Politicizing any tragic event for the sake of political posturing is despicable. And that’s exactly what the left did on Saturday before the bodies of the victims of Lee Loughner’s massacre were even cold. It’s deplorable to point fingers and play the partisan game, but the right has to respond to the left’s rhetoric. Citing blogs and tweets to point out hypocrisy of the left’s behavior concerning an incident of such horrible violence makes me sick to my stomach. But if we don’t engage the left, even at their most disgusting states, they will dominate the narrative. If the left had their way, they would have you believe that the responsibility for Saturday’s events rested solely on the shoulders of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart. It’s disgusting, despicable, insensitive to the victims and provably false. But that’s how the left wants this event to go down in the history books and those of us on the right have to engage.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in my news feed on Twitter that morning. I assumed it would be updates and conflicting reports of the chaotic events (which there was plenty of that). But within 30 minutes of the story catching fire, my timeline was filled with radical leftist ranting against the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Andrew Breitbart.
Eric Boehlert first re-tweeted someone blaming Palin for the shooting. I don’t necessarily equate re-tweets as an endorsement so I let that one slide past without comment. I just couldn’t believe that even someone as ridiculous as Eric Boehlert would actually ascribe blame and political posturing before any facts were known about the incident. Minutes later Bohlert linked to Andrew Breitbart’s breitbart.tv livestream of the CNN coverage citing a commenter as “proof” of the approval of violence from the right. Disgusting.
It seems that MMFA has taken quite a turn from the previous shooter situation. Look at how Media Matters treated the Discovery Channel incident:
When it’s apparent that the insane person with the gun might lean toward the extreme left, Media Matters takes the road of “this isn’t a time to score political points.”
Before we even know the facts or political leanings of this murderer, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert appears to jump in head first in an effort to … score political points.
Max Blumenthal tweeted that he would be going on Al Jezeera-English to talk about the incident. I suppose the list of news agencies that consider Max Blumenthal a credible source for commentary of anything would be rather short, but I couldn’t imagine why he would go on Al Jazeera-English to discuss this. What possible aspect of this story would Max Blumenthal be able to discuss with any credibility? Blumenthal later tweeted and re-tweeted what are surely going to be his talking points for his Sunday appearance.
Max Blumenthal could hardly be considered a credible source when it comes to profiling a person. Remember when he called James O’Keefe a racist? Later Blumenthal denied ever calling O’Keefe a racist. After being confronted by his comments at CPAC, Bluemthal was forced to retract his statement and then ran out of the Marriot hotel with his tail between his legs. Nice get, Al Jezeera!
Perhaps the greatest offender in the day’s events was Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. Markos went all in blaming Palin and Breitbart for the incident (after that he spent 3 hours in silence while scrubbing his site). His theme was that the violent rhetoric that Palin and Breitbart supposedly support caused their “chickens to come home to roost”. He is so sure that Palin’s infamous cross hairs map was a major contributor to the shooting.
Keep in mind, this is within minutes of reports of the shooting.
Markos is the author of the book American Taliban which literally equates conservatives to terrorists.
As Markos continued to spew his rhetoric some on the right began to respond. Many started digging around on Daily Kos and they found some interesting things. For instance, a post by a “diarist” titled My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!
The “diarist” later took down the post. Markos had this to say about the matter:
It’s interesting that Markos will afford the “diarist” the benefit of the doubt that no actual harm was implied by his rhetoric but that Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map is one of “violent” inference.
His hypocrisy keeps going:
Markos didn’t seem to have a problem when his “diarist” took down his post.
Numerous reports came through that Daily Kos took down their own post putting a bullseye on Representative Giffords! Kos later re-activated the link. The graphic below is a screen cap of the bullseye post. Graphics of the bullseye and Representative Giffords were added by Hillbuzz.
So it’s OK for Daily Kos and a random “diarist” to scrub their sites of any violent rhetoric against Congresswoman Giffords, but not OK for Sarah Palin. Riiiight.
To put the crosshairs/bulls eye rhetoric to rest, the DLC has used bulls eye and crosshairs themselves to mark elections of interest. I didn’t see anyone today, or ever, going after them for “inciting violence.”
There are numerous other examples of the left going insane on Saturday, again, within minutes of the report of the shooting. It’s a disgusting political climate but conservatives have to engage these claims. We can’t pretend that these attacks don’t exist. They won’t go away, they will become history. The best that we can all do now is pray for the victims of this tragic massacre, monitor our legal system to insure this murderer is tried to the full extent of the law, and chronicle what events actually DID happen and what led to it so that we can accurately prevent it from happening again.