Liberals' Violence Warning Comes a Year Late
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently attracted major attention when he dramatically warned, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi had done earlier, that malicious words can lead to life-threatening violence. Yet both were silent about the wave of political violence that reached its peak a year ago this month in a series of crimes that were not deemed especially newsworthy, because they were committed by supporters of presidential candidate Barack Obama.
How many of us remember the McCain-Palin campaign bus coming under gunfire in New Mexico last October? Through sheer luck, neither McCain, Palin, nor anyone else was harmed by the bullet that shattered a window of the McCain/Palin Straight Talk Express. (For anyone who might argue that this was an insignificant crime, it's worth noting that the recent shooting of a moving bus with a BB or pellet-not an actual bullet-is being treated as attempted murder.)
Who remembers that the home of a Republican headquarters manager in central Florida was shot up that same week? Or the Molotov cocktail throwing, the cutting of McCain supporters' cars' brake lines, and other acts of vicious vandalism?
The recent beating of an African-American conservative by union thugs echoed violent incidents from 2008, when a middle-aged woman on a Manhattan street was beaten in the face with the stick from her McCain campaign sign, and pro-McCain women in Orlando were shoved and threatened, a continuation of the sexism and intimidation endured by Clinton supporters earlier in the year. Feminists remained silent, as did the media, and did not seem to mind when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was hanged in effigy in California.
*snip*
While incitement and violence from right and left are equally evil, the latter has been rewarded with mainstream acceptance, an apparent result of two years of the media shrugging off Obama's extremist ties. One revealing recent example was the Baltimore Book Festival's promotion of terrorist Bill Ayers and genocide-espousing poet Amiri Baraka as two of their biggest celebrity authors, along with writers including astronaut Buzz Aldrin and actress Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady), in a series of full-page newspaper ads.
MOREWonder why Ooooobama complains about Fox News, but not the rest of the MSM.
