The following article will consist in two parts: 1) A detailing of just a few of the profoundly hateful rhetoric that comes out of the left on a routine basis, which clearly refutes the idea that some sort of “climate of hate” is being generated by the right wing; and 2) my argument why “political rhetoric” – which is free speech that should be protected by anyone who values American society – should have nothing to do with acts of violence.
Allow me to state at the outset that, when we look at Jared Loughner, what we find is that he had a grudge against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dating back to 2007. That grudge predates Sarah Palin; it predates the Tea Party movement; it predates the so-called “rightwing rhetoric” against Barack Obama. In fact, Loughner’s hatred of Rep. Giffords actually occurred during the LEFTWING hatred targeting George W. Bush and Republicans. And we find that while Loughner nowhere mentioned Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, ObamaCare, conservatives, or anything “right wing,” he DID repeatedly mention his belief that George Bush was responsible for engineering the 9/11 attacks.
And yet it took Paul Krugman and The New York Slimes 2 hours after the terrible tragedy in Tucson to publish a vile and frankly immoral piece of propaganda demonizing conservatives. Which is to say that this Nobel Prize-winning propagandist of the left started manufacturing facts before the echoes of the gunfire had died down. And this from a man who had himself burned effigies of Republicans at his party celebrating the Democrat victories in 2008; and who had called for Joe Lieberman to be hung by the neck in effigy.
Let’s take a moment and look at the hatred of the left, and realize just how amazingly laughable it is for the left to claim the moral high ground regarding any “climate of hate,” and recognize that they did nothing more than despicably try to seize political advantage from a terrible tragedy:
1) The hatred of conservatives by the left:
■ “I’m waiting for the day when I pick it up, pick up a newspaper or click on the Internet and find out he’s choked to death on his own throat fat or a great big wad of saliva or something, you know, whatever. Go away, Rush, you make me sick!” — Left-wing radio host Mike Malloy on the January 4, 2010 Mike Malloy Show, talking about Rush Limbaugh going to the hospital after suffering chest pains.
■ MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2009 fantasized about the death of Rush Limbaugh: “Somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp”
■ Author/humorist P.J. O’Rourke: “It’s the twilight of the radio loud-mouth, you know? I knew it from the moment the fat guy-”
Host Bill Maher: “You mean Rush Limbaugh and Sean-”
O’Rourke: “-from the moment the fat guy refused to share his drugs….”
Maher: “You mean the OxyContin that he was on?…Why couldn’t he have croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?” — HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, February 8, 2008.
■ MSNBC’s Amy Robach in 2006 mildly wondered if “Death of a President” movie depicting the imagined assassination of President Bush was “poor taste or, as some say, thought-provoking?”
■ On his radio show in 2009, Ed Schultz wished for Dick Cheney’s death: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion, Dick Cheney is, he is an enemy of the country … Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you?”
■ Also on his radio show, in 2010, Schultz shouted: “Dick Cheney’s heart’s a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him!”
■ Then-Air America host Montel Williams in 2009 urged Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to kill herself: “Slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to – or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.”
■ Writing on the Huffington Post in 2007, radio host Charles Karel Bouley mocked: “I hear about Tony Snow and I say to myself, well, stand up every day, lie to the American people at the behest of your dictator-esque boss and well, how could a cancer NOT grow in you? Work for Fox News, spinning the truth in to a billion knots and how can your gut not rot?”
■ “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Host Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time, March 2, 2007, discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed.
■ “Earlier today, a rental truck carried a half a million ballots from Palm Beach to the Florida Supreme Court there in Tallahassee. CNN had live helicopter coverage from the truck making its way up the Florida highway, and for a few brief moments, America held the hope that O.J. Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris.” — Bill Maher on ABC’s Politically Incorrect, November 30, 2000.
■ Host Tina Gulland: “I don’t think I have any Jesse Helms defenders here. Nina?”
NPR’s Nina Totenberg: “Not me. I think he ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” — Exchange on the July 8, 1995 Inside Washington, after Helms said the government spends too much on AIDS.
■ “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease….He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” — USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.
For more examples and additional information, see MRC’s recent report: “While Media Indict Conservative Speech, Left’s Lunacy Is Ignored”
See also Michelle Malkin’s documentation, “The Progressive Climate of Hate: an Illustrated Primer 2000-2010.”
I have further documented numerous concrete acts of violence by the left in two articles here and here which I wrote during the debates that occurred last year when Democrats falsely demonized the right.
Furthermore, you should do a review of history. Go back to the 1960s and consider movements and organizations such as the Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the anti-war movement, the radical environmentalist movement, and the violence that has been all-too typical of the left.
I believe by now I’ve made my point.
Before moving on, allow me to demonstrate how top Democrats have deliberately manufactured blame and guilt at conservatives for crimes that liberals and Democrats in fact committed.
First, there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reflecting on how his Uncle Jack (JFK) was essentially killed by right wing conservative hatred as a device to “me to” the liberal movement to demonize conservatives as being responsible for the Tuscon, Arizona shooting by a deranged psychopath. There was only one problem: JFK was murdered by a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald, who somehow is never mentioned a single time in Kennedy Jr.’s fabricated account.
The second episode was Nancy Pelosi, speaking out against the Tea Party movement, reflecting on the murder of Harvy Milk in her district of San Francisco:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Pelosi said, choking up and with tears forming in her eyes. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and … I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”
What’s wrong with Pelosi’s words and tears? Well, in demagoguing conservatives for their climate of violence-generating hate, she nowhere reflects upon the fact that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered by a Democrat who was angry because his fellow Democrats had not reappointed him to his government job. And her equating these murders with right wing violence is not just absurd, but evil.
Both of these accounts are readily historically verifiable. The Democrats in question literally fabricate history in order to blame the party and ideology that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with these murders. What we see are people who are clearly close enough to the events in question to know that what they are saying is not true. They are either liars without shame, or they have literally so committed themselves to false ideology that they have used every possible device of rationalization to believe obvious lies. You can take your pick.
So you take an event like the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (along with the murder of conservative Republican-appointed federal judge John Roll, btw), and demonize conservatives for it, and it is merely one more documented case of obvious demonization that merely serves to demonstrates that if you want to see hate, just look at liberals.
And, yes, if deranged monster Jared Loughner was anything, he was a liberal. One thing is certain; he certainly was not a conservative, and he certainly was not influenced by any “rightwing climate of hate.”
Clearly, I did not attempt to prove that conservatives have not said anything hateful. First of all it would be impossible to prove a negative; and second whether conservatives have said hateful things about liberals really isn’t the point here. The point is that when Democrats denounce the right for “hate,” they merely demonstrate that they are hypocrites without any shame whatsoever.
This baseless and hateful charge about rightwing hate being responsible for the Tucson shooting that was recently repeated by dozens of Democrat elected officials, hundreds of mainstream media journalists, and thousands upon thousands of liberal bloggers, literally becomes a tacit acknowledgment that it is in fact the left that practices hate.
Tomorrow: Part 2, on how free speech political rhetoric should be and is unrelated to acts of violence: “On The So-Called Link Between Political Rhetoric And Violence.”
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