If Squeaky Frome breaks out of her cell tomorrow and tries to shoot up congress again-- we can still blame Sarah Palin
Saturday, January 15, 2011By Daniel Greenfield
This was what the political climate looked like back in 2006 when this was the DVD cover of a widely promoted movie featuring the murder of President Bush, as a way of discussing how awful Bush is. This wasn’t the work of a single lunatic. Roger Ebert, who is predictably outraged over Palin, praised the movie as “necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush’s role in the world today.”
Here’s more:
“The scenario is a familiar one: What would happen if a much-hated world leader was killed in office? Since the failed assassination attempts on Adolph Hitler, fictions imagining how things might have changed with the elimination of one powerful figure have fascinated historians and the public.”and
“Bush Jr., whose methods and ideology have been vilified as Hitlerian in real-life speeches and demonstrations that we’ve all seen already”Ebert’s attitude was commonplace among liberals at the time. And anyone whose memory reaches back a mere 4 years has to laugh every time we get another sanctimonious lecture about creating a climate of hate toward the man in the White House.
By the way here’s how the movie was promoted in one dayNo wish fulfillment here. No climate of hate. Just an ad agency, a distributor and a newspaper running a picture of him being killed. But man, that Sarah Palin is dangerous with all her rhetoric.
The week has passed along with the ugly circus that resulted when an unstable man opened fire on a crowd that included a congresswoman and a judge. Some of the circus can doubtlessly be attributed to a tabloid media that has long ago learned to shape tragedy into a narrative. Rather than report the news, they manipulate emotions by fitting the news into a story that is meant to move, outrage or uplift viewers.
The week has passed along with the ugly circus that resulted when an unstable man opened fire on a crowd that included a congresswoman and a judge. Some of the circus can doubtlessly be attributed to a tabloid media that has long ago learned to shape tragedy into a narrative. Rather than report the news, they manipulate emotions by fitting the news into a story that is meant to move, outrage or uplift viewers.
This is not reporting so much as it is storytelling, presenting heroes and villains, a Punch and Judy show for the audience to identify with. Think of it as a Reality TV show that encompasses not just individual volunteers who agree to act out for the cameras, but everyone. From the populations of entire nations to individuals who are just going about their business—no one escapes its grasp except through the embrace of absolute privacy and by refusing to consume any of the products of the media.
This week the media jumped on the Arizona shootings and the Ted Williams story, two narratives that they created, spun out and then plumbed to exhaustion. There is no real difference between the two narratives.
Both were artificial. Ted Williams, like most homeless people is a drug addict and a criminal with serious mental problems. The Arizona shootings were carried out by a mentally ill man for reasons divorced from any normative politics. But the media played out their side of the narrative, until it collapsed and then began telling the other side of the story, without ever admitting that the mess they were reporting on was a mess they had created.
Probably the most outrageous portion of the media’s hypocrisy came in their condemnations of Sarah Palin’s speech. “How dare she make the story about her?” they asked, when they had been the ones who had dragged her name into the story on no grounds at all. Except a campaign map with bullseye targets of politicians targeted for election defeats.
The absurdity of it is apparent. The constant mentions of the bullseye campaign map went without answering the simple question, did Loughner ever even see the map? And if he didn’t, then what possible relevance does the map have?
For example Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Which means you can blame Shakespeare for the shooting of Judge Roll who did have a law degree. But unless you can show that Loughner had even read Henry VI, then it’s a non-starter.
The left has made the argument that the right “created a climate of violence”, which gives Loughner a ready made alibi and avoids having to actually prove that there is any connection between Palin, the Tea Party and Loughner.
Let’s take these two examples from a liberal blog
“PUMPING THE AIR FULL OF GUN-BASED IMAGERY AND RHETORIC, WHICH HAD ALREADY REACHED FEVER PITCH AND RESULTED IN THREATS ON GABRIELLE GIFFORDS’ LIFE AND SOME VIOLENCE AGAINST HER, WHEN SOMEONE ACTUALLY SHOT HER AND KILLED A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE, AND NO MATTER WHO HE WAS OR WHAT HE WAS THINKING, HE WAS LIVING IN A CULTURE THAT LINKED GUNS, VIOLENCE”So Palin is guilty of playing a role in Loughner’s shootings, regardless of how he felt about her, regardless of whether he ever saw her bullseye campaign map, regardless of absolutely anything.
“(what if it turns out he didn’t like Palin? He still lived in the culture of violence she helped to create)”
The climate argument says that Sarah Palin poisoned the climate so badly that whoever kills a liberal for any reason, even if the killer is on the far left, was clearly influenced by her. If Squeaky Frome breaks out of her cell tomorrow and tries to shoot up congress again—we can still blame Sarah Palin.
But the liberals promoting the climate argument haven’t thought about that one too carefully. If we can blame any crime on anyone who creates a culture of violence, while skipping that middle part 2 where we show a clear connection between the two, then the party is on.
You know all those arguments about how movies and rap music cause murder? Well guess what. Everyone on the left who decided to be a shamelessly dishonest idiot this week just proved it.
Did a police officer get shot? It must be Ice Cube’s fault. Lock him up right now. No, we don’t have to prove that the shooting happened because of him. He contributed to a culture of violence and PUMPED THE AIR FULL OF GUN BASED IMAGERY. He’s guilty.
And why stop there. If we can treat all violent rhetoric as the cause of murder, then we can go after movies too. How many times were Natural Born Killers or Clockwork Orange blamed by defendants and relatives of victims of violent crimes? More than a few. It’s time to hold everyone involved accountable. Movies and TV shows with violent gun based imagery? Forget about it. Same goes for video games.
No, sorry, but you don’t have freedom of speech. You’re poisoning the climate with carbon gun based imagery and violence.
And who knows how many people died because Obama said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
There’s your gun-based imagery right there. No, we don’t have to prove that Obama’s words actually got anyone killed. Let’s just pick a shooting and blame it on him. It doesn’t matter if the shooter was one of his supporters. It doesn’t matter if the shooter heard of him. It doesn’t matter if the shooter thought that a dog was talking to him. THE CLIMATE WAS POISONED BY GUN BASED IMAGERY AND VIOLENT RHETORIC.
Only two types of people will fall for this. The very easily frightened who want a nanny state to smooth over any unpleasantness and the completely irrational who are so filled with hate that they stopped making sense around the Nixon Administration.
But polls show that most Americans have not fallen for it, and so the media pulled back a little on their non-stop propaganda tour, and instead began regaling us with the stories of everyone who ever met and knew Loughner, thereby giving him his celebrity and providing an incentive to future would-be-shooters. Another public service brought to you by that most invaluable of institutions, the free ‘owned by a small group of media conglomerates’ press. What would we ever do without it, except perhaps think for ourselves, and process tragedies as tragedies instead of ways to goose the ratings that week so another executive can buy himself a yacht and promote their favorite politician of the month.
This week has passed. And like a hungry dog, the media looks elsewhere to feed. Another bone of tragedy to dig up, grip between its paws and gnaw on all over again.
The speeches have been given. There’s a slogan and t-shirts. Yes G-d help us, even memorials have to be properly branded and marketed. Heaven forbid that people attending a memorial be unsure what message we’re supposed to take away from it. No, we must spell it out for them. Carefully.
I don’t know if it was sponsored by Coca Cola (Together We Refresh), but it wouldn’t surprise me at this point.
And Obama’s appearance completed the appropriation of tragedy for political purposes, with a high road speech, while his supporters did the low road work for him.
By giving the media what he knew they wanted, a scapegoat, Sheriff Dupnik avoided having to answer tough questions about why Loughner was allowed to run loose. And the media gave him what he wanted, a free pass, with the tough questions only coming from the local Arizona Republic. But who cares about asking why a dangerous schizophrenic was allowed to run loose after allegedly making death threats—when you can instead blame the GUN-BASED CLIMATE OF VIOLENT RHETORIC or some such nonsense, as RFK Jr crawled out from his hideaway deep beneath a volcano to tell us that JFK was not killed by a Lee Harvey Oswald, a radical Communist, but by RIGHT WING GUN BASED RHETORIC.
And now that everyone has played their parts, the curtain falls and we move on. Those who have lost someone, mourn their dead. Gabrielle Giffords makes her slow journey to recovery. And the nation gets back to dealing with the economic and political disasters that Obama and his supporters have foisted on us, and tried to exploit a horrible massacre to prevent us from talking about it.
You know that Constitution. You know the one they didn’t want us reading out loud because it might give people ideas about how they have the freedom to criticize the government, instead of the obligation to volunteer to sort recycling and buy tickets to Obama’s latest speech. Not such a bad document, is it. Even if it was written because OF THE GUN-BASED CLIMATE OF VIOLENT RHETORIC when some crazy racists from the South decided they want to secede from the mother country because of too much government control.
Not such a bad document at all.
Canada Free Press
