The Left Never Wastes a Tragedy

The Left never stands so tall as when it stands upon dead bodies. Whether it is Bill Clinton blaming the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh, Democratic mayors suing gun manufacturers after school shootings in Arkansas and Colorado, Democrats turning Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial into a campaign rally, or Cindy Sheehan vastly overstaying her 15 minutes of fame, the Left never lets a tragedy pass without blaming it on its political enemies and pushing its agenda. Saturday’s tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, D-AZ, was no exception.

Within minutes, Matthew Yglesias blamed the shooting on “violent rhetoric” such as that of Michele Bachmann. DailyKos proprietor Markos Moulitsas tweeted, “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.” Allegedly, Palin had caused the tragedy by producing a map with “crosshairs” over targeted districts, including that of Giffords. The “evidence” becomes more underwhelming when one realizes Palin’s map used surveyor symbols, not crosshairs or bullseyes. In fact, both the DLC and DailyKos created maps with bullseyes — in the latter’s case, against Congresswoman Giffords herself, and later running a column in which the author called the shooting victim “dead to me.”

And at the risk of sounding like the snobbish liberals who frequent DK, the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was obsessed with the proper use of English grammar; this does not lead me to believe he was a Sarah Palin fan.

Arizona Shooter was a Left-Winger (And Nuts)

It should come as no surprise that Saturday’s shooter, who has been used as a convenient tool for morally superior left-wingers to whip conservatives, appears to have been a mentally disturbed occultist who drew his political inspiration from The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. So much blood has been shed in the name of those two collectivist ideologies that Saturday’s tragedies would scarcely represent a drop in the bucket. Caitie Parker, a classmate of Loughner’s at Tuscon’s Mountain View High School and Pima Community College, describes him as “a political radical,” “left-wing, quite liberal” and “Anti-Flag.” His views seem as remote from Glenn Beck and Tom Tancredo as possible. (American Family Radio talk show host Bryan Fischer was way ahead of the crowd in pointing out the shooter’s left-wing views.)

More to the point, the Left has so specialized in inciting its members to assassinate politicians and spreading violent rhetoric that the psychological mechanism of projection forces it to hallucinate similar instances on the Right.

The Left’s perpetual cry of conservative “violence” is like a bad movie Hollywood continually remakes. The most recent example occurred when liberals blamed the 2009 Holocaust Museum shooting on conservatives, although the perpetrator was a Christian-hating socialist. Huffington Post blogger Michelle Kraus wrote simply, “Thank you very much Karl Rove and your minions.” Another HuffPo columnist accused Fox News host Glenn Beck of “using the public airwaves to incite violence,” while Alan Colmes smeared FreeRepublic.com. The gunman, James Wenneker Von Brunn, had written, “‘Christianity’ destroyed Roman Civilization” and called socialism “the future of the West.” Loughner’s political views may have stemmed from the same source.

The Left is Constantly Inciting Violence

While accusing conservatives of two of the last zero conservative terrorist attacks, the Left is perpetually calling for the assassination, fantasizing about the premature death, or laughing about the passing away of its political enemies. In May 2004, Air America talk show host Randi Rhodes referenced President Obama’s favorite film, The Godfather, about what someone should do to George W. Bush:“Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and [sound of gunfire].” A few years later, she chuckled as a radio spot on her network threatened to assassinate Bush over Social Security.

She was far from alone. In October 2004, UK Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker declared Bush should be “tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts” and asked, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?” Not content with idle speculation, a foreign leftist produced the film Death of a President to bring this vision to cinematic life.

Antiwar protesters — the “Tea Partiers” the Left likes — regularly carried homemade signs like these:

NPR’s Nina Totenberg, who covers politics at taxpayer expense, wished Sen. Jesse Helms would contract AIDS. and later publicly hoped that Gen. Jerry Boykin “is not long for this world.” Columnist Julianne Malveaux proposed this nutrition plan for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.”

In the last, painful days of Pope John Paul II, the New York Press ran a knee-slapper of a cover story entitled, “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope.”

President Obama is not above this. Obama laughed lustily when Wanda Sykes said she hoped Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail.

Cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall called for violent revolution on MSNBC:

Now, once again, tragedy has hit the homeland. And the Left continue to project its methods, tactics, and senseless bloodlust onto its political opponents. the only proper response is laughter at their claims, investigation of the facts, exposure of their violent history, and prayer for our future.