Blame Righty: A condensed history
On Monday, as the progressive smear machine worked overtime to pin the horrific Tucson massacre on conservatives and to squelch political opposition by targeting Tea Party/limited-government rhetoric, I published“The progressive “climate of hate:” An illustrated primer, 2000-2010.”
Today’s column provides another primer for the amnesia-wracked blamestream media on just how widespread the Blame Righty meme has been over the past two years. Regular readers of this blog are well aware of this expanding litany outlined below. You are also well aware of the cunning ability of the Left to hinder exposure of this sordid history by accusing its chroniclers and whistle-blowers of “playing the victim.” Sarah Palin is the most prominent conservative to encounter this tactic, but she is by no means the first conservative public figure to experience it. Kabuki outrage over her use of the term “blood libel” is an intended distraction from the history outlined below that undergirds her message. The political speech suppressors have honed their craft long and well.
The solution isn’t to “tone it down” and turn the other cheek, but to confront them forcefully with the facts — and to fight back unapologetically against insidious efforts to diminish the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech and activism of the Right in the name ofrepressive “civility.”
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I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been “far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than” they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It’s time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.
For the past two years, Democrat officials, liberal activists, and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Alas, the Obama administration’s political and media foot soldiers have proven themselves incapable of such restraint.
In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill instructor and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprits of the spree were the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).
That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others, and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the Left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent of undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the “huge anti–immigrant backlash in this country” – never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism, and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.
In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunngunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration’s report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the Tea Party, talk radio, and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. The state party chair, Pat Waak, singled out Tea Party activists and blamed “people opposed to health care” for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far Left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democrat candidate.
In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in an online magazine post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.” Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed “anti-government” bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, “conservative media personalities, websites, and even members of Congress.” So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to Tea Party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everythingfrom George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church, and airlines.
In May 2010, liberal New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.
In August 2010, Democrat supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a “firebombing” at the congressman’s St. Louis office on Tea Party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, enraged over a paycheck dispute.
President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that “Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.” But as the progressive Left’s smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.
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