One Year Ago, Media Rushed to Blame Boston Bombings on "The Extreme Right Wing"

Designated Villains.

The bombs killed three people -- including a child -- and wounded 264 others. The blast sheared limbs off human beings.

The body parts had not even been collected yet when the media set itself to speculating upon its Fantasy Villain, the villain that would help it advance its political agenda.

The morning after the attack, Good Morning America's Pierre Thomas narrated a segment with an on-screen graphic wondering, "Could this be homegrown terror?" Thomas noted that April 15th was only four days before the anniversaries of the bloody end of the Branch Davidian standoff and the Oklahoma City bombing. Regarding the date the attack occurred, GMA guest Mark Potok linked, "The real Patriots Day is April 19th. That is the date that counts for people on the extreme right in the United States."

...

More speculations from the media followed:

Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like."

— Former Boston Globe reporter Charles Pierce writing on Esquire’s politics blog at 3:22pm April 15, 2013, barely half an hour after the bombings occurred.

I like that. I like that quite a bit. "Let's not speculate hastily about foreign Islmaic terrorists," he says. "Let's speculate instead about domestic right-wing white terrorists."

Under the guise of high-mindedness and an unwillingness to jump to conclusions about convenient racially-satisfying tribally-approved scapegoats, he offers his own convenient favorite racially-satisfying tribally-approved scapegoat.

"The thinking, as we’ve been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack. And officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. There’s the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco."

— NPR correspondent Dina Temple-Raston on All Things Considered, April 16, 2013.

Yes, of course, "anti-government and right-wing individuals" always take time to celebrate Hitler's Birthday, or, as we call it, Aryan Christmas.

Chris Matthews, of course, weighed in, but I'll direct you to the link for that. And of course there's more where this came from.

posted by Ace at 02:25 PM

| Access Comments