Our monster.

So now that he has been caught, Americans will focus on their latest outcast and "monster".

Dylann Roof will be the face of evil for the next few weeks, and his vile actions in that church on Wednesday night will bring scornful howls of condemnation from a nation that wants to distance itself as far away as possible from his despicable act.

But can it?

I know that we are all outraged now, but let's remember this important fact: Dylann Roof was not created in a vacuum. And let's be honest with ourselves, there are a lot of Dylann Roofs living among us right now. We see their postings on the Internet, and we hear and see their angry rhetoric on talk radio programs and in chat rooms and websites where like minded people spew their hatred for the people who they perceive as a threat to their way of life.

It's hard to believe that Roof could have so much hatred in his heart after only 21 years of life, but I am sure that he has had a lot of practice and indoctrination.

The Judge in the case today called his family "victims". (In all my years in a courtroom, I have never heard a Judge refer to the defendant's family as victims in such a manner. But hey, we are in South Carolina, and I am digressing.) This was stunning. I guess it never occurred to the "good ole boy" sitting on the bench that maybe, just maybe, they were the ones who actually taught Dylann Roof to hate. (Oh, did I mention that this same Judge was reprimanded for using the n-word in open court?)

But it's not only his family, it's his country as well.

Roof made it clear that he wanted to kill black people , and yet some of the candidates for president of our country refuse to call what happened Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina what it really was: a hate crime. 

"It really is OK to say that the massacre of nine African Americans in their church was a racially motivated hate crime. How do we know? Because Dylann Roof, the confessed murderer, said so. There’s no need to speculate about what, besides race, might have motivated him to join a Bible study group for an hour, at the historical Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, and then shoot almost everyone dead, gladly leaving a survivor to tell the world what he’d done and why. Race is the answer, according to the guy who did it. Asked and answered, the end.

 

Unless you are Jeb Bush, and you are easily confused by super simple questions to which there is only one very obvious answer:

 

This was after Bush addressed the Faith and Freedom Coalition summit Friday morning, where he declared that Roof’s motivation remained a real mystery:

“I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” Bush said in his remarks. “But I do know what was in the heart of the victims.”

How Bush knows what was in the “heart” (the one shared heart, we guess?) of the victims, but not the heart of their murderer, is a real mystery to us. He told Huffington Post reporter Laura Bassett that he

“doesn’t know what the background of it is,” so obviously he cannot conclude that it’s a racially motivated hate crime. You gotta judge that for yourself, based on the flimsy circumstantial evidence that people who know him have said he is a fan of segregation, and his car has Confederate flag plates, and he wore the white supremacist flag of Rhodesia on his jacket — and oh yeah, he told law enforcement officials he wanted to kill black people to start a race war." [Source]

One of my twitter friends said this and it's apropos: "The new racism in America is denying that racism exists in the first place. "