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The blogs this morning are talking about a poll being taken by an Australian radio station, ABC News Radio that asks the question “Is America’s right-wing political ‘hate speak’ responsible for the Arizona massacre?” As this is being written the worldwide response was 72.5% YES and 27.5% NO. First of all, Australia has a current culture of bowing to liberal causes so this poll which was started there most probably reflects the local sentiment that voted earlier than everyone else. As the Sun rises and daylight begins to awaken the rest of the world, the poll results reflect the opinions of those countries Westward from the land down under. First up would be Asia, then China, the Indian sub-continent, the Islamic Middle East, then Europe and Africa. Not the best sampling of favorable pro-American sentiments to expect an impartial poll of opinions.
The mainstream liberal sentiment over the shooting of Arizona Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by a pro-Nazi, Left-wing lunatic named Jared Lee Loughner being expressed by our own news media can be summed up perfectly by the following list of headlines found on the web site SheikYerMami.com
After the shooting democrats immediately plotted to blame the tea party for the shootings by the young leftist crackpot. No wonder, because only they have the cure for the disease they caused: Democrats Will Introduce Legislation Outlawing Inflammatory Language (Gateway)
Vile, pernicious, obsessed and deranged: Sheriff Dipshit yammers on about “vitriol”, proves that HE is a mental case:
the left is so full of shiite they need to prove they’re made of it:
Not that facts will change this wave of hate on the Left. And not that it matters that exactly 2 months earlier they themselves called for a revolution and a violent overthrow of the government.
The Left Call Blood Libel Against Palin (eye on the world)
The Blaze:
WatchMegyn Kelly Confronts AZ Sheriff Over ‘Political Spin’ on Shooting Media
“Is it the place of a sheriff to stir the pot on either side of the political aisle?” (pissweak. She could have destroyed him, she chose not to….) Read More »
NewsBusters:
To put things into perspective, the web site for the Washington Examiner ran this story yesterday in their Beltway Confidential column that compared the shooting in Arizona to the massacre in Fort Hood, Texas by a Muslim extremist. How interesting it is to hear the unified call by news media and government officials to resist jumping to conclusions when the accused killer is known to be a Muslim extremist. The preliminary evidence in the Arizona shooting paints a picture of a left-wing, anti-social nut-job but that is being overshadowed by last year's political campaign by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin's effort to vote out certain Democrats who voted for the Obama socialized medicine bill.
Journalists urged caution after Ft. Hood, now race to blame Palin after Arizona shootings
By: Byron York 01/09/11 8:58 AM
Chief Political Correspondent
On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.
Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.
"The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.
"We cannot jump to conclusions," said CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. "We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever."
"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."
The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, "I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts." In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president's remarks.
"We can't jump to conclusions," Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a "transparent" investigation into the shootings "so the American people don't jump to conclusions." And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN's John Roberts was quick to intervene. "Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions," Roberts said to Hoekstra. "By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?"
Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.
After reporting that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had condemned what Dupnik called "the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," CNN's Wolf Blitzer turned to congressional reporter Jessica Yellin for analysis. The sheriff "singled out some of the political rhetoric, as you point out, in creating the environment that allowed this kind of instance to happen," Yellin told Blitzer. "Even though, as you point out, this suspect is not cooperating with investigators, so we don't know the motive. President Obama also delivered that message, saying it's partly the political rhetoric that led to this. So that's why we want to bring up one of the themes that's burning up the social media right now. On Twitter and Facebook, there is a lot of talk, in particular, about Sarah Palin. As you might recall, back in March of last year, when the health care vote was coming to the floor of the House and this was all heating up, Palin tweeted out a message on Twitter saying 'common sense conservatives, don't retreat -- instead reload.' And she referred folks to her Facebook page. On that Facebook page was a list of Democratic members she was putting in crosshairs, and Gabrielle Giffords was one of those in the crosshairs."
Yellin noted that Palin had "posted a statement on Facebook saying that 'my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other victims of today's tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families and for peace and justice.'" Yellin continued: "And I should point out that Republican leaders in Washington have said that this is not a partisan issue, this is about violence, as have some tea party groups. But clearly this is a moment to talk about our political rhetoric."
"It certainly is," Blitzer agreed. "But the question is, is there any evidence that the suspected shooter in this particular case was a Sarah Palin fan, read Sarah Palin's website, was a member on Facebook, watched her tweets, or anything like that?"
"None at all," Yellin responded. "And there is no evidence that this was even inspired by rage over health care, broadly. So there is no overt connection between Sarah Palin, health care, and the [shootings]."
Indeed, there is no "overt" or any other sort of connection between Loughner and Palin. If such evidence came to light, it would certainly be news. But without that evidence, and after a brief caveat, the CNN group went back to discussing the theory that Loughner acted out of rage inspired by Palin and other Republicans. Conclusions were jumped to all around.
And it wasn't just CNN. Other media outlets were also filled with speculation about the attack and pronouncements on the state of American political rhetoric. What a markedly different situation from 15 months earlier when, in the face of actual evidence that Maj. Hasan was inspired by Islamist convictions, many media commentators sought to be voices of caution. Where was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?
That is a really good question: "Where WAS that caution after the shootings in Arizona?" Is this tragic event being manipulated into a larger campaign to stifle the voices of the conservative movement by characterizing all of our opinions as "hate speech"? The recent FCC ruling made by three Democrats to give the government control of the Internet seems to be just the beginning.
As FOX News commented this morning in a story on the cheap shots coming from left-wing news media that has tried to blame conservatives for the Arizona shooting, while several liberals pointed out the Sarah Palin ad last year that had cross-hairs over some Democrat Congressional Districts, no one mentioned that Democrats have done the same thing:
Arizona Massacre Prompts Political 'Cheap Shots'
By James Rosen
Published January 10, 2011 FoxNews.com
Krugman, in his blog post on the Times website, went on to mention Giffords' presence last year on Palin's "infamous crosshairs list." This was a map, disseminated by Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, denoting the districts of 20 vulnerable House Democrats with images of crosshairs overlaid on each. The map was accompanied by a caption saying: IT'S TIME TO TAKE A STAND. Giffords herself, during her narrow campaign victory over a Tea Party-backed opponent last year, had complained about this choice of imagery, telling MSNBC: "The way that (Palin) has it depicted, the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district ...When people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action."
Unnoted by Giffords then, or Krugman now, is the routine use of similar language and imagery by both parties in a culture obsessed with "battleground" states. Indeed, a nearly identical map, included in a Democratic Leadership Committee publication in 2004, featured nine bullseyes over regions where Republican candidates were considered vulnerable that year, and was accompanied by a caption reading: TARGETING STRATEGY. A smaller caption, beneath the bullseyes, read: BEHIND ENEMY LINES. The map illustrated an article on campaign strategy by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Somebody ought to update Roget's Thesaurus to include Hypocrite as being synonymous with Liberal.
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