A History Of Left Wing Violence & The Cost Of Living In A Free Society

Michelle Malkin has done a superb job of documenting the left wing nuttery over the past decade. S.E. Cupp has a similar article, as does PJM. The true vitriol and eliminationist rhetoric of the left has no analog on the conservative right. The right wants to argue policy; the left wants to delegitimize their political opposition so that they don't have to address their policies.

Trying to explain the acts of the left in response to the Arizona mass murder, George Will makes my point much more eloquently:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first. . . .

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Update: James Taranto made the following observation on the left's treatment of political violence, penned in light of the left's outrageous defense of Frances Fox Piven's calls for Greece-like riots in America:

America's liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The "mainstream" media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left's fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information. . .

In other related news, both the New York Times and Michael Tomasky have demonstrated despicable hypocrisy, penning articles now tying the murders in Arizona to the right with not a shred of evidence, yet in response to the Ft. Hood shooting, with evidence piling up left and right about the shooters motives, counciled caution and refused to draw conclusions.

The most sane response to this mass murder has come from the people most injured by it - the parents of Christina Taylor Green, who have described the monstrous event that claimed the life of their child is "the cost of living in a free society."



And lastly, this from Instapundit:

As I think about it, the mental process seems to be something like this:
Lefty: Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement encourage hatred and violence!

Questioner: How do you know?

Lefty: Because whenever I think about them, I’m filled with hate and a desire to do harm!

Read More...

Summary only...

Yet More on The Left's Mission To Tie The Arizona Mass Murder To Sarah Palin & The Tea Partiers

Prof. Glen Reynolds, writing at the WSJ, asks "where is the decency in blood libel?"

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

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?

This from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO:

For every apparently right-wing Timothy McVeigh there is a left-wing Ted Kaczynski; both exhibited a sort of mental derangement in their braggadocio about extreme politics. The Sixties culture of drugs, permissiveness, national liberation, radical politics, and environmentalism no more made the Palestinian extremist Sirhan Sihran assassinate Bobby Kennedy, or Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme try to kill President Ford, or pop socialist and cult preacher the Rev. Jim Jones order the execution of Rep. Leo Ryan, or Arthur Bremmer shoot the “segregationist dinosaur” George Wallace, than right-wing politics drove on the equally deranged Jared Lee Loughner.

At PJM, for the apparent benefit of Paul Krugman, Roger Kimball has amassed a short history of left-wing "hate speech," including the use bull's eyes to target Republicans. And I would be remiss indeed if I did not mention this post from Dr. Sanity, discussing the sickness in the mind of Jared Loughner as well as the sickness in the soul of a leftwing nutjob who, in the wake of Loughner's mass murder, e-mailed Dr. Sanity to say "This is what comes of spewing hate, you fascist pig!." Talk about irony.

Read More...

Summary only...

More On Jared Loughner's Slaughter In Arizona & Leftwing Media Hypocrisy

Two exceptional essays by Byron York and Ed Morissey on the mass murder by Jared Loughner and the media / left's rush to tie this act to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Byron York compares this rush to the media / left's actions after the Ft. Hood shooting by Nidal Hassan. Morissey builds on that, pointing to CNN's scurrilous reporting, and points to some words used by the left - the very tip of the iceberg - during the last campaign by Obama and the DNC concerning politics and bullseye's on targets for Democratic pickup.

This from Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

"The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

"We cannot jump to conclusions," said CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. "We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever."

"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."

Actually, that was responsible reporting at the time, at least until it became conclusively shown that Nidal in fact was motivated by Salafi Islam to carry out his mass murder. But as York goes on to discuss, in the very hours after this murder, with no evidence initially and then with the mounting evidence to the contrary, the left wing generally, and the left wing media in particular, have been falling all over themselves to tie this to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the rise in "hate speech" that the left wants everyone to believe is a phenomena unique to the past two years.

Ed Morrisey points out the massive hypocrisy of CNN to speculate that Palin and the Tea Party were responsible in any way for this mass murder and adds:

. . . as has been repeatedly pointed out in the hours since, Democrats have also used crosshairs and bulls-eye imagery in their own political communications, including one in Arizona “targeting” J. D Hayworth of Arizona. As far as the “reload” comment, it was less than three years ago that Barack Obama himself talked about responding to political opponents with a gun analogy:

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

The comment drew some laughs and applause. But it also struck a chord with his Republican rival. John McCain’s campaign immediately accused the Democratic candidate of playing the politics of fear. They also mentioned that Obama said he would use a gun that would be illegal under Obama’s plans to cut down on illegal firearms.

Getting hysterical about the use of war terminology in politics is about as hypocritical as one can possibly get, as Howard Kurtz explained yesterday, especially for journalists covering politics . . .

To add a few thoughts, as to the Tea Party at least, the left would like us to believe that a determination to stop deficit spending, to lower taxes, and an inchoate desire to return to the Constitution at the time of the founding somehow is an invitation to violence. To the contrary, it is a call for a return to law.

The same cannot be said of at least a portion of the violent left wing rhetoric that has been with us since the days of Vietnam. Indeed, that was a world that gave us The Weathermen and many others who called for violence and who, in fact, did commit politically motivated violence, murder and mayhem. And to pretend violent rhetoric is an artifact of the right is ridiculous. The left's violent rhetoric was raised to an art form during the Bush years and, indeed, is still with us.





And on a closely related issue, where is the media outrage when we have seen, over the past few years, vile reverse racism, all of it accepted without comment by the left. Seemingly at the drop of a hat, the left calls virtualy anything they don't like "racism," wholly irrespective of racial animus. These people in fact have motivated mass murders, including the sniper murders by John Allen Mohammed and the murders by Omar Thorton, who last year at a distributorship in Connecticut, killed eight of his co-workers.




Silence.

Read More...

Summary only...

Palin, Religion & Left Wing Dogma

Steve Benen writing at Washington Monthly has his panties in a bunch. Apparently, he can't believe that Sarah Palin, actually believes that there was a role for religion within the outer ambit of the state at the time of our nations founding. This from Mr. Benen:

THE THEOCRATIC WING OF THE GOP.... A certain former half-term governor appears to be drifting even further away from the American mainstream. Over the weekend, appearing at an evangelical Christian women's conference in Louisville, Sarah Palin rejected the very idea of separation of church and state, a bedrock principle of American democracy.

. . . She denounced this week's Wisconsin federal court ruling that government observance of a National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional -- which the crowd joined in booing. She asserted that America needs to get back to its Christian roots and rejected any notion that "God should be separated from the state."

Palin added that she was outraged when President Obama said that "America isn't a Christian nation."

The amusing aspect of this is the notion that the United States would return to its roots with support for National Day of Prayer observances. That's backwards -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison explicitly rejected state-sponsored prayer days. I'll look forward to the conservative explanation of how the Founding Fathers were godless socialists. . . .

But far less amusing is the fact that Palin and others of her radical ilk reject any notion that "God should be separated from the state." It's the 21st century, for crying out loud. There are some countries that endorse Palin's worldview and intermix God and government -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan under Taliban rule come to mind -- but they're generally not countries the United States tries to emulate.

The separation of church and state has long been a concept that all Americans could embrace, and has served as a model for nations around the world to follow. For Palin to publicly denounce this bedrock American principle suggests she might actually be getting worse. . . .

. . . Update: Greg Sargent obtained a transcript, and it's worse than I thought. Palin not only thinks the Founding Fathers opposed church-state separation -- in other words, she thinks those who came up with the idea opposed the idea -- she also suggests religious people necessarily reject the constitutional principle. This is just astounding.

What is astounding here is the degree of Mr. Benen's historical ignorance. As to Madison and Jefferson vetoing a "national day of prayer," I wait to see that bit of historical fantasy. Lastly, as to the charge that Palin seeks to make America a theocracy, perhaps if Mr. Benen knew a bit more about Madison and Jefferson, he would understand how utterly ridiculous such a charge actually is. Mr. Benen is a pawn in the left's two centuries old war on religion - and not a particularly intelligent one.

Update: Greg Sargent, running a WaPo blog, the Plum Line, made a similar argument to Mr. Benan. Do they still teach history to journalists these days? Apparently, for these journalists, the history of religion in America begins with Everson.

Update: JP, writing at Texas For Sarah Palin, has a superb post up on the history of religion in America, and in particular, the history of "days of prayer" called by our government.

Update: Plumb Bob Blog also has an excellent post on this issue, take a deeper look at the Court's decision on the issue and some of the arguments the radical secularists are using to remove religion generally and Christianity in particular from the public square.

Read More...

Summary only...

More Politicized Science

The mixture of politics and science is a toxic brew where the objective search for facts is corrupted into the selection of facts for the purposes of advocacy. While I could easily be talking about climate science, this time I am actually referring to the American Antrhopological Association (AAA) and the science of anthropology. Anthropology is defined by dictionary.com as "the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind." It is an important but, one would think, innocuous field of study. Not so.

When the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we desperately needed to understand the culture of the societies in whose areas our soldiers were operating. As an anthropology professor pointed out in 2003, it was incumbent on the government to seek help from anthropologists familiar with the culture of Afghanistan and Iraq if we were to have any hope of winning the hearts and minds. That is precisely what the U.S. Army did, requesting help and receiving it from volunteers. And my hat is off to those who anthropologists who volunteered in service of their country. By all accounts, they made a real difference, "explain[ing] tribal customs and work[ing] to improve health, security and education . . ." Those "efforts . . . helped significantly reduce combat . . ." Who could possibly take issue with that?

The AAA, that's who. This is the largest association of anthropologists in America and a body supposedly dedicated to the advancement of science within their discipline. The reality is that they are a left wing advocacy organization. For example, the organization recently issued a policy brief coming out in favor of card check for labor unions. That seems rather far afield indeed from the concerns of furthering the discipline of anthropology. Similarly biased advocacy can be gleaned from their web-site for a variety of left wing political causes.

None of that is mentioned in a recent NYT article, where the AAA is given a platform to excorciate members of their discipline for daring to support our military efforts. According to the article, the AAA is calling the work of scientists who cooperate with the military "dangerous, unethical and unscholarly" and are taking the position that the academic patriots who volunteer to help our military “can no longer be considered a [as involved in a] legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Should the AAA be entitled to express this opinion? This is supposed to be a scientific association. It is not. It is an advocacy organization overlaid over a scientific discipline. If this groups recommendation carries any weight with things such as tenure decisions for individual anthropologists, then their decision to transform their science into an advocacy is significant indeed. I would love to hear from any antrhopologists who have assisted the military whether the AAA's recommendation has any potential to actually impact their careers.

There is no difference that I can discern between AAA and the climate scientists who have similarly jettisoned scientific inquiry for advocacy. This is an evil must somehow be addressed. If Climategate flowers, as well it might, hopefully it will lead to a backlash throughout the science world against those, such as the AAA, who have replaced science with advocacy. It is a true cancer on the scientific world.

Read More...

Summary only...