NYT: "First Tea Party Terrorist?"

I won't even link it. It's "The Opnionator" at the NYT if you care.

Let me just quote his defensive reaction to criticism:

Postscript (added after reading a few dozen angry comments): Just to clarify a few things: 1) When I said in this column that you could in principle follow my logic to conclude that Joseph Stack was a Tea Party terrorist, I should have added the explicit reminder that this logic depended on accepting the somewhat squishy definition of “Tea Party” ideology that, I argue, is appropriate given the still-inchoate nature of the movement; 2) I’m of course not saying that Stack has much in common with the average law-abiding Tea Partier (any more than Osama bin Laden has much in common with the average law-abiding Muslim or law-abiding Islamist) — even though I do think that intense rage, which Stack evinced so violently, can be found on the movement’s fringes; 3) I’m definitely not, as some commenters seem to think, saying that Stack is a conservative terrorist. Indeed, my point is that the Tea Party movement is still undefined enough to accommodate ideologically eclectic people. However, I think commenters who take the Stack manifesto’s closing reference to the Communist Manifesto as a sign of communist sympathies are misreading his intent; and I suspect his closing characterization of capitalism isn’t meant as a rejection of free-market economics but rather as a complaint that capitalism has become corrupted in America. I think the overall point of those two references is that capitalism, as it’s being corruptly practiced, is no better than communism, and may be worse. But there will never be any way of knowing for sure what he meant.

He has no evidence at all for the bolded crap -- he wants the guy to be a Tea Partier, therefore he is a Tea Partier. (Despite having never once attended a Tea Party meeting nor attempted to join the local Tea Party.)

Contrary evidence -- all the leftist cant in the suicide note -- is just dismissed as a not-entirely-right-wing sort of Tea Party populism, and the explicit praise of Communism is dismissed as meaning something other than it clearly does.

They've got their Narrative and they're sticking to it.

The lying bastard Robert Wright takes a page out of the leftist playbook, too, by not even mentioning the endorsement of Communism. As the entire media did. He mentions it in the chunk I quote above, but that's only in a postscript to his original hack-work, and he only mentions it because his gross deception was made very public in the comments.

This is what they do -- Wright has no evidence, or even any argument, that the endorsement of Communism is being "misread." The ipse dixit nature of his postscript claim demonstrates that. So, having no good way to spin the quote, he simply omitted it.

As the media does again, and again, and again, and again. Facts which are damaging to the Democratic Media Party, but which can be slanted, get reported, but with spin.

Facts which are damaging to the Democratic Media Party, which cannot be slanted, are simply embargoed altogether.

posted by Ace at 04:54 PM

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