Daniel Greenfield: The Media’s Bloody Circus

"You can blame Shakespeare for the shooting of Judge Roll"
*
A week has passed, Daniel Greenfield observes, in which the media turned an ugly tragedy into an even uglier circus:

Probably the most outrageous portion of the media’s hypocrisy came in their condemnations of Sarah Palin’s speech. “How dare she make the story about her?” they asked, when they had been the ones who had dragged her name into the story on no grounds at all. Except a campaign map with bullseye targets of politicians targeted for election defeats.

The absurdity of it is apparent. The constant mentions of the bullseye campaign map went without answering the simple question, did Loughner ever even see the map? And if he didn’t, then what possible relevance does the map have?

For example Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Which means you can blame Shakespeare for the shooting of Judge Roll who did have a law degree. But unless you can show that Loughner had even read Henry VI, then it’s a non-starter.

The left has made the argument that the right “created a climate of violence”, which gives Loughner a ready made alibi and avoids having to actually prove that there is any connection between Palin, the Tea Party and Loughner.

[...]

So Palin is guilty of playing a role in Loughner’s shootings, regardless of how he felt about her, regardless of whether he ever saw her bullseye campaign map, regardless of absolutely anything.

The climate argument says that Sarah Palin poisoned the climate so badly that whoever kills a liberal for any reason, even if the killer is on the far left, was clearly influenced by her. If Squeaky Frome breaks out of her cell tomorrow and tries to shoot up congress again—we can still blame Sarah Palin.

But the liberals promoting the climate argument haven’t thought about that one too carefully. If we can blame any crime on anyone who creates a culture of violence, while skipping that middle part 2 where we show a clear connection between the two, then the party is on.

[...]

And who knows how many people died because Obama said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

There’s your gun-based imagery right there. No, we don’t have to prove that Obama’s words actually got anyone killed. Let’s just pick a shooting and blame it on him. It doesn’t matter if the shooter was one of his supporters. It doesn’t matter if the shooter heard of him. It doesn’t matter if the shooter thought that a dog was talking to him. THE CLIMATE WAS POISONED BY GUN BASED IMAGERY AND VIOLENT RHETORIC.

Only two types of people will fall for this. The very easily frightened who want a nanny state to smooth over any unpleasantness and the completely irrational who are so filled with hate that they stopped making sense around the Nixon Administration.

But polls show that most Americans have not fallen for it, and so the media pulled back a little on their non-stop propaganda tour...

[More]

- JP