As that great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said: It’s deja vu all over again.
When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 it took the mainstream media — and other liberals — about 2 seconds to blame conservative talk radio in general and Rush Limbaugh in particular for what happened. Why? Because conservative talk radio, they said, was too “hot.” It inflamed passions. It was too anti-government. Or as Dan Rather put it: “Even after Oklahoma City, you can turn on your radio in any city and still dial up hate talk; extremist, racist, and violent from the hosts and those who call in.”
Conservatives, in other words, created a dangerous and ultimately deadly atmosphere that either produced or at least emboldened a Timothy McVeigh – and made him think that what he was about to do was the right thing. This is what passes for the wisdom of the elite Left.
Fast forward to today. Now we have the screwball who flew his prop plane into an office building in Austin that housed the IRS. Joe Stack detested the IRS – and many other things – and this was his statement.
So who are the crazies on the Left blaming for this? If you said the Tea Party movement give yourself a gold star.
We get this from the so-called mainstream media:
Time magazine ran an on-line story about the crash – and right there in the middle of the story — in bright red – was a link to another story in Time. About what, you ask? The Tea Party movement, what else?
An editorial in the Washington Post said Stack’s “alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party Movement.”
New York magazine wrote that Stack’s rhetoric “could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.”
And from the hugely popular left-wing website, the Daily Kos we got a post entitled, “Teabagger terrorist attack on IRS building.”
For the record, there is no evidence whatsoever that Joe Stack belonged to any Tea Party organization or ever attended a Tea Party. None.
Now let’s go back a week or so to another act of violence — that shooting at the University of Alabama. A Harvard-educated professor, who failed to get tenure, shot up the place killing three professors. Turns out she was a huge fan of Barack Obama. Question: Would any serious journalist – or anyone else for that matter – make the case that this woman represents Obama’s most passionate supporters?
Yet the Left loves to play connect the dots — when in their fevered imaginations the dots lead from conservatives to violence. And that’s assuming Stack is a conservative and not simply a lunatic.
What we used to call the mainstream media – and I now call the lamestream media – are so riddled with bias that there is no hope for them. Over many years the cancer has spread. The disease is now incurable. Their credibility is on life support.
