Hillary Clinton: Loughner Is "An Extremist;" Blames Shootings on "Crazy Voices" That "Get On TV"

Chicken status: Thoroughly fucked.

Allah collected up some particularly good quotes of the day on free speech, incitement, and desperate, blood-libeling Democrats.

Particularly hard-hitting and pointed is this WSJ essay from Glenn Reynolds. This is a serious read-the-whole-thing piece, as I really cannot quote all the cutting parts. It's all cutting.

American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

So as the usual talking heads begin their "have you no decency?" routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?

...

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?

Let us count this all up. The following people have been alleged, with hope in their black hearts, to be white conservative anti-government types:

1. The DC Sniper. FBI profiling said he was a white man (he wasn't; in fact he wasn't "a man") and the media ran with that. You couldn't miss the fact they desperately wanted him to be white (and Christian), which became particularly obvious when they refused to use his real, chosen, legal name -- John Allen Muhammad -- instead insisting on calling him by his original but no longer legal name, John Allen Williams.

2. The IRS Plane-Bomber. Joseph Stack was alleged to be an "anti-government extremist" (wink, wink) even though he quoted from the Communist Manifesto -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- and savaged capitalism in his suicide note. How the media played this is clever -- in news reports, they imply, but do not say, he was a Tea Party type ("anti-government extremist"); they don't say he's a Tea Partier so much as they drop the implication and leave that possibility open for the reader to infer. In opinion columns savaging the right for "hate speech," they cite Stack as an example of the consequences of such. They don't make their errors by direct statement, but they continue making the same error, deliberately, by unavoidable implication.

3. The Discovery Channel Shooter. In one bullet point out of 20 or so, he mentioned that he didn't like illegal immigrants filling the USA with additional dirty, carbon-dioxide creating people. The media seized on this and dubbed him an "anti-immigration extremist," overlooking the fact that the other 19 bullet points in his manifesto were all about environmental, not immigration, extremism, and in fact that he didn't just hate illegal immigrants' babies -- he hated human babies, period, and wished to see them all dead.

4. The Times Square Bomber, who, as Reynolds notes, was immediately dubbed a likely Tea Party by the "centrist" Michael Bloomberg.

5. The census worker hanged in the woods with the word "FED" not, in fact, written on him. He was killed, famously, by an anti-government Tea Party type. In fact, the census worker himself was the culprit -- he killed himself. But this story was barely reported after that, so in the minds of a large percentage of the public, he was in fact killed by a Tea Partier. (Note that the media isn't concerned with dispelling all myths -- they really want you to know that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii; but they don't really mind if you continue to believe the census worker was murdered by conservative conspirators.)

6. The Fort Hood shooter -- initial reports were pregnant with insinuation that this had been a poor white fellow, one of the guys John Kerry had said hadn't done well in school, so they went to Iraq, who'd gone off his nut. But more importantly, after the shooter's identity as an extremist Muslim had been outed, the media continued to speculate that it was the horror of war and not Islam which had animated him -- that is, that it was still the policies of the right which had driven him to kill. Chris Matthews infamously suggested that he had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy -- that he had gone mad from the horrors of war not by experiencing them himself (he was always safely stateside) but from hearing about such horrors from his patients.

Or, given that he would soon be deployed overseas, that he was suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder -- a new psychological condition, minted by Dr. Matthews, postulating that people can go nuts do to the fear that, in the near future, they will be exposed to the horrors of Bush's War Machine.

And now:

7. An atheist (Satanist?) leftist pot-smoking 9/11 truther who apparently became obsessed with Rep. Giffords when she did not sufficiently respond to his concerns about government mind-control by use of grammar-- also, of course, animated by "hate speech" on the right.

Gee, you'd almost start to think there was some kind of Narrative going on here, with the media dead-set on who the Black Hat would turn out to be in every crime and every horror. And even when it's disproven, conclusively, that their patsies of choice were not in fact behind the crime, they continue to insinuate that we were.

Enough. Enough.

Note: You may be wondering when I'm going to do my own apologia on this score. I am aware, such is owed. I'm writing it; but it's a bit long and involved, and I decided I can't finish it during the day when headlines are supposed to come up rat-a-tat-tat, so I've put it aside and will finish it later.

Housekeeping: rdbrewer's been on fire in the headlines and asked, hey, why am I not a coblogger? Well, good question. So welcome him aboard.

And Incidentally... I'd bet money that he isn't a Satanist. That sounds like day-after media sensationalism to me; I bet the "shrine" isn't a shrine. He just likes skulls or something.

I can relate.

posted by Ace at 02:18 PM

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