The Rush to Blame the Right for Giffords' Shooting

We don't know what motivated the gunman in Arizona. And until we do, journalists -- even opinion journalists -- should stop playing connect the dots.

It's interesting, and not in a good way, that the same liberals who are so concerned about supposedly hateful conservative speech polluting our national conversation never seemed especially bothered by all the talk about President Bush being a "war criminal" and a "Nazi."

Nor were they especially outraged over the movie "Death of a President," which was about the assassination -- not of some fictional generic president -- but of President George W. Bush specifically. And were my sensitive liberal friends thrown into a tizzy when in June 2008, during the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said, "If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"?

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/09/opini ... -shooting/

We don't know what motivated the gunman in Arizona. And until we do, journalists -- even opinion journalists -- should stop playing connect the dots.

It's interesting, and not in a good way, that the same liberals who are so concerned about supposedly hateful conservative speech polluting our national conversation never seemed especially bothered by all the talk about President Bush being a "war criminal" and a "Nazi."

Nor were they especially outraged over the movie "Death of a President," which was about the assassination -- not of some fictional generic president -- but of President George W. Bush specifically. And were my sensitive liberal friends thrown into a tizzy when in June 2008, during the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said, "If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"?

Who knew?

The Tucson shooting was an unspeakable horror, a characteristic exercise in American democracy — a townhall meeting outside a Safeway store — interrupted by gunshots and bloodshed. The gunman targeted Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head but survived, and killed six and wounded thirteen others. Any time someone attempts to assassinate a public official it is an attack on the entire country, and the Tucson shooting has been appropriately treated as such by politicians across the political spectrum.

We barely knew all the facts in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, though, before this vicious act was being milked for political advantage by ghoulish opportunists on the Left. Their argument was that the suspect, Jared Loughner, was effectively sent from the Tea Party. Paul Krugman rushed to his keyboard to say, “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.” Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas blamed Sarah Palin because she included Giffords’s district on a map with crosshairs denoting Democrats she wanted to see defeated. Keith Olbermann called for Palin to be drummed from public life unless she repents of her role in the tragedy. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik blamed “the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,” and called his state “the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry” — apparently for the offense of enforcing immigration laws. And so on.

http://visiontoamerica.org/story/the-le ... agedy.html

The Unabomber was profiled in the media as a right wing extremist, until he turned out to be a Left Wing extremist and huge fan of Al Gore.

The DC Sniper was profiled in the media as a white right wing skinhead, until John Muhammad and son were arrested.

Slick Willie blamed Rush Limbaugh for Tim McVeigh back when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred. It was bogus.

:thumbsup:

outdoor338 wrote: We don't know what motivated the gunman in Arizona. And until we do, journalists -- even opinion journalists -- should stop playing connect the dots.

It's interesting, and not in a good way, that the same liberals who are so concerned about supposedly hateful conservative speech polluting our national conversation never seemed especially bothered by all the talk about President Bush being a "war criminal" and a "Nazi."

Nor were they especially outraged over the movie "Death of a President," which was about the assassination -- not of some fictional generic president -- but of President George W. Bush specifically. And were my sensitive liberal friends thrown into a tizzy when in June 2008, during the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said, "If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"?

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/09/opini ... -shooting/

Great points Outdoor. Can you imagine the outrage if some right wing guy made a miovie about killing Obama? The media would tear him a new one and LJ would be blowing a head gasket....

The Tragedy of Misrepresenting Violence



The essay below addresses the issue of violence in our schools in the last 10 years. Below that is a Nikitas3.com editorial from April 19, 2007, The Intellectuals and the Gunman, written in response to the massacre at Virginia Tech.





The horrific murder of five students by Stephen Kazmierczak at Northern Illinois University on February 14, 2008 has become far too routine an occurrence. From the killing of two fellow students by Luke Woodham on October 1, 1997 at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, through Columbine and Virginia Tech to Northern Illinois, America has been convulsed by a wave of youth violence that has accelerated in the last decade. This is not inner-city gang violence among the poor, but middle class violence in “safe” schools.

These types of incidents were virtually unheard of in the 1950s or 1960s, when guns were more readily available than they are today as 20,000 state and federal laws currently regulate the manufacture and distribution of guns. Yet every incident since Pearl has raised the call for simple gun control, while ignoring the bigger, more complex and more comprehensive picture about the debasement of social standards that is the real cause of violence – the wholesale move away from the cohesive family structure and away from our sustaining Christian faith; toward ever-increasing violence in television and movies (yes, “pacifist” Hollywood); the advocacy of occultism and false new-age spirituality that represent a selfish “whatever” ethos with no moral center.

Also the rapid spread of environmental paganism which deems all human activities as destructive and which paints a bleak picture of the future; the violence and social chaos that is a permanent and underlying theme in promiscuous sex; and the routine acceptance of abortion—the cheapening of the most innocent life in the name of convenience -- which also is a result of permissive sexual license. The cumulative effect of these social shifts, along with others discussed below, is the real underlying cause of this rise in violence among the kids involved.

No, it is not guns that kill people. People kill people. Guns have been available since the beginning of American history, yet it is in our morally relativist culture of today that students are finding the motivations and rationales to make murder their vehicle of choice for settling scores with a society from which they say they feel alienated.

Below is a summary of incidents since Pearl, Mississippi. After each, and in summary at the end, Nikitas3.com will offer an analysis which will be made only on the evidence presented here, and without further knowledge of the more extended stories of these killers. That will be a future project for Nikitas3.com, to investigate cases individually in order to unmask this wave of violence for what it truly is, a social movement that is a natural outcome of permissive atheist liberalism.

Read complete article here http://www.nikitas3.com/tragedy_of_misunderstanding.htm

Can you imagine the outrage if it would have been Osama Bin Ladin and NOT Sarah Palin who put the crosshairs on Giffords' District, and it was a muslim that killed those people?!

Whatevergreen wrote: Can you imagine the outrage if it would have been Osama Bin Ladin and NOT Sarah Palin who put the crosshairs on Giffords' District, and it was a muslim that killed those people?!

Yes I can imagine that, and I would be blaming the individual and not all Muslims. And comparing Palin to Bin Ladin? Obama has a great history of killing and terrorism, what has Palin done?

There's simply a rush to blame somebody, anybody. Unfortunately, that's the nature of our culture these days. Lately, it's all along political divisions. Sad......