January 9, 2011 by Jeff Schreiber
I don’t know how they do it.
Time and time again, the left manages to pin these disgruntled, deranged individuals and their sick, twisted, bloody actions on the American right. Despite being able to bring together millions of people from coast to coast with only one indiscretion–an idiotic redneck at a Rand Paul event who roughed up an aggressive political activist seeking access to the now-senator–the Tea Party is instantaneously blamed for the terrible happenings yesterday in Tucson, Arizona, where a congresswoman lay nearly dead and several others ended up not so lucky.
Despite being characterized by friends as “left-wing” and “quite liberal,” despite admitting to enjoying the works of Hitler, Marx and Engels as his favorite books, Jared Loughner was successfully painted as a product of right-wing political rhetoric, the physical manifestation of Sarah Palin’s “targeting” of vulnerable Democrats leading up to the previous election.
Before Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was even revealed to have survived the attack, folks at FireDogLake and the Daily Kos pinned the shooting on Sarah Palin, citing a “target map” circulated by her Political Action Committee in advance of last year’s mid-term elections. Lefties across the Internet, quick to politicize the event before the bodies could even be counted, ignoring the fact that similar “target” lists were released by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council, and ignoring the fact that Congresswoman Giffords had both participated in the controversial reading of the Constitution on the House floor this past week and voted against Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader, landing her in hot water with the lefternmost base of the Democratic Party. (One entry by an author named “BoyBlue” at The Daily Kos, long since scrubbed, even went so far as to employ the headline “Congressman Giffords is now DEAD to me!!”)
In short, it doesn’t matter that a far-left Democrat shot a conservative Democrat in the head. This was definitely the act of a Tea Party member and a product of Rush Limbaugh’s political rhetoric.
The same thing has happened before.
Joseph Stack, the man who flew an airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas in February 2010 was originally described as a Republican mad at the IRS before it was discovered that he was a lifelong Democrat who penned an anti-government manifesto before taking to the skies.
James Von Brunn, the gunman who stormed the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and killed a security guard, was described originally as a gun-crazy right-winger before it was discovered that he was a bigot and Nazi (National Socialist Party) sympathizer whose original target was the offices of The Weekly Standard, the venerable conservative publication headquartered in our nation’s capital.
Nidal Malik Hasan, the radical Islamic jihadist who killed and injured dozens at Fort Hood, was originally thought to be a disgruntled soldier unhappy with the continuing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan before it was discovered that he was, in fact, a radical Islamic jihadist who hated this country and took his orders from a vehemently anti-American Imam in Yemen. (The same could be said for the jidadist who killed a military recruiter in Arkansas.)
Amy Bishop, the neurobiology professor who murdered several of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, was also thought to be a right-wing political activist, before acquaintances described her as just the opposite, a lifelong Democrat obsessed with Barack Obama.
On and on and on, the list goes. The Pentagon shooter. The Discovery Channel shooter. And now, Jared Loughner.
Each time, the media’s knee-jerk reaction is that these people are right-wing extremists, and each time they turn out to be leftists, to hate America, or both. Even on a macro level, the Tea Party rallies only gave us one indiscretion (the aforementioned problem at the Rand Paul event), while groups of leftists seem to constantly engage in vandalism and violence whenever given the chance, whether protesting the G-20 and G-8 summits, rallying against the elimination of entitlements in Britain and Greece, or challenging the government on the extension of the retirement age in France. Closer to home, in New Jersey, members of the New Jersey Education Association prayed for the death of Gov. Chris Christie and, in Wisconsin, you might recall that a local lefty actually shot his television because Bristol Palin advanced to another round inDancing With the Stars.
And yet, across the country and the world, it has become abundantly clear that the left has somehow once again managed to convince the masses that political violence in the United States of America is a product of increasingly passionate political discourse fueled with hate-speech spewed by talk radio and Fox News. Over in the UK, the Guardian focuses on “rightwing rhetoric.” Across my Facebook pages, people otherwise disengaged in politics have chastised Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. On Twitter, irrelevant pseudo-celebrities like Jane Fonda have spent their time tweeting things like the following:
@SarahPalinUSA holds responsibility. As does the violence-provoking rhetoric of the Tea Party
It’s become almost common knowledge among the uninformed masses that the Tea Party is inherently violent, yet almost two years and countless events filled by millions of people prove exactly the opposite. On the left, though, there’s a history of violence including everybody from the Weather Underground to the ski-masked entitlement junkies busting windows in Pittsburgh proper. But it doesn’t matter. We’re guilty, even if there’s no evidence whatsoever of our guilt, even if all of the evidence points to the exact opposite conclusion.
As Jay Spencer at RedState points out, for an example of exactly what kind of evidence points toward the violent rhetoric on the left as a possible cause of political violence across the country, all we need to do is look at the words of the left’s No. 1 spokesmouth:
- “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Barack Obama in July 2008
- “I want you to argue with them and get in their face!” Barack Obama, September 2008
- “Here’s the problem: It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.” Barack Obama on banks, March 2009
- “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” Barack Obama on ACORN Mobs, March 2010
- “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.” Barack Obama on the private sector, June 2010
- “A Republican majority in Congress would mean ‘hand-to-hand combat’ on Capitol Hill for the next two years, threatening policies Democrats have enacted to stabilize the economy.” Barack Obama, October 6, 2010
- “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Barack Obama to Latinos, October 2010
Frankly, I don’t know what to do. As you can see, I only have so much time to express my opinions on this Web site. I don’t hold the power to sway public opinion beyond the few thousand people who might see this piece over the next few days and weeks. If the collective power of the New Media on this resurgent American right is not enough to set the record straight, as obvious as the true peddlers of venom and vitriol may be, how do people like you and like me even stand a chance of changing this completely inaccurate public perception?
Following the attack on Congresswoman Giffords and her staff at the meeting in Tucson, I felt as though this would have been the third or fourth time I’ve written a piece on the mischaracterization of a mass shooter. Each time before, I got into the double-standards in the media, citing specific examples and videos and such. This time, I just don’t see the point, especially when folks like Michelle Malkin have done such a great job — click HERE to see her coverage, which includes screenshots of scrubbed posts from lefty-friendly sites.
To be honest, I’m simply exasperated. I expect that fact and established history would not be enough to convince the entrenched lefties out there, but I was hoping that some of the more independently minded folks would be willing to entertain truth and common sense. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Those on the left were the quickest to politicize this horrific event, and they turned it to their advantage because of it.
Sadly, the two lessons learned from the Giffords shooting were that (1) elected representatives need to put more, not less, space between themselves and the people they represent, and (2) when something like this happens, rather than pray for the victims, politicize it as quickly as possible. Seems like the American left won on both accounts.
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