Right-Wing Media Paranoids Haven't Talked a Nut Into Shooting Anyone for Nearly Six MonthsPosted Tuesday, January 11, 2011 1:11 PM | By Tom Scocca
Rush Limbaugh is on the defensive, which is to say the offensive, about the liberal media's instant decision to slander the conservative movement in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting:
Quote:It's the template. It's the narrative. There's never any evidence. Every projection, every prediction, every association that any act of violence has been made with the conservative right has fallen on emptiness. There has never been any evidence of it.
OK, look: so far, Jared Loughner appears to have been acting on some nonpartisan, lunatic ideology.* The people who jumped to the conclusion that he was a right-winger motivated by Tea Party rhetoric or mass-media criticism of Giffords were wrong—at least, he seems to have been much more upset about her attitude toward his theories of grammar than her vote for Obamacare.
Giffords did not get shot because Sarah Palin's political team put a gunsight logo—or a surveyor's mark, or maybe a football-chalkboard X unified with an O to show that we're all on the same team—on top of her district on a map. She did not get shot because the lumpy guys in suits who run campaigns and write political talking points enjoy using metaphors to make their business sound as exciting and important and dramatic as military combat. (Nor did she get shot because someone at Daily Kos used the nonviolent, conventional English expression "dead to me.")
That said: regarding this crazy, evidence-free narrative about how right-wing media incited someone to violence? The one dictated to the leftist media by their bosses at the Democratic National Committee? Here's what happened a little less than six months ago:
A California man accused in a shootout with California Highway Patrol officers in Oakland early Sunday told officials that he traveled to San Francisco and planned to attack two nonprofit groups there "to start a revolution," according to a probable cause statement released by police.
Bryon Williams, 45, a convicted felon with two prior bank robbery convictions, targeted workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, said Oakland police Sgt. Michael Weisenberg in court documents.
And where did Williams get the idea that he should load up his mother's pickup truck with guns and go try to assassinate members of liberal organizations?
Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said.
(Maybe he was watching Rachel Maddow?)
A little over a year before that, a Kansas man named Scott Roeder assassinated George Tiller, a doctor known for performing late-term abortions, while Tiller was at church. Here's Bill O'Reilly, from his earlier ongoing, obsessive coverage of Tiller's abortion practice:
Quote:In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed.
Tiller's clinic was picketed and vandalized. And then, finally, some fanatic walked up to him on a weekend morning and shot him in the head.
A month before the Tiller killing, Richard Poplawski of Pittsburgh ambushed and killed three police officers responding to a call at his house; he reportedly "feared 'the Obama gun ban that's on the way.'"
That's three violent incidents in the past two years, perpetrated by people who were angry about gun control, abortion, or the work of liberal nonprofits. Two of them specifically targeted a person or organization that had been singled out by a Fox commentator. Fallen on emptiness, you say.
And so Rush Limbaugh is talking about Jim Jones—"a full-fledged communist and Democrat"—because even if that was more than 30 years ago, it proves that the only crazies are liberals, the only murderers are liberals, the only threat is the liberal left coming to murder people and destroy your freedom:
Quote:They're now moving to gun control. That was also predictable. What that happens, you know that they're beginning to change course on this. Now, I guarantee you that somewhere in a desk drawer in Washington, DC -- someplace in an FCC bureaucrat's office or someplace -- the government machinery will be in place to take away as many political freedoms as they can manage on the left. They already have it in place, just like the health care bill, Obamacare, was already written years ago. It was in a desk drawer waiting for the moment that they could begin to implement it.
Do you hear Rush? It's a plot. The Democrats had it all planned. The machine is getting ready to take your freedoms. Your guns, even. Will no one stand up and stop the machine?
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Joe(Yahsure, vat ve say don't make nobody do nuthin', youbetcha)Nation
