June 12th 2009
Krugman: No Difference Between Us And Von Brunn
Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
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hat’s the lead of Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today - a column you just knew was coming. You can imagine the gleeful smirk on his face as his fingers smashed away at his keyboard. But Krugman’s just turning over his liberal outrage engine; the howling rpms build from there, as he rushes to build the “conservative political establishment” as junior Von Brunns:
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Interestingly, Krugman’s column is almost identially mirrored by Alex Kingsbury in U.S. News:
A month before a suspected white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington and opened fire, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic right-wing extremism was the most pressing domestic terrorist threat that the country faced.
Conservatives were outraged that the DHS analysts had singled out antiabortion and antitax radicals for scrutiny. But the report was part of a series that DHS compiles on domestic dangers from all sides of the political spectrum, an area that’s taken a back seat to overseas threats.
A series of recent incidents shows the prescience of those reports and illustrates the worrying reality that terrorism often comes from inside the homeland.
And that’s hardly the end of it. Just check out the piling on by the Left at Memeorandum.
While Kingsbury mentions the assassination of Pvt. William Long, an act of terror most mainly marginalized media managed to report without mentioning the word “Islam,” Krugman fails to mention Long at all. To his credit, Kingsbury approached the subject pretty fairly and didn’t go on to condemn mainstream Republicans, as Krugman did. I thought this excerpt from Kingsbury’s piece was particularly even-handed:
In another recent high-profile incident, George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed legal abortions, was shot and killed last Sunday as he stood in the aisle of his church. Scott Roeder, the man charged in Tiller’s murder, echoes the DHS report on right-wing extremism. Believed to have been a member of an antigovernment militia in Montana during the mid-1990s, Roeder had a history of railing against taxes and abortion, according to news reports. “We can see from these incidents that the U.S. is not immune from these types of attacks and that a lone gunman or cell can kill just as effectively,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But it also shows that those operating outside an organized terrorist network lack the training and tradecraft to make their attacks either sustained or a systemic threat.” After the killing, the U.S. Marshals Service was instructed to increase security at the country’s abortion clinics.
There was no call to reinforce security at military recruiting stations, however, after Abdulhakim Muhammad allegedly shot two soldiers smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of an Army center in Arkansas. Pvt. William Long was killed and another soldier was wounded. Muhammad was reportedly angry over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
Kingsbury should have reported that Muhammed has said his act was jihad, and he (Muhammed) should not be deemed guilty because Islam requires such actions. Still, he’s no Krugman. Here’s the NYT columnist’s evidence that we are dangerous:
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
Where was Krugman for the last eight years? Where was his concern when the Left called Bush a baby killer? When they launched conspiracy theories from Haliburton being behind the war in Iraq to Bush being behind 9/11 - the same whacked out theory that was part of Von Brunn’s lunacy? Did he condemn the film about Bush being assassinated?
No. When the Left attacks the Right, it’s all good, justified and exactly the sort of thing Jefferson was thinking about when he wrote that a little revolution is good and necessary from time to time. Let Code Pink harrass military recruiters and block the entrance to recruiting stations, but never, never, allow abortion protesters to be anywhere near an abortion clinic. This is logic, leftist style.
Krugman has particular villification for Glenn Beck, but probably has never written a critical word of Keith Olbermann. He says Rush Limbaugh has “joined hands with the lunatic fringe.” He accuses the R.N.C. of of somehow being unstable because it wants to change the leadership of the nation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he’s a hypocrite. So he can’t stand looking in mirrors. So he trumps up fear where no fear need be. No matter. He’s got a trump card:
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously.
Oh, yeah. We’re all racists and we wouldn’t be so angry if Obama were just white. What a masterful example Krugman has given us of the Left’s ability to use hate speech in order to ignore the issue at hand - whether it was global jihad under Bush, or unconstitutional economic lunacy under Obama.
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Posted in Fox News, Leftism, Media bias, New York Times | 3 Comments » | 
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Comments
June 12th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Hello Mr. Pearce,
I just read your recent post comparing a recent story of mine with a Paul Krugman column. I notice that you made a small error though when you say that my piece doesn’t mention the murder of Pvt. Long.
Not so, as I’m sure you can read for yourself from your own link:
http://www.usnews.com/mobile/articles_mobile/holocaust-museum-shooting-other-recent-attacks-prove-domestic-extremism-a-threat/index.html
If you’ll notice Pvt. Long is mentioned in both the 3rd and 6th paragraphs.
Cheers,
Alex Kingsbury
June 12th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Sorry for the error and thanks for bringing it quickly to my attention. I was clearly suffering from first post of the morning syndrome. On re-reading your article, I found it to be more even-handed than Krugman’s and have edited the post accordingly.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Laer –
They all must have gotten the same memo. See Tim Rutten’s opionion piece in today’s LA Times:
Hatred roils right-wing extremists