“Never waste a good crisis,” is a favorite saying of President Obama’s chief strategist, as a crisis can be used to leverage all sorts of projects. Now, we can update this to “don’t waste a good murder,” as the right sort of killing can do the same thing.
Two “good” murders came along in two weeks, one the killing in Kansas of a late-term abortionist, and the other an assault by a racist at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, in which a security guard was killed.
In fact, there were three domestic terrorist murders, but one wasn’t useful, as a serviceman was killed by a Muslim fanatic at a U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Arkansas, and servicemen aren’t on the protected species list, as defined by the media. Abortionists are, so this and the incident at the museum were woven together into a gag meant to silence talk radio, and then all center-right-wing political comment, with the claim that they all were “hate speech.”
At first, James Van Brunn, the geriatric assassin who shot up the museum, fit the media’s view of your classic right-wing fanatic, as he a was an angry white male, an old angry white male, and a veteran (and therefore unstable, as the Department of Homeland Security warned us) though his war ended 60 years earlier. But soon other aspects intruded, that tended to muddy the view.
He was a member of the Mensa society – an intellectual! – and a student of journalism, two things that might commend him to liberals. He commanded a PT boat in the Pacific, and thus shared a war record with a beloved American president, who promoted civil rights legislation, (and was himself shot by a lunatic).
His blog, which quickly went up on the Internet, sounded a lot like a KKK ranting, but it also sounded like Moveon.org. He hated George W. Bush (and his father.) He hated the NeoCons, and the Iraqi invasion. He accused Bush of having misused the attacks of September 11th to install a dictatorship. Liberals said the abortionists’ killer had been motivated by Bill O’Reilly, but van Brunn wrote that he “despise[d] JEWS-NEOCONS,’ AND ‘BILL O’REILLY,” and that “Hillary, Obama, McCain, Ruppert [sic] Murdoch” were all part of a far-reaching pro-Jewish cabal.
Liberals traced his rage to the “Obama Effect,” which involved the first non-white president, with blacks and Jews in positions of power, but this was almost as true of the Bush 43 White House, with black Secretaries of State in unbroken succession, all controlled by the treacherous neo conservatives; and he was crazy and violent before Obama was born.
True, there is a lot of anti-Semitic rant on the website, but it wasn’t much different from that on the site of the church Barack Obama went to in Chicago, or heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who providentially popped up on the day of the Holocaust murder to complain that ‘them Jews’ had kept him away from the president.
“In the last few days,” as Jake Tapper tweeted, “both James von Brunn and Rev. Wright have claimed that POTUS is controlled by Jews.” If it is possible that von Brunn was stirred up by right-wing talk radio, it is possible, too, that he was roused by Joe Klein and Chris Matthews, who have been claiming for months now that Jewish neo-cons subverted George W. Bush in the interests of Israel, and have blood on their hands for Iraq.
And perhaps the Muslim who killed the Army recruiter might have been stirred up by left- wing talk radio, or the likes of Rep. John Murtha D-PA, who accused the Marines of torture and massacres. The accusations have been proven false, but he hasn’t apologized.
A few years ago, Newsweek ran rumors of Korans being flushed down toilets by U.S. soldiers, and people died in the numerous riots that followed. No complaints about incitements to violence there. Then there are the detainee photos from five years ago that the ACLU and many House Democrats want released, even though generals have said they would endanger the lives of American servicemen.
These are the people complaining that the deaths in Kansas and Washington can be traced to talk radio, and they won’t let other inconvenient facts stop them. A good death is too precious to waste.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
