Blood Libel
The sun didn’t set yesterday before the professional left had pinned blame for the murders of six people and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, et. al.
William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection has screenshots of the accusations (and especially the hypocrisy) of the usual suspects on the left. Most notable is DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas pinning responsibility for the attack on Sarah Palin while his own site simultaneously hosted a blog post by a leftist attacking Giffords that was more toxic than anything Palin has ever said or written. (When called on it, Moulitsas quickly sent the offending post down the memory hole.)
Especially noxious has been Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik who blamed the shooting on “one party blocking another party from bettering this country.”
On the contrary, everything we’ve learned about shooter Jared Loughner tells us that he was a seriously mentally ill individual who occupied that narrow slice of the political spectrum where the far left and far right start to blend together. There’s evidence that Loughner had fixated on Giffords as early as 2007, long before Sarah Palin or the tea party came on the scene.
As for the idea that political rhetoric is to blame for the violence, I’m going to through my lot in with Slate’s jack Shafer:
For as long as I've been alive, crosshairs and bull's-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such "inflammatory" words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I've listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I've even gotten angry, for goodness' sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.
From what I can tell, I'm not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds also took aim (no pun intended) at the media and the political left (but I repeat myself) and their efforts to tie Saturday’s violent attack to the right:
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?
There is no decency on the left.
One comment on “Blood Libel”
Tags
Sorry Hoy, you've got it all wrong.
Mark Potok from Southern Poverty Law Center has facts-
Jared Loughner read Animal Farm, Brave New World, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, and Mein Kampf and none of those had any affect whatsoever.
It was We The Living that threw this guy over the edge.
If you disagree with these "facts" then you're probably a racist that is glad Giffords was shot.
Net Neutrality would have prevented this from happening.