The mean spirited vitriol of the left

Palin has nothing to apologize for. T. Belman

By Melanie Phillips, The Spectator

I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief at the attempt to blame the Tea-Partiers and ‘the right’ for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others in Arizona by a mentally disturbed individual, Jared Lee Loughner. Even more outrageously, America’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has effectively equated this mentally deranged loner with the Islamists who committed the 9/11 atrocities:

In a television broadcast filmed before students in Abu Dhabi, Mrs Clinton was asked why the 9/11 terror attacks, the work of a handful of men, had been allowed to colour American views of a whole people. ‘We have extremists in our country,’ she said. ‘A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman congress member was just shot by extremists in our country. We have the same kinds of problems, so rather than standing off of each other we should work to try and prevent the extremists wherever they are from being able to commit violence.’

The moral corruption of Mrs Clinton’s equation is not only obscene – it actively endangers America and the free world. Can it really be the case that an American Secretary of State believes that an attack upon her country that murdered thousands of people and which chalked up another marker in the holy war against the west being waged from within the Arab and Muslim world — in the defence against which America is sending its young men to die on the battlefield — has the same significance as one deranged gunman running amok? But then, who can forget Mrs Clinton’s dark imprecations, in her earlier incarnation as the President’s wife, against the

vast right-wing conspiracy

which was how she characterised opponents of the Democratic party?

It would seem that it is not just this gunman who has become wholly detached from reality but – as I have now observed many times over — a great swathe of the western intelligentsia and political class.

As soon as the bloodbath in Arizona took place, the liberal intelligentsia – led by the intellectually corrupt New York Times — leapt to blame Sarah Palin and the ‘extreme right’ for creating a climate of murderous hysteria towards Democrats such as Gabrielle Giffords. The atrocity provided the opportunity they had been waiting for to smash the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News — by accusing them all of inciting murder.

No matter that there was not a shred of evidence to link Loughner’s behaviour with any of these organisations. In the UK, the Independent pronounced that the Arizona attack represented the

fruits of extremism

by the American ‘right’. This hysteria extended beyond the left. The Telegraph declared:

Inflammatory rhetoric draws real blood;

And the Times decided that the shootings were caused by

a mean spirit

on the ‘extreme right’ — by which it appeared to mean Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

A moment’s scrutiny of the facts that are known so far suggests that blaming the ‘right’ for this rampage is as absurd as it is malicious. For a start, the political views of Gabrielle Giffords, let alone the gunman, do not fit the categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’. Ms Giffords, for example, supports the gun law which enabled her assailant — while clearly of unsound mind — to purchase a firearm to shoot her through the brain; she also supports immigration laws considered by the left to be ’racist’.

For his part, the gunman’s views are all over the place. His rambling obsessions included those staples of right-wing discourse, government and the gold standard. But he was also described by his classmates as

left wing and quite liberal,

a reader of the Communist Manifesto who had even burned the American flag.

Yet he also rambled about mind control, creating a new currency and ‘controlling English grammar’. What is overwhelmingly clear, therefore, is that this was not the act of a political malcontent but a person suffering from serious mental illness, which had alarmed teachers and classmates at his college.

Furthermore, we are also told that he was a cannabis user. This is not an insignificant detail. Cannabis, as some of us have been saying over and over again, is known to promote in some people uncontrolled aggression, and has been linked in a number of studies to violent attacks. Loughner’s behaviour suggests a psychotic illness; and cannabis is known to trigger psychotic episodes and schizophrenia. But it is not ‘the right’ which is doing everything it can to legalise cannabis and make it even more available to even more people, with the result that even more will succumb to psychotic mental illness. It is the left.

It is also quite monstrous hypocrisy to blame ‘the right’ for creating a climate of aggression. Yes, there is a deeply unpleasant and hysterical strand of extremism on that side of politics, and it should certainly be condemned. Yes, Sarah Palin’s ‘crosshairs’ graphic was stupid and irresponsible.

But for heaven’s sake, it is on the left that we hear, day in, day out — even in the mainstream media — the relentless demonisation of their opponents as ‘racist’, ‘Nazi’, extreme right’ ‘mad’, ‘nutjobs’; the calls to kill ‘global warming deniers’ who are ‘destroying the planet’; the constant incitement to hatred of President Bush and the neocons as ‘Bushitler’ and ‘war criminals’.

They even turn on their own side when faced with any evidence of independent thought. Here’s ‘BoyBlue’ on the Daily Kos website, two days before the Arizona shootings, stating that because Ms Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi, Ms Giffords

… is now dead to me!

a post that has now been removed. And here’s the Daily Kos again targeting Gabrielle Giffords for ‘selling out the constitution’ with…wait for it… yes, a bulls’ eye:

The Daily Kos put a bulls-eye on the back of Congresswoman Giffords and other Blue Dog democrats in a story on June 25, 2008 asking, ‘Who [sic] to primary?  Well, I’d argue that we can narrow the target list by looking at those Democrats who sold out the Constitution last week.  I’ve bolded members of the Blue Dogs for added emphasis.’  Congresswoman Giffords’ name was among those bolded.  The author goes on to state that ‘Not all of these people will get or even deserve primaries, but this vote certainly puts a bulls eye on their district.’

At least, that’s in the version that American Thinker quoted from earlier today. But on the Daily Kos site itself, the bulls’ eye reference now appears to have, uh, vanished too.

The Huffington Post has apparently allowed a poster to state repeatedly that top energy company executives should be assassinated – and also that Tea Partiers should be murdered because of the Arizona shootings.

And here’s also a sample of language that President Obama himself has used:

* Obama on ACORN supporters: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”
* Obama to supporters: “Hit Back…… Twice As Hard”
* Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun.”…
* Obama to voters: Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat”

Then, of course, there’s the left’s murderous incitement against Israel and its defenders, a tsunami of bigotry and deranged, obsessional hatred that results in waves of attacks on Jews and the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Not to mention the torrent of real Nazi-style, genocidal hatred of Jews and Israel and incitement to mass murder pouring out of the Arab and Muslim world week in, week out – and to which the left not only turns a blind eye but which it actually endorses, claiming to be ‘all Hezbollah now’ and the murderous like.

The fact is that, rather than mounting a principled opposition to the fascist and racist ‘right’as they so noisily boast, the left’s hatred of Israel, the ‘Zionist/neo-con/Jerusalem/Washington conspiracy’ and the capitalist/industrialist complex means their discourse is often indistinguishable from that employed by neo-Nazis and white supremacists. For the Independent, of all papers, piously to denounce the climate of hatred when a glance at its own website reveals a tidal wave of hatred and bigotry amongst its readers unleashed by the propaganda it pumps out really takes the mouldy biscuit.

If words have consequences, as we are now being so sanctimoniously and hypocritically told, what about the effect that the left’s vitriol against Israel has had upon the hysterical masses of the Arab and Muslim world? And yet the left have erupted in a frenzy to blame one psychotic gunman upon the ‘vitriol’ of their political opponents – against whom, of course, they are thus once again demonstrating their own obsessional and unbalanced hatred. For those who are demonising Sarah Palin for having Gabrielle Giffords’s ‘blood on her hands’ are running the risk of ending up with Sarah Palin’s blood on their hands.

But then, insight and self-knowledge are no more the defining characteristics of the left than they are of Jared Lee Loughner. The fact is that a terrible and tragic atrocity by a mentally disturbed individual has been seized upon and exploited — coldly, cynically and maliciously — for the purposes of crude political propaganda. Even by their own degraded standards, the liberal intelligentsia have now managed to plumb more vicious depths of narcissistic self-delusion than ever before.