Does the American left collectively share responsibility for the Islamic terrorist shooting in San Bernardino? The Scrapbook doesn’t believe in such a sweeping judgment, but if one were consistently to apply the left’s own logic, they end up indicting themselves.
Recall that in the days leading up to the San Bernardino attack, the left was working overtime to blame the allegedly irresponsible rhetoric of Republicans and pro-life activists for the fact that an obviously mentally disturbed man killed three people at an abortion clinic. The Week‘s Damon Linker penned a column headlined “The deeply irresponsible rhetoric of the pro-life movement” that was typical of the genre. Much of the condemnation was disingenuous, but leave that aside.
Coming on the heels of all this chin-stroking designed to shame and silence pro-life activists and politicians, where is the similar media soul-searching about the folly of liberal political correctness in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting? After all, it was reported by a local CBS affiliate that a man working near the terrorists’ residence “said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.” And who but the American left has been constantly beating the drums against racial profiling? (Bloomberg, it’s worth noting, speculated on one hypothetical motive even as the attack was ongoing, pointing out that it took place a few miles from a Planned Parenthood clinic.) Examples of this media double standard abound, and if we didn’t know better, we’d say the selective highlighting of irresponsible political rhetoric precisely coincides with the pieties and priorities of the American left.
And speaking of pieties, when it became obvious that the facts behind the San Bernardino terrorist attack weren’t going to fit any preferred media narrative, the predominant response from liberals to the shooting was, astonishingly, to start attacking politicians for offering “thoughts and prayers” for the victims—instead of passing gun control laws. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy and Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz openly embraced this meme du jour. The New York Daily News‘s front page the day after was a series of tweets from GOP politicians offering thoughts and prayers for the victims, with the headline “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.” On Twitter, writer Daniel Foster observed that the outrage over prayer was a “zeitgeisty thing whose time had come. Like Leibniz and Newton both inventing calculus, except a thousand progs and stupid.”
The irony, of course, is that this silly line of attack amounted to a kind of prayer to the secular god of government. Liberals offer no demonstrable solution to such attacks even as they dogmatically insist that imaginary new laws can prevent gun deaths. And they completely ignore the fact that gun deaths have fallen by half over the past 20 years, even as gun laws have become somewhat less restrictive.
However, if insulting the political and cultural opposition was the goal, mission accomplished. Never mind that this made a mockery of the victims and first responders who prayed at the scene in San Bernardino.
Even President Obama, not known for shying away from alienating and smug gun-control rhetoric, sensed the overreaching and made a point of specifically offering his “thoughts and prayers” the day after the shooting, throwing his ideological comrades under the bus. While concern for the victims of San Bernardino remains paramount, The Scrapbook’s thoughts and prayers also go out to those offended by thoughts and prayers.
