Who makes monsters? Mostly the Left: because of its huge presence in the media and the arts, the Left has traditionally manufactured the most hate-objects. They’ve done it for so long that it has become almost a birthright. The photographer Zombie has documented dozens of calls from the left, from demonstrators to celebrities, for the assassination and murder of President George W. Bush. But that’s not a crime, is it?
Click on the Zombie link and you will find hundreds of images of George Bush which advocated his murder or depicted his death. Here is an image from an Obama campaign rally in 2008 depicting Bush after being decapitated.
Why did this not evoke the outrage of the Leftists in the MSM or people like Luzatto?
The discrepancy is probably because the Left has long appointed itself the guardian of the freak-minting industry. It is a prerogative that is jealously guarded. Thus Glenn Reynolds could receive this insulting email calling for civility without the slightest irony. “I cannot emphasize this enough: your brand of public discourse is hurting our country. It us poison. So fuck you, you GOP utensil, and fuck your mother for bringing you forth.” Get it Glenn? So too could Ann Coulter be threatened by protesters at the University of Ottawa to prevent her from making a “hate speech.” S**t flows downhill. There is no mystery to that. It’s Leftist physics.
If it doesn't outrage the Left, it's not an outrage. Get it?
But as in physics, to any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. People who get smeared and demeaned by the people with the press megaphone grab their own megaphone and begin to shout back. They stop buying the newspapers that employ the haters. And they turn to a medium that gives them a voice.
One might argue that the explosive growth of the blogosphere has been driven by its utility as an adaptive optical appliance through which to view the media. But it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. Since the reality “out there” is first distorted by the media to the point where the discerning members of the public must apply a further distortion to make the image sensible, we inflict a huge signal loss on the viewer. There is no guarantee that the applied corrections don’t do more harm than good. Back in the days of the anti-Marcos underground I asked someone why he bothered to read either the government newspapers or the Communist Party propaganda sheet. He replied, “I buy it for date, my friend. It’s still good for telling me what day it is.”
Just so. The theme du jour in the MSM is that the Right is stirring Americans to rage, to racism and to do violence. Ignoring their own crimes is part of that theme. And it's a useful distractions from the dismay that a majority of Americans are feeling over the headlong lurch into vastly greater government control, skyrocketing taxes and deficit spending that is literally unlike anything this country has ever experienced.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law let me quote one last ime from Fernandez' article:
because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
The big lie is always better for ideologues than the small lie. The risk for the country is that the lies of the Left will not just be corrected, but will be over-corrected until we no longer have the ability to approximate reality in a world where reality and truth is vitally important.