Leopold and Loeb 2.0

These two Aryan Nation-looking motherfuckers— David Henry Tuck, 18, and Keith Robert Turner, 17—have been charged with aggravated sexual assault after beating, sodomizing, stabbing, and pouring bleach on a 16-year-old Hispanic boy “who they believed had tried to kiss a Hispanic 12-year-old girl at a party.”

The attackers forced the boy out of the Saturday night house party, beat him and sodomized him with a plastic pipe, shouting anti-Hispanic epithets, said sheriff's Lt. John Martin…

Harris County prosecutor Mike Trent said the attackers also cut the victim with a knife. They then poured bleach over the boy, apparently to destroy DNA evidence, and left him for dead, authorities said. He was not discovered until Sunday, 12 hours after the attack.

The victim, whose name was not released, suffered severe internal injuries, cuts on his chest and head injuries.

"It's about 50-50 whether he lives or dies at this point," Trent said.

Investigators say that the attack was prompted because of “the age difference” between the victim and the girl he tried to kiss, and that Tuck and Turner were “being mean and vicious and looking for any excuse to stomp somebody.”

Somebody? Or somebody Hispanic?

This shit doesn’t happen in a void. When we read that nearly 20% of American high school students experience physical assault on the basis of sexual orientation, and a doctor who performs abortions—and was already shot by a radical anti-choicer—has become the target of a campaign to hold him “accountable for his actions that have caused untold misery and loss of life,” and a Hispanic teen is beaten and raped within an inch of his life by two residents of a predominantly white Houson suburb as they hurled racial epithets at him, we must necessarily consider what forces legitimize such actions in the minds of the perpetrators. And we need look no further than the GOP, as each is representative of their key wedge issues: gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.

When there are politicians—including our president—spouting off about gays undermining the sanctity of marriage, abortionists commiting murder, and mostly Hispanic undocumented workers threatening both our national security and economy, and those politicians’ words are repeated ad infinitum by their supporters, and the conservative echo chamber comprised of media shills and the rightwing blogosphere led by disgusting characters like Michael Savage and Michelle Malkin, who have millions of listeners and readers, put their own overtly vicious spin, rooted in bigotry and hatred of The Other, on these policies, we should expect nothing less for a disingenuous wedge issue designed by the likes of Karl Rove to exploit the prejudices of the GOP base to translate into action that leaves victims of policy also victims of violence.

This shit doesn’t happen in a void. When real people are used as fodder to garner votes born of bias, those real people are inevitably endangered. Politicians cannot continually demonize a group of people and then claim naivety that the fuckwit homophobes, radical anti-choicers, and racists on whose votes they are dependent for their continued supremacy actually treat those groups as demons, monsters under the bed who threaten our very way of life.

The GOP is no longer a legitimate political party. They are a collection of hatemongers who overtly seek to convince poor white trash that they are privileged, and that their privilege can be used to oppress the weak, scaring them through policy and their loyal shills that life would be better if only gays and feminists and racial minorities weren’t around. They use these people’s hatred of others to mask the real reasons life sucks for poor whites—tax breaks for the rich, rewarding companies who offshore, largesse toward corporations designed by lobbyists at the expense of Americans’ pocketbooks. As long as the gays, feminists, and racial minorities stand between the GOP and their poor base with targets on their backs, the GOP will continue to hide behind them, shouting, “Ready, aim, fire!”

This shit doesn’t happen in a void.