Lovely. Nice Cover-Up, Mainstream Media.

I'm delighted that the mainstream media have made a point of repeatedly telling us that the L.A. Fitness Club mass murderer, George Sodini, was motivated by his hatred of women over the fact that he hadn't gotten laid since the Reagan administration. Okay.

I'm less thrilled that I had to find out from Joan Walsh over at Salon.com, days later, what all of the newspapers knew, from looking at his blog, but decided not to tell us. Once she gave me the old (now taken down) URL, it was easy enough to pull it up out of the Google cache, and you can see it for yourself.

1. First of all, he was laid off back in May, apparently. I'm not surprised; it was the first prediction I made. As in the movie Falling Down, most of the time you can trace the triggering event behind a mass murder or a spree killing to one of two things: a divorce with a nasty child custody battle, or a lay-off. I'm not saying the media should have made a big deal out of this, and I'm not saying that his employer is responsible for the slaughter. And I hope it's obvious that I'm not saying that unemployed men are justified in venting their anger on women, only that the public needs to be warned that some of them, probably quite a few of them, do. With the monthly unemployment numbers coming out in a few hours, we could use a reminder that spiraling unemployment has a human cost, too, in the rising number of angry people who feel that they have no prospect in life, who feel that they have nothing left to lose, who feel that they might as well take someone else down with them.
   
   Economists both progressive and libertarian are, as far as I can see, uniformly predicting a long "jobless recovery," with the real unemployment rate hovering at or just below 25% for years now. People could stand an early warning that this means that we are all in danger of violence from those who aren't surviving. There are not enough cops in this country to protect us, especially to protect women, from the level of chronic slaughter that we'll see for as long as the (pointless, useless, politicized for the last several decades) official unemployment rate is above 6%. For many reasons, but not least of which to stop the slaughter, we have got to put Americans back to work.
   
   
2. More importantly, I'm actively angry that not one mainstream news outlet thought it was relevant to point out that Sodini started thinking about doing this at the peak of the 2008 election season, and began formally planning it on November 5th, and that the first reason given for why he intended to murder a large number of white women women was for race treason: because, like President Obama's mother, they were too busy having sex with black men to be available to white men like him.

I have long since lost track of how many right-wing, racist and/or anti-abortion, terrorist attacks we've had since the election. The newspapers and the network TV anchors are not doing us a favor by trying to hide this fact from the public; I know it's upwards of a dozen, not even counting the two Democratic congressmen who've gotten death threats in the last couple of days. I've said it before and I'll probably have occasion to say it again and again: "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" (PDF) is turning out to be the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" of 2009.