Demonic (31 page)

Angry violent mobs are always Democratic: Code Pink, SDS, The Weathermen, Earth First!, anti-war protesters, and union protesters in Wisconsin. Like them, the Ku Klux Klan was, of course, another Democratic undertaking, originally formed to terrorize Republicans, but later switching to terrorize blacks. It was Democratic juries that acquitted Klansman after Klansman. It was Democratic politicians who supported segregation, Democratic governors who called out the National Guard to stop desegregation, Democratic commissioners of public safety who turned police dogs and water hoses on civil rights protesters.

As the historian Paul Johnson explains, “Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race.”
⁴⁹

Once, Democrats used blacks as the mythical enemy to rally their troops. Today, it’s conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Fox News. To increase their own power, Democrats are perfectly happy to gin up violent ruffians—from the Klan to
Moveon.org
—to battle this or that human devil. Democrats are always the party of the mob. The only thing that changes is which mob they’re supporting.

ELEVEN
TIMOTHY McVEIGH IS
NOW A TEA PARTIER

W
henever a Democrat is elected president, the media’s standard response is to start looking for armed rebellion in the red states. With mob savagery woven into the history of the Left, they use their media mobs to broadcast stories about the omnipresent threat of right-wing violence, hoping that no one will notice that the actual violence—as opposed to the supposed threat of violence—has always come from the Left.

Consider that liberals have been citing Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bomber, as a right-wing terrorist for fifteen years. Liberals simply assumed that McVeigh was a conservative because he was a white male who knew how to use a gun. After a century of violence from the Ku Klux Klan, the labor unions, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-war protesters, the Weathermen, the SDS, the Black Panthers, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, Squeaky Fromme, and Earth First!, liberals were desperate for any hooligan who looked like a Republican.

But McVeigh was neither conservative nor Christian. This alleged right-winger was a drug-taking self-proclaimed agnostic, who was thrown
out of the Michigan militia and who declared, “Science is my religion,” sounding more like Janeane Garofalo than Wayne LaPierre.

Liberals were undeterred. McVeigh was white and he was male: he
had
to be a Republican. (To liberals, we all look alike.) In
Harper’s Magazine
, Lewis Lapham said McVeigh’s views were “not unlike those expressed by the members of the nation’s better country clubs.”
Time
senior writer Richard Lacayo called talk radio “an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast.”
Today
show host Bryant Gumbel said, “The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men.” Then-representative (now senator) Chuck Schumer blamed the bombing on the National Rifle Association.

(Luckily, McVeigh was captured before the Unabomber, so liberals didn’t have to explain how the Green movement wasn’t responsible for Ted Kaczynski’s bombing spree.)

Even the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on talk-radio hosts, accusing them of “fostering hatred, division and encouraging violence.” He said some rhetoric “pushes fragile people over the edge,” adding, “their bitter words have consequences.… They leave the impression, by their words, that violence is acceptable.”

In response, Brent Bozell, Media Research Center chairman, offered $100,000 to Clinton’s favorite charity if he named a single credible radio talk-show host who had called for violence against the American people or the government. The reward remains uncollected.
¹

Again, in January 2011, when twenty-two-year-old, left-wing pothead Jared Loughner shot up a Gabrielle Giffords political event at a Tucson Safeway, killing six people, liberals immediately blamed the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and all conservatives for inspiring the shooter.

To make their case, they needed to prove:

1. Right-wingers had called for violence against anyone, especially moderate Democratic congresswomen
   
2. Loughner was listening to them
   
3. Loughner was influenced by them
   

But as more information came out, the truth was nearly the opposite. Loughner’s attack would have gone down in history as another act of terroristic violence by a right-winger, just like McVeigh, except this time conservatives had the Internet and other media outlets to publicize the truth.

No conservative had called for violence against anyone. Nor had any conservative engaged in any “rhetoric” that was likely to lead to violence. Every putative example of “violent rhetoric” these squeamish liberals produced kept being matched by an identical example from the Democrats.

Sarah Palin, for example, was accused of complicity in murder for having produced a map with crosshairs over the congressional districts being targeted by Republicans. So did the Democratic Leadership Committee. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel went on Fox News and said he invented the bull’s-eye maps.

Similarly, every time liberals produced an example of military lingo from a Republican—“we’re going to target this district”—Republicans produced five more from the Democrats. President “whose asses to kick” Obama had warned of “hand-to-hand combat” with his political opponents and said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”—making Obama the first American president to advocate gunfights since Andrew Jackson.

These are figures of speech known as “metaphors.” (Do liberals know where we got the word “campaign”?) It’s not that both sides did something wrong, neither side did anything wrong. But the drama queens ran riot for weeks after the Tucson shooting. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recalled Palin’s statement “We’re not retreating, we’re reloading” and then he said—I quote—“That’s not a metaphor.” If it wasn’t a metaphor, whom did she shoot?

By blaming a mass killing on figures of speech, liberals sounded as crazy as Loughner with his complaints about people’s grammar. After insisting that we drop metaphors, liberals were on the verge of demanding a ban on metonymies—until they realized no one was buying it. (Wait until they find out about gerund phrases!)

As for Loughner being influenced by Tea Partiers, Fox News, and talk radio—oops, another dead end. According to all available evidence, Loughner was a liberal. Every friend of Loughner who characterized his
politics described him as liberal. Not one called him a conservative. One friend said Loughner never listened to talk radio or watched the TV news. Throw in “never read books” and you have the dictionary definition of a liberal. Being completely uninformed is precisely how most liberals stay liberal.

According to voluminous Twitter postings the day of the shooting by Caitie Parker, one of Loughner’s friends since high school, he was “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal,” and “a pot head.”
²
If any public figure influenced this guy, my money’s on Bill Maher.

But liberals were so determined to exploit the massacre to get conservatives to stop talking, they told calculated lies about Loughner’s politics. In a shocking example, the
New York Times
implied—against all evidence—that Loughner was a pro-life zealot. Only because numerous other news outlets, including ABC News and the AP, reported the exact same incident in much greater detail—with eyewitness quotes—do we know that the
Times
rendition was complete bunk.

ABC News reported:

One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act “wildly inappropriate.” “One day [Loughner] started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,” classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. “The rest of us were looking at him in shock.… I thought this young man was troubled.”

Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well. “A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,” Ali said.

Here’s the
Times
version: “After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a ‘terrorist for killing the baby.’ ” That’s how the
Times
transformed Loughner from a sicko laughing about a dead fetus to a deadly earnest pro-life fanatic. (Never believe a news story written by Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage, or Scott Shane of the
New York Times
—or, for simplicity, anything in the
Times.
)

Loughner’s liberal worldview might have passed unnoticed, as it has
with other random nuts committing violence. But liberals opened the door by blaming what they hoped would be Loughner’s right-wing politics.

The
New York Times
’s Paul Krugman got the ball rolling two days after the shooting spree in a column titled “Climate of Hate,” announcing that the cause of the shooting was “toxic rhetoric” coming “overwhelmingly, from the right.”
³
This was followed by the usual torrent of exactly zero examples.

Rather, Krugman cited the McVeigh canard, as well as this crucial evidence: Other liberals saying right-wing rhetoric is dangerous! This would be like one birther citing another birther as proof that Obama was born in Kenya.

Thus, Krugman said the Obama administration had issued reports claiming “right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.” Liberals spend a lot of time worrying about the “potential” of violence from the right, whereas conservatives have to worry about actual violence from liberals.

But according to Krugman: “[T]here’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the
Washington Post
. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.”

Only a complete zealot like Krugman could say black is white and white is black—not even gray!

Krugman was referring to a remark Bill O’Reilly made about
Washington Post
reporter Dana Milbank that had roiled the mainstream media for weeks in 2010.

To be fair to O’Reilly, which he wouldn’t be to me, he was joking. We know that because he specifically said so. Milbank had flat-out lied in a column, claiming that Fox News’s election night coverage included only one Democrat. There were, in fact, at least six. O’Reilly called him out on it, then switched to a story about Sharia law in Oklahoma and asked his guest: “Does Sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank? That was a joke for you ‘Media Matters’ people out there, because you know—‘O’Reilly says we want to behead Dana!’ ”
⁴

In response, Milbank wrote what has already been recorded as the
gayest column in world history that didn’t include a picture of the cast of
Glee:

Bill O’Reilly wants my head—literally. On Thursday night, the Fox News host asked, as part of a show that would be seen by 5.5 million people: ‘Does Sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?’ He then added, ‘That was a joke.’ Hilarious! Decapitation jokes just slay me, and this one had all the more hilarity because the topic of journalist beheadings brings to mind my late friend and colleague Danny Pearl, who replaced me in the
Wall Street Journal
’s London bureau and later was murdered in Pakistan by people who thought Sharia justified it.… But what was he trying to say? That America would be better if it were more like Iran?
⁵

The liberal blogs soon lit up with red-hot indignation over O’Reilly’s direct threat to personally behead Milbank. It was even discussed on CNN’s
Reliable Sources
, with Milbank again bleating, “I think it’s a serious issue when people are suggesting violent imagery … as Bill O’Reilly did.”

When host Howard Kurtz pointed out that Milbank was, in fact, wrong about how many Democrats had appeared on Fox News election night, Milbank said, “That’s a fair argument. Maybe I should have written it differently, but let’s not talk about cutting off heads.”
⁶
Yes, he should have “written it differently” by not lying.

Now, here’s some of that lighthearted “mockery aimed at Republicans” Krugman sees from Keith Olbermann. After Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade chastised the media for refusing to identify Muslim terrorists as Muslims, Keith commented: “There is ‘stupid’ and there is ‘bigoted’ and there is ‘paranoid’ and there is ‘Islamophobic’—though it takes a big man to combine all four of them.… Not every un-American bastard is Brian Kilmeade, but all Brian Kilmeades are un-American bastards and tonight’s ‘Worst Person in the World.’ ”
⁷

The mind reels at such dazzling, frothy wordplay. If you close your eyes, it’s almost like you’re listening to Oscar Wilde!

A few years earlier, Keith accused Bush of inspiring the anthrax attacks (in his wry, Noel Coward–like way).

Rachel Maddow’s caustic repartee includes her making up stories about right-wingers killing a census-taker and a Republican congressman being warned in advance about the Oklahoma City bombing—both stories requiring subsequent corrections.
⁸