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.

T

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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April 14th 2009

Liberal Fascism Run Amok

I

was in LA all day … well, driving to and from, and in LA, so I got an earful of talk radio reports on the DHS “right-wing extremism” report with no keyboard at the ready, so here I find myself trying to figure out how to write about something that already generates nearly 20,000 hits on Google’s blog search.

That’s part of it: Those 20,000 blog hits mean this report won’t sink into a sea of media inattention, as would have happened a few years back, and that’s very good, indeed.

Anyone who didn’t see this coming doesn’t understand “progressive” thought, because the movement, to which our president subscribes, is all about repressing and vilifying those who don’t align with the carefully defined groupthink.  We saw enough of it during the Bush years, but back then their charges and actions couldn’t gain real traction since they were out of power.  But now that Congress and the White House are progressive, they have all the traction they need.

You’ve read it elsewhere, but allow a quick venting:  Veterans who fought for America are now enemies of America who need to be watched?!  Law enforcement also better watch people who reject federal authority?!  How much federal authority, precisely, needs to be rejected?  Just excessive new federal authority, or do we get busted for not currying to good ol’ FDR-era overstepping?  The report’s not clear, so we’re not in the clear. Opposing unabated abortion or immigration might be a sign of right-wing radicalism?!  Sorry, Bub, but last time I checked, I wasn’t plotting the radical fall of our country even though I seem to fit the profile.

I have a confession to make.  That’s my car there, with the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag on the back.  Just arrest me and throw away the key.  I’m obviously not a patriot.

Well, enough ranting.  Here’s the thing:  We cannot allow the authors of this report and those who delegated it and signed off on it to slink about in protective anonymity.  We need to know if the perpetrators of this Obamination are direct Obama appointees, and if so, what else they are working on.  We need to know if the report was prioritized over reports on more significant threats, like, you know, jihadists or maybe that radical legalize pot bunch … if they could ever get their act together, they could be really dangerous.  (But you could stop them with Twinkies and Doritos.)

The GOP can’t be afraid of this issue; they must push for release of documents and identification of the perps, because Lord knows, the NY Times, which was so intent to debilitate our foreign surveillance programs and out Scooter Libby, won’t.

Hot Air offers up a couple names for this phenomenon of expansive liberal fascism:  fauxrage and Obamateurisms.  I don’t think so.  My rage isn’t faux, any less than their rage at Bush was faux, and this isn’t amateur; it’s just the letting loose of the progressive hounds.

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With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.

For all 'Media Bias 2008' – Click Here