If you are of a certain age, you also remember that JFK’s assassin was supposed to be a right winger – because Texas was "Right Wing Heaven." There was also, if I recall correctly, shouts of faux anger about hate speech. That lasted for months, until the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was a devoted Communist and a fan of Castro got to be so overwhelming that even the MSM had to stop blaming it on the Right. That didn’t stop Oliver Stone from putting that story line into a movie and making JFK the victim of a shadowy Right Wing Cabal®.
Sorry to disagree with Ann Althouse, but the “above the fray” approach was the way that George Bush handled the claim that he lied about WMDs in Iraq (when the belief that Saddam had them was universal). A lie has to be met with the truth because the unaided truth doesn’t stand a chance if no one utters it.
It is, however, not a good idea for the Right to make lists of Leftist “eliminationist rhetoric.” That’s playing the Left’s game by the Left’s rules and all you accomplish is letting the best cut-and-paster win a game without getting to the truth. The fact is that political rhetoric in today’s world only animates organized groups who are already in the violence business, such as the Muslims seeking to go on Jihad, and when that happens, the MSM denies it.
The way to handle this is to focus on the killer: is he a ideologue or a nut? If he has a political bias, it’s inevitable that that will be used to indict the group he adheres to. If he’s a nut (and the two are not mutually exclusive) it should be used to point out the political biases of the commentators. I think that this event will actually do more damage to the tattered reputation of the MSM than to either the Left or the Right.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds gets an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds gets an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
... 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?
1 comment:
A kid with a history of being (lets be kind) unstable, gives an excuse for the liberal media and liberal politicians to use this as an excuse to indict conservatives and try to take more and more freedom from each and every American. The esteemed Sheriff Dupnik of Pima County, given an opportunity by Geraldo, blames Sharon Engle and Sarah Palin for setting this guy off.
Compare to the Fort Hood shooter. The guy shouted Allahu Akbar while shooting his victims yet we were told not to make a connection to radical Islam. That they say would be jumping to conclusions. We need to find the facts.
I wonder about the Jared's parents, were they oblivious or scared of this young man. If I was the Sheriff I would talk to them before I went off blaming Engle and Palin.
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