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!

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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.

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When Politics Ends & Violence Begins

There is a surprisingly good article in the NYT, When Does Political Anger Turn to Violence? I expected it to be another article claiming that the the Tea Party groups are right wing militias in thin disguise who spend their evenings passing around dog eared copies of the Turner Diaries. There were some suggestions of that, but overall it was a serious article articulating one of the points I have made on this blog several times before - that when a group feels their voice is silenced and their vote is stolen or dilluted, that they are shut out of the political process, blood in the streets will likely follow. The NYT agrees:

. . . So far, experts say that the discontent pooling on the right (anti-Washington and anti-Wall Street) and to a lesser degree on the left (anti-Wall Street) has some, but not yet all, of the ingredients needed to foment radicalism.

“As long as there is some possibility of getting results by political means, the chances that any group will turn truly radical are small, and maybe vanishingly small,” said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College. But if those efforts to engage are thwarted, he said, the equation changes.

The risk that angry words themselves will incite violence is higher when they are aimed at a despised minority, or a feuding enemy, if history is any guide. . . .

Furthermore, the psychological distance between talk and action — between fantasizing about even so much as brick heaving and actually doing it — is far larger for a typical, peaceable citizen than many assume. In the aftermath of the July 2007 London subway bombings, for instance, polls found that about 5 percent of Muslims living in England said that they believed violence was justified in defense of Islam. “That projects to about 50,000 Muslims in the U.K.,” Dr. McCauley said, “but very, very few of them are acting violently.”

Kathleen Blee, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, said the same was true even for groups that consider violence a central tenet. “In the white power groups I study, people can have all kind of crazy racist ideas, spend their evenings reading Hitler online, all of it,” she said, “but many of them never do anything at all about it.”

Protest groups that turn from loud to aggressive tend to draw on at least two other elements, researchers say. The first is what sociologists call a “moral shock” — a specific, blatant moral betrayal that, when most potent, evokes personal insults suffered by individual members, said Francesca Polletta, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics.”

This shock may derive from an image . . . It can also reside in a “narrative fragment,” like the Rodney King beating, which triggered a riot all on its own. . . .

The second element is a specific target clearly associated with the outrage. A law to change. A politician to remove. A company to shut down. “If the target is too big, too vague — say, the health care bill, which means many things — well, then the anger can be hard to sustain,” Dr. Polletta said. “It gets exhausting.”

Not that the rage, or the risk of escalation, necessarily goes away. If a group with enduring gripes is shut out of the political process, and begins to shed active members, it can leave behind a radical core. This is precisely what happened in the 1960s, when the domestic terrorist group known as the Weather Underground emerged from the larger, more moderate anti-war Students for a Democratic Society, Dr. McCauley said. “The SDS had 100,000 members and, frustrated politically at every step, people started to give up,” he said. “The result was that you had this condensation of a small, more radical base of activists who decided to escalate the violence.”

Given the shifting political terrain, the diversity of views in the antigovernment groups, and their potential political impact, experts say they expect that very few are ready to take the more radical step.

“Once you take that step to act violently, it’s very difficult to turn back,” Dr. Blee said. “It puts the group, and the person, on a very different path.”

As I wrote recently in concuring with a Powerline post, violence has no place in our democracy. But unlike the authors of Powerline, I could see acts by our government that could lead to blood in the streets. In my 40+ years, I never entertained such a thought. That changed when Obama speculated that he might give in to calls on the left to actually prosecute the prior administration over political differences on the Iraq War. An act like that - criminalizing political disputes in an effort to destroy their opposition, could well have led to political violence.

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