murderer owned a Weiner tome.)

[XanaDUer]

1. Excellent summation

I attend a UU church from time to time in the heart of this right-wing hellhole. Wooten?-forget it- he's too busy writing inspirational stories about working-class Americans who got butt-fucked by their job being offshored and how they "overcame" this by going back to school at one of those government-sponsored and paid-for-by-the-taxpayers vo-tech schools and, nay, was grateful that the opportunity to start over at 50+ came their way. (I was pleased to discover that, on Wooten's webpage-there were many people calling bullshit on this story-they had to shut down comments because I guess there were not enough put-on-a-happy-face "God bless 'em" comments than there used to be in the past)

I digress...Nate? He's too busy bitching about, perhaps, having to order his supersized fries in Spanish to worry about some dead liberals. Or writing self-aggrandizing stories about what a great guy he is.

Expecting narcissistic right wingers to cry over dead liberals is like expecting republicans to vote for the average American worker-ain't gonna happen.

[bunkerbuster1]

4. I suspect you attend for the same reason I do...

my motivator, going in, was anger management. I felt as if I might hurt (or worse) somebody if I didn't find some rational place to sort out my feelings about where human beings fit with the rest of the planet, and the universe.

I stayed and became a member for the great people I came to know.

Oh, and your observations about the local newspaperfolk are dead-on.

[XanaDUer]

2. PS-God bless Leonard Pitts.

Always loved the guy, way back when when I lived in Miami.

[bunkerbuster1]

3. Yeah, Leonard, he's good people.

A little more middle-of-the-road politically than I am, but then if I had a nationally syndicated column I'd probably tone it down a bit as well.

[RubyDuby in GA]

5. You mentioned Darrell Fuckabee, and a Nate.

Is this Nate Harwell? I know we live close to each other, neighboring counties, but you are subjected to their filth as well?

[bunkerbuster1]

6. No; it's Nate McCullough.

I think "filth" might be a tad strong for this guy's verbiage. He's... well, I think this post summed it up nicely:

http://hillbillyragger.blogspot.com/2007/05/nate-mccullough-dont-like-brown-people.html