Went to the Funeral, Got a Rally

Getting a lecture on civility from a Democrat is a lot like being lectured on religious tolerance by a follower of Islam. With either one, you’re going to get a message so laughably hypocritical it’s hard to tell whether to feel intellectually insulted or amused by the ridiculous nature of the premise.

Chances are, the guy giving the speech today is the same person who last week intentionally defamed your character to win an election or tried to blow you up for not bowing to Allah. And if it wasn’t him personally, you can bet he’s on friendly terms with the guy who did it. The point is you can be certain the least-qualified individual to speak on the subject is the one giving the lesson.

Speaking of the least-qualified among us, President Obama addressed the country last week on the Arizona shooting with a message calling for “civility.”

The President didn’t call anyone out on this specifically, but we can be sure we were all in need of a good chastising. Especially from Paul Krugman who could barely wait two hours to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting. And Palin herself for . . . well, for daring to address these baseless accusations, I suppose.

His call for a ceasefire on violent references in political rhetoric might have been more credible if it weren’t coming from the same guy who said of Republicans, “If they bring a knife, we bring a gun,” and who promised to do “hand-to-hand combat” with the incoming Republican majority. And the same Chief of State who tried to rally Hispanics to support Democrats in 2010 so they could help him “punish our enemies”. And who joined the lowest elements of his party in referring to the Tea Party as “tea baggers.”

But Obama did commend Sheriff Clarence Dupnik last week for his fine job slandering Rush Limbaugh; at least, I assume that’s what Obama was commending him for, because that’s all Dupnik has done since the shooting. Of course, the crowning glory of Obama’s résumé as a peacemaker may always be the twenty years he spent in Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church listening to such things as Wright’s infamous reaction to the 9/11 attacks: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost . . . God damn America!” Between friends like Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, Obama would have to reside at the United Nations to more effectively surround himself with anti-American zealots.

Anyone who doubts whether or not the left viewed last week’s speech as a political opportunity would need only to examine the media coverage.

Before, during, and after, the focus was entirely on Barack Obama’s performance. That aspect was not at all surprising, considering that only two months before, the left was pining for “their own Oklahoma City Bombing.” For a president whose party had just suffered one of the worst mid-term defeats in the history of the nation, it was, by their own words, the moment they had been waiting for. Analysis of the event entirely ignored the reason for the President’s speech, but breathlessly centered on whether he would be able to recapture his magical appeal from the campaign.

To say the circumstances surrounding Obama’s speech were more akin to a political rally than a memorial service would not be a stretch at all.

To his credit, he didn’t jump on the liberal bandwagon in blaming conservatives for the shooting, but he did wait long enough for the production and distribution of T-shirts recycling his campaign sloggans to be distributed to the crowd in attendence. (“Together We Thrive” originated from Obama’s Organizing for America website in 2008.)

Indeed, anyone watching the spectacle on television with the sound turned down would have mistaken it for just another 2008 Obama rally. Anyone listening to only the whistles and applause from the audience would have a hard time believing the occasion for the celebration was because a madman had shot twenty people, leaving six of them dead. It was almost like the Paul Wellstone Memorial all over again.

Yes, there is precedence for the claim that Democrats use these types of events for political gain. In 2002, following a plane crash which killed Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone weeks before the November election, Democrats famously and tastelessly turned the memorial into a fiery campaign rally. Republicans who showed up to mourn and pay their respects were loudly booed out of the assembly.

Likewise, Democrat activists hijacked the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006 in another attempt for a midterm election bump. While Reverend Joseph Lowery used the occasion to gather applause for statements opposing the Iraq war–with George W. Bush in attendence, no less–Jimmy Carter attempted to stir up racial animosity and fear of anti-terrorism measures by reminding the crowd that King’s family had themselves been the target of a federal wiretap. (Somehow, Carter neglected to mention it was the Kennedys who saw fit to wiretap the Kings.) Former President Bill Clinton likewise gave a long-winded speech about racial division before pausing to remember outloud that he was at a woman’s funeral.

If trial lawyers are branded the profession of “ambulance chasers,” then surely any hearse traveling down the road will have Democratic activists in hot pursuit.

It is unfortunate that we’re still talking about the shooting in Tucson, because it never should have gotten political in the first place. But that’s precisely what this is all about.

We now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Tucson gunman was not a right-wing activist, nor was he by any stretch a follower of Sarah Palin, but the media is continuing to stick to its initial lies on the matter.

Honestly, given their history, it would be more surprising if they weren’t. The majority of the media has been acting as a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party for longer than most of us have been alive; it’s what they do, and why those of us on the other side are forced to do what we do to counter them. If there had been no one to refute their lies this time around, then we would all think that Sarah Palin herself pulled the trigger on twenty people, including a congresswoman and a nine-year-old girl. Their frustration with their inability to spin this lie is why we are now being told we need to keep quiet in the name of “civility.”

The political left-wing sprang into action immediately following the shooting by placing the blame on the hateful rhetoric of the right-wing, thus themselves fanning the flames of hateful rhetoric, and then told Republicans to shut up and stop defending themselves.

Even supposed-journalists claimed Sarah Palin had “found a way to become part of the story.” She, Rush Limbaugh, and the numerous other conservative personalities who were singled out by name were then accused of being “suspiciously over-defensive” when they dared to challenge their accusers.

Is it strange that someone erroneously blamed for such a hideous crime might take issue with the accusation and seek to defend themselves?

The same liberals who demand the public spectacle of a trial in the case of known terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are all too eager to sentence conservative voices in the court of public opinion without even presenting the slightest bit of evidence to back up their charges.

Yes, Sarah Palin had images of crosshairs on her political website. So do the majority of other political activists on either side of the aisle. Democrat Bob Beckel both graciously and proudly took credit for pioneering that sort of campaign imagery in the first place.

The very word “campaign” owes its origin not to a description of a strategy to earn votes in a representative republic, but to the military campaigns (or wars) throughout history.

Much of the wording and terminology we now find ourselves examining in the weeks after this shooting have come into play because of the one-time symbiotic relationship between violence and regime change.

Our American culture is unique in that it does not historically rely on a violent overthrow of political rivals, but our language itself is a heritage of a time when this was not the case.

As previously stated, violence and politics share a relationship that dates to the beginning of human civilization, but the outrage over the shooting of a United States Representative proves, if anything, how rare political violence has become in our country.

But, somehow, it’s always the political right in the United States that is accused of being violent. Yet, it’s difficult for anyone to cite incidents or that’s capable of providing evidence for this stereotype.

Nonetheless, the lie sticks in the minds of many people because it’s been relentlessly drilled in by a complicit media.

Tea Party activists have been cast as violent extremists since day one, yet all stories to support the claim have been manufactured.

Left-wing activists have routinely sought to infiltrate Tea Party events to falsely engineer incidents of violence precisely because there are no such occasions occuring on their own. Indeed, Tea Party members themselves are routinely the target of physical violence. Perhaps most outrageous of these many instances was when a black, wheelchair-bound Tea Party activist was ruthlessly beaten by liberal heath care reform advocates. The New Black Panthers cheered this beating.

Speaking of the Black Panthers, they are just one of many prominant liberal factions which routinely and publicly advocate political violence.

Others include organizations like Code Pink, the Earth Liberation Front, and even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — you’re more likely to have a bucket of blood thrown on you by a member of PETA than you are to get spit on by someone from the Tea Party.

Along with famous eco-terrorist Ted Kaczinsky (the Unabomber), these activists routinely employ lethal force for their own extremist goals. ELF (the Earth Liberation Front) is composed of arsonists who blow up buildings and demolish vehicles. James Jay Lee was shot and killed when he took a Discovery Channel headquarters hostage at gunpoint for–in his words–not showing enough programming to advocate environmentalism. Saying that of the Discovery Channel is a lot like accusing Cartoon Network of not showing enough cartoons. In their coverage of this incident, the left-wing media omitted Lee’s environmental motives.

We could–and perhaps should–attribute these cases of violence to political advocates such as Al Gore, who’s been personally profitting for years on an exaggerated message of the effects of humanity on the environment. Lee was in fact known to have been influenced by Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but the same people who attacked Sarah Palin over the actions of Jared Loughner would never dream of mentioning that.

Similarly, one of the victims to survive the Arizona shooting is now himself threatening conservatives with violence. Eric Fuller, a longtime liberal extremist, is giving Loughner a pass on the shooting and instead turning his rage toward the Tea Party and other conservatives. And really, considering he himself was shot and has spent the past ten days listening to people telling him it was Sarah Palin’s fault, you almost can’t blame him.

This is the perfect example of liberal and media distortions having created a monster, and the story is going entirely underreported in the mainstream. If this extremist or someone like him were to attack Sarah Palin or someone like her, how would the media report on the story? We can bet they would circle the wagons and blame everyone but themselves; surely Fuller would be a “lone gunman with no political motives” . . . not like that “far-right Palin acolyte” Loughner.

Why do the targets of these outrageous leftist smears even have to fight back against such ludicrous accusations?

Because history has shown that if they do not, these things have a tendency to stick, no matter how absurd. A prime factor in the low approval ratings George W. Bush suffered during his later years in office was his unwillingness to answer his detractors.

For reasons which many conservatives are still unclear about and annoyed with, Bush never took the opportunity of these assaults to clarify his positions and rally his forces, leading skeptics to conclude that what his political rivals said about him must be true.

On the one hand, it’s inspiring to have leaders who are so tough, as opposed to the notoriously thin-skinned Obama, who needs stitches to heal from a papercut.

On the other hand, we need leaders who are willing to explain themselves and their records, particularly against a media which will never stop distorting them.

And a media marching to the tune of an animal like Paul Krugman will always need to be corrected. We’ve always known that crazy people could get their hands on weapons, but now we have further proof that they can also land a job at The New York Times.

Speaking of gun control, the liberals aren’t giving up on this one, either.

When a man is willing to shoot dozens of people in broad daylight, getting arrested for possession of an illegal weapon is probably the furthest thing from his mind.

Isn’t it still illegal to kill people in Arizona if you don’t also work for a Mexican drug cartel?

Regardless, with every publicized shooting, liberals moan, “If only we had laws to keep this sort of thing from happening!”

Most of the time, we already do, but somehow that doesn’t do a lot to dissuade a murderous psychopath.

You know how liberals are always telling us people are going to use marijuana whether it’s legal or not? Well the persistence of a pot-head is nothing compared to the determination of someone ready and willing to use a gun.

The truth is that the genie of the firearm is already out of the bottle, and it’s no longer possible to put it back in. Restricting gun rights will only make it harder for people to defend themselves from the real criminals, be they eco-terrorists or random crazies like Loughner.

In truth, had there been an armed civilian in the crowd at the Tucson shooting, lives might have been saved. That’s what the Second Amendment is all about. It certainly would have been more effective than any measure Tucson’s Sheriff had taken.

Now is not the time for “civility” as prescribed by the left, and which could more accurately be summarized as censorship of the right.

We will not give up our First or Second Amendments without a fight. It is we who are the party of rational debate, innovative ideas, and brave new leaders. We would do a disservice to our ideals, our champions, and our country if we allowed ourselves to be bullied into silence.

Travis Sedars
Mason City, Iowa

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