Like most Americans, I am appalled at the senseless slaughter in Tucson… carried out by a deranged left wing madman against one of the few Democrats in the U.S. Congress who could be counted on to put service to her country and to her constituents ahead of service to her party.
As the events of Saturday, January 8, became known, the American people could have joined hands in their collective repugnance at this horrific crime, as they did in the days following the 9/11 attacks, but that unity was sacrificed on the altar of crass political opportunism the moment Clarence W. Dupnik, the Sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, stepped before the TV cameras.
Just minutes into his report, the sheriff opened a very large can of worms. He said, “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government… the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and, unfortunately, Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” Then he added, “The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business… this has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.”
To blame the assassin’s actions on talk radio and “people in the TV business” is reprehensible… particularly in light of the fact that nearly all brownshirt-style political violence in America is perpetrated by Democratic interest groups such as the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, and ACORN.
As a longtime Republican activist, I know from personal experience whereof I speak. During the 1960s, when I led a statewide election reform campaign in Oklahoma… a program that brought voting booths to every county in the state where Democrats had systematically denied the right to a secret ballot… my associates and I had more threats on our lives than I care to remember.
In 1968, as some friends and I picketed a Hubert Humphrey campaign appearance in Tulsa, we were attacked by a mob of some 300 Democrats (there were only twelve of us). A group of four or five burly steelworkers stubbed their cigars and cigarettes out on my bare skin before wrestling me to the pavement and knocking me unconscious.
In 1972, while serving as a regional chairman for the Nixon reelection campaign in southeast Pennsylvania, I was subjected to repeated demands for money by members of a Philadelphia organized crime family… all south Philadelphia Democrats. When I refused to comply with their demands they threatened to kidnap my wife and our three children and smash their elbows and kneecaps with baseball bats.
I have witnessed many more acts of fraud, violence, and intimidation by Democrats, far too numerous to mention. In fact, we are aware of instances where shotguns and rifles have been fired indiscriminately through the windows of Republican party headquarters and campaign offices. Luckily, not all Democrat gunmen are as skilled as Jared Loughner.
Anyone who believes that Jared Loughner may have been motivated by the political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck is as insane as he is. Does the sheriff really expect us to believe that a man like Loughner would listen to hours and hours of counter-culture music on MTV and then switch over to watch Sarah Palin on Fox News or tune in to Rush Limbaugh?
To the contrary, it has been reported that Loughner’s favorite song is a sick little number titled “Bodies,” published jointly by Pounding Drool Music and Renfield Music Publishing, Inc., a subsidiary of Wind-Up Entertainment, Inc. of New York. In that composition, the phrase “Let the bodies hit the floor” is repeated a total of 17 times in just 37 lines of lyric. And since Loughner’s closest friends have said that he doesn’t watch TV and pays little or no attention to the news, is it not logical to assume that he was far more motivated by the “music” he listens to than by conservative political rhetoric?
With that in mind, I have a challenge for the sheriff. If he really believes what he says, I’ll give him $100 for every conservative Republican we find among the employees and executives of Pounding Drool, Renfield, and Wind-Up, if he’ll give me $100 for every liberal Democrat we find. Does he have the courage to put his money where his mouth is?
What is most unfortunate is that Dupnik’s mindless insinuations have inspired the left wing hate machine… The Huffington Post, Moveon.org, the Daily KOZ, Bill Mahre, Keith Olbermann, and others… a group that doesn’t require a whole lot of motivating before they become totally unhinged. Sarah Palin could not have been more correct when she referred to the attacks by such leftist character assassins as a “blood libel.”
Yes, there is politically inspired violence in this world, far too much of it. But I challenge the sheriff to name a single act of violence committed by a conservative or a Republican after listening to a Sarah Palin speech or a Rush Limbaugh monologue. On the other hand, acts of violence by those on the political left would fill volumes. We can start with Lee Harvey Oswald, John Allan Muhammad, Lee Malvo, and Ted Kaczynski, to name just a few
Since it has been widely reported that Loughner was a registered Independent who reads The Communist Manifesto and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, it is highly unlikely that he ever voted Republican. What that tells us is that the Tucson killings represented an assassination attempt on a left-leaning Congresswoman by a leftist madman. The shootings had nothing whatsoever to do with conservatives, Republicans, talk radio, or Fox News… in spite of the sheriff’s best efforts. What would be interesting to know is what the sheriff and his deputies knew about Loughner’s history of creepy behavior and what steps they took, if any, to protect the people of Tucson from him. Was anything done? And if not, why not?
And finally, we would be remiss if we failed to mention the Obama pep rally/memorial service held at the University of Arizona’s 14,000 seat McKale Memorial Center, instead of a more appropriate church or cathedral. There are those on the left who insist that Obama was as surprised as anyone in the television audience that he was to speak before an overflow crowd of 30,000 people… comprised mostly of politically unsophisticated students who will be important to his reelection bid in 2012.
Anyone who has ever done presidential advance work, as I have, understands that nothing happens within a mile of a president or a presidential candidate that is not fully approved and planned by the candidate’s advance team. This is especially true of sitting presidents who must also satisfy the security requirements of the Secret Service. So, lest anyone doubt that Obama’s participation was planned by his handlers to serve as a kick-off for his 2012 reelection campaign, we need only take note of the thousands of “Together We Thrive” t-shirts placed on the chairs of memorial service attendees prior to the event.
After days of speculation, it has now been confirmed that the “Together We Thrive” theme had its genesis in the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America campaign, formerly known as Obama for America 2008.
As the only national leader who requires a teleprompter to lead a national moment of silence, one might question Obama’s intellectual prowess, but never his audacity or his duplicity. In his address in Tucson, he said, “At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not (in) a way that wounds.”
He continued, “What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. That we cannot do. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.”
As might be expected, his words were in sharp contrast to liberal reactions of the past week, causing us to wonder what it is that causes Democrats to be so hateful, so downright deceitful. The best answer to that question comes from columnist Jonah Goldberg who wrote at the time of Ronald Reagan’s funeral, “Intellectually, the old liberal project is exhausted. Its arguments do not persuade, its numbers don’t add up, its aims no longer seem achievable or worth the costs… But some liberals, many of them hobbled by nostalgia, refuse to believe that this is true. They loved the romance and excitement of the New Deal and the Great Society so much that they continue to sit in a nearly empty theater, refusing to believe that the movie’s over – even though the credits have rolled and the lights have come on. ‘It’s just an intermission,’ they insist. ‘The second half will be better – just you wait and see!’ ”
As Sheriff Dupnik listened to Obama’s plea for civility and humility from his seat in the tenth or fifteenth row, the old liberal war horse just couldn’t make himself believe that the Obama era, the “liberal movie” as Goldberg described it, has run its course. More than likely he was smiling to himself, secure in the knowledge that Obama’s plea was intended only for public consumption and that he really didn’t mean what he was saying.