For you lefty "Obama enablers"...

[Uncle Bill]

...this 'blame game' you continue to play, while you rail against any of the conservative talkers, finding constant blame for all the ills of the nation, while your 'side' spews all the hatred and ignorance any deranged unstable loser needs to justify whatever they might concoct as their 'going out' tribute.

Even on this BB there is no lack of rants by you finger-pointers at the right. But you are so blinded by your white guilt, you can't see the forrest for the trees. May you forever rot in your liberal/socialistic views that will be the death of a once great nation.

UB



Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Wall Street Journal about the media/left’s rush to judgment of Sarah Palin and the tea party movement after the shootings in Tucson:

American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. “Where,” asked Mr. York, “was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?”

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

So as the usual talking heads begin their “have you no decency?” routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo (“proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do”), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on “rhetoric” and a “climate of hate” to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

Democrats are desperate these days, no doubt. They took a drubbing in the midterm elections, President Obama remains an unpopular President, approval of and support for Obamacare has all the buoyancy of a lead balloon and Democrat party identification is at record lows.
But that doesn’t excuse the attempts by the left to leverage the Tucson shooting into Barack Obama’s “Oklahoma City moment.”

[Uncle Bill]

Here's another article that makes more sense than some local Tuscon sheriff, who admits he is speculating without a modicum of evidence. He is, however, being praised by the MSP as a guru of law enforcement with incredible insight of the 'whys and wherefores' of a tragedy like this happening.

In my opinion, this sheriff of Pima county is in the process of covering his rear for shortcomings by his office in not watching this mentally disturbed lunitic, and what he might be capable of doing.

UB


Blaming the Right for the Giffords Attack Is Pure McCarthyism


Monday, 10 Jan 2011 01:40 PM



By George Will
It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate."

Demystification of the world opened the way for real science, including the social sciences. And for a modern characteristic. And for charlatans.

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society, and people, can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Instead, imagine a continuum from the rampages at Columbine and Virginia Tech — the results of individuals' insanities — to the assassinations of Lincoln and the Kennedy brothers, which were clearly connected to the politics of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan, respectively. The two other presidential assassinations also had political colorations.

On July 2, 1881, after four months in office, President James Garfield, who had survived the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga, needed a vacation. He was vexed by warring Republican factions — the Stalwarts, who waved the bloody shirt of Civil War memories, and the Half-Breeds, who stressed the emerging issues of industrialization.

Walking to Washington's Union Station to catch a train, Garfield by chance encountered a disappointed job-seeker. Charles Guiteau drew a pistol, fired two shots and shouted "I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president!" On Sept. 19, Garfield died, making Vice President Chester Arthur president. Guiteau was executed, not explained.

On Sept. 6, 1901, President William McKinley, who had survived the battle of Antietam, was shaking hands at a Buffalo exposition when Leon Czolgosz approached, a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, concealing a gun. Czolgosz, an anarchist, fired two shots. Czolgosz ("I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people — the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.") was executed, not explained.

Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of President Kennedy. They explained why the "real" culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a "climate of hate" in conservative Dallas, the "paranoid style" of American (conservative) politics, or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism.

Last year, New York Times columnist Charles Blow explained that "the optics must be irritating" to conservatives: Barack Obama is black, Nancy Pelosi is female, Rep. Barney Frank is gay, Rep. Anthony Weiner (an unimportant Democrat, listed to serve Blow's purposes) is Jewish. "It's enough," Blow said, "to make a good old boy go crazy." The Times, which after the Tucson shooting said "many on the right" are guilty of "demonizing" people and of exploiting "arguments of division," apparently was comfortable with Blow's insinuation that conservatives are misogynistic, homophobic, racist anti-Semites.

On Sunday, the Times explained Tucson: "It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act directly to Republicans or tea party members. But . . . " The "directly" is priceless.

Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained that the tea party movement is "the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity." Rising to the challenge of lowering his reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared tea partyers as racists: They oppose Obama's agenda, Obama is African-American, ergo . . .

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left — devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data — is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.


George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.

[Uncle Bill]

And one more...just to offset the myriad of lefty blog URLs being posted.

UB

Watchdog: Left Exploiting Arizona Rampage to ‘Criminalize’ Conservatives


Monday, 10 Jan 2011 07:54 PM



By David A. Patten and Kathleen Walter


The left’s systematic ridicule of Sarah Palin and other conservatives following the Arizona shooting rampage reflects a deliberate campaign to “ultimately criminalize” conservative thought in America, according to media watchdog L. Brent Bozell.

Bozell’s comments in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview came as 22-year-old Jared Loughner appeared in federal court in Phoenix on Monday on charges of trying to assassinate U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. The shooting spree Saturday at a Safeway supermarket north of Tucson left six dead and 13 wounded. The judge ordered that Loughner be held without bail.

Bozell, founder and president of the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, isn’t alone in his concern about the media coverage of the rampage.


Top radio talker Rush Limbaugh weighed in Monday as well, saying on his show that coverage of the Arizona shooting has been a “lame, purely political attempt by the left to do what they cannot convince the American people to do, and that is support them. It’s embarrassingly, depressingly sick.”

Limbaugh added, “Half the country have been indicted for the actions of a lone, deranged individual.”

Also, CNN “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz denounced the effort to link conservative political rhetoric to the shooting as a “sickening ritual of guilt by association,” adding that “the blame game is already under way.”

Those reactions, however, did not dissuade MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., from doubling down on their attacks.

“He saw a Second Amendment remedy and that's what occurred here and there is no way not to make that connection," Clyburn said Monday, according to The Charleston Post & Courier, a reference to Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's reportedly speaking of a possible “Second Amendment remedy” people could use to address their grievances.

Such efforts to blame the Tucson massacre on conservatives reflect a broader agenda, Bozell said.

“This is a part of a campaign to delegitimize, and ultimately criminalize, conservative thought in this country,” Bozell said. “Note how quickly The New York Times came out with an editorial calling for the Fairness Doctrine as a result of this.

“I mean, anything to pin to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or the tea party . . . anybody on the conservative side, to delegitimize them, that’s what they’re going to do. That’s the tactics of the far left.”

Palin’s antagonists are focusing on a Facebook post nine months ago that listed a number of Democrats the GOP hoped to defeat following the vote on healthcare reform. It used what some say appeared to be a cross hairs symbol to designate vulnerable districts, including Giffords.' Giffords later cautioned in a cable TV appearance that heated political rhetoric such as that could have serious consequences.

But evidence emerged Monday that Loughner’s fixation on Giffords may have predated both the rise of the tea parties and Palin’s emergence on the national political scene in 2008 as Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate.

In an FBI document filed with the court, the agency stated that a safe in Loughner’s residence contained a form letter written to the alleged killer from Giffords’ office, thanking him for attending a “Congress on Your Corner” event in 2007. Loughner reportedly harbored negative feelings toward Giffords for several years.

Loughner’s bizarre rants mention Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but do not mention Palin, Fox News, the tea party movement, or other high-profile conservatives such as host Glenn Beck or Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. He appeared to be an anti-government anarchist, and various sources report that his behavior had grown increasingly erratic in recent months.

From a journalistic perspective, Bozell said, the news media should be graded “close to an F” for its coverage.

“Because they have committed a mortal sin,” he said. “They have raised as fact, or at least [for] serious consideration, things that are simply not true.

“And [they] are in such a rush to implicate conservatives when evil things happen that they were doing that before they had even the basic facts of the story down. Before they even knew the gender of the poor child who was killed, they were already suggesting that Sarah Palin might be to blame.”

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik's remarks implicating talk radio and political rhetoric for the shooting are “completely out of line,” Bozell said, adding, “There’s not one shred of evidence” linking the two.

The media dismisses heated rhetoric when it is used by the left-wing websites and even President Barack Obama, who remarked in the run-up to the November elections that, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“When it’s on the left, it’s just politics,” he said in the interview. “But when it’s on the right, someone needs to be indicted for this.”

The Media Research Center chief said he’s tired of the media's double standard when it comes to tolerance for strident political speech, adding, “Conservatives are grown-ups about this.”

“But somehow this becomes part of the de-legitimization of the conservative movement,” he said. “You’re not allowed to express a thought that is contrary to the leftist mantra.”

The media watchdog said he is quite concerned with the breakdown of civility in political discourse.

“It is happening on the left. It is happening in some quarters on the right,” Bozell said. “But that’s a breakdown of civility, and I wish we would address that.

“But just because I want to address the breakdown of civility, doesn’t mean I’m suggesting someone is evil and wants to harm someone else.

“I’m all in favor of hard-hitting debate, so long as there is a legitimacy to it,” he said. “You can have civility to it. A rule of thumb that I follow on my staff: Anything we write about someone, ‘Would you say it to their face? Could you have a drink with them afterwards?’ If the answer’s yes, then it’s appropriate. If the answers no, then it’s inappropriate.”

Rep. Bob Brady, D-Pa., told CNN on Sunday that he intends to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening to members of Congress.

"You can't put bull's-eyes or cross hairs on a United States congressman or a federal official," Brady said in an obvious reference to the map on Palin’s Facebook page.

There is no indication what support Brady’s bill would find in the Republican-controlled House. But the shooting clearly has touched off an ongoing discussion in Congress over how to enhance security.

[zeus3925]

Frankly, on this issue I would like to see Righty/Lefty, Liberal/Conservative, Republican/Democrat labels get parked at the curb for a while. It is an American tragedy that we all suffer. It is a threat to our republic when any violence occurs against an elected official.

We need to come together in a calm, sane manner to resolve the recent events. Discounting viewpoints by applying labels to to another person's speech solves nothing other than to satisfy the ego of the labeler. It only polarizes and splits the nation. Most people have a range of viewpoints that are discordant with the labels others put on them, anyway.

We are all Americans, brothers and sisters in a sense. We are all passengers aboard this ship of state. Our fate lies in our teamwork as a nation.
.