Posted by William J. Kelly Jan 13th 2011 at 11:00 am in Featured Story, First Amendment, Fox News, Free Speech, Islam, MSNBC, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Obama, Palin, Tea Parties, Uncategorized, conservatives, media bias You can’t retract hate. You can’t retract idiocy. You can’t retract bigotry. You can’t retract irresponsible claims masquerading as journalism. It’s time to fire Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, and New York Times’ Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller for printing and broadcasting blood libelous statements intended to directly link Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, and conservatives in general to the Arizona massacre on Saturday.
These phony journalists and commentators should be fired for unethical media practices, for libel, for slander, and for perpetuating the culture of hate and bigotry they falsely claim to be so passionately against.
Not even a day after the tragedy, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote an editorial called, “A Climate of Hate,” and he did so without any facts. He laced his January 9th editorial diatribe with his wish-filled assumption that Jared Loughner’s insane killing spree was linked to Sarah Palin and conservative, tea party, and talk radio rhetoric.
He says:
I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again.In his column, Krugman attempted to link the massacre to a “culture of hate” which he claimed was cultivated by the right:
It’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.Really, Krugman? Only from the right, eh? Are there no liberal activists hanging Sarah Palin effigies?
Or burning effigies of President Bush?
Are there no violent protestors outside the RNC Conventions or at the G-20 Summit? Or hate or bigoted speech against conservatives and Fox from the likes of Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, or legislators like U.S. Senator Dick Durbin who calls tea party supporters extremists and who, this week, linked Sarah Palin to the massacre? Have there been no dead fish sent in the mail or casual threats made against political enemies by Rahm Emanuel? Or Black Panthers holding clubs outside polling booths to threaten people attempting to vote? Is this all not hate-speech? Or actual hate in action?
In Krugman’s mind, progressives are justified in using hate-filled rhetoric against conservatives. What is not justifiable or tolerable to Krugman is a news network like Fox that gives both sides of the story; that allows liberal and conservative commentators to voice their opinions. What is not tolerable is a Sarah Palin or the success of commentators like Limbaugh, O’Reilly or Beck. What is not tolerable are every day people standing up for their rights against government intrusion since complete government intrusion is what progressives like Krugman are for.
Consequently, Krugman also calls out Fox commentators in his feeble attempt to link the network to the massacre:
You won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.Krugman wasn’t alone in his desperate act of journalistic stretch. On the night of the shootings, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann also made irresponsible statements – again without any facts. He, too, made wish-filled assumptions:
It is essential tonight not to demand revenge, but to demand justice; to insist not upon payback against those politicians and commentators who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism, but to work to change the minds of them and their supporters, or if those minds tonight are too closed, or if those minds tonight are too unmoved, or if those minds tonight are too triumphant, to make sure by peaceful means that those politicians and commentators and supporters have no further place in our system of government.
Domestic terrorism? Where were the facts, Olbermann? To protect the Islamic jihadists, MSM have branded any attempt to discuss the problem of Islamic extremism, “Islamaphobia.” However, in this instance, Olbermann and the MSM were more than happy to rush to a pre-determined judgment to extract a liberal political gain.
In his rant, Olbermann qualifes that his statement is not bent on “political payback.” However, that is precisely what he wants. He quickly invokes Sarah Palin:
If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics – she must be repudiated by the members of her own party.Time and time again, politicians from both parties have used targets and bulleyes on political maps, including the Daily Kos, which included Giffords on its 2008 “target” map for defeat. The media hypocrisy is stunning and should be career-ending.
Now, only a few days later, after all the hand-wringing, Krugman, Olbermann and other MSM have journalistic egg on their proverbial faces after they tried to pin a murders of a nine year-old girl, a federal judge, and four other innocent souls on Sarah Palin, Fox News, and other conservative voices.
Krugman was wrong. Olbermann was wrong. The New York Times was wrong. Jared Loughner wasn’t a tea party activist. He wasn’t a conservative. His favorite books were, “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf.” A plastic skull may have served as a shrine in his backyard. He wrote bizarre online postings wondering, “What do chocolate chip cookies taste like?” He liked a documentary called, “Zeitgeist,” which promotes conspiracy theories on Christianity and 9/11. Acording to a highschool friend, Loughner disliked the news and didn’t listen to political talk radio.
Clearly, the MSM now has no justification to continue to make bogus charges against Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, or conservatives in general. And Krugman and Olbermann and the rest are in a pickle.
This is a potential public relations disaster for the left and they are in the middle of it. Fortunately, they have the MSM to cover-up for them.
It would be media suicide for Krugman and Olbermann to admit they were wrong. Consequently, they have only one choice: continue the lie. They will pretend that the facts are what they publish in their newspapers, what they say on TV, and what they write in their blogs. They will continue the hate speech diatribe against Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party as it relates to the Arizona massacre. Truth is not an obstacle.
It is a common liberal tactic in MSM circles: Perpetuate a lie enough and it then becomes truth. As Saul Alinsky said in“Rules for Radicals,”In war, the end justifies any means.” Even the use of a crisis. Moreover, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel shed light on what a crisis means to the political left: “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” he said.
They aren’t.
This week, a senior Democrat operative apparently told Politico.com that Obama needs to “deftly pin this on the tea partiers just like the Clinton White house deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”
Well, it looks like media like Krugman and Olbermann are doing their best to help them out. In the light of this tragedy, it is unfortunate to have to reduce it now to political terms. It would not be the first time a tragedy was misused by both politicians and the media. As some commentators have correctly pointed out, some members of the media didn’t wait even 24 minutes before trying to exploit, degrade, and distort this true American tragedy for their own gain. They should be worse than ashamed.
They should be fired.
Big Journalism
