A Case of Possession?

David Solway examines the self delusions of the left.

In all the years I’ve been following the political scene on this continent, I’ve rarely come across anything as reprehensible as the liberal-left reaction to the  shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Make hay when darkness reigns (or never let a crisis go to waste) seems to be the working “progressivist” motto. Of course, the left has always been at it, exploiting suffering for gain. Going back at least to the New York Times’ Walter Duranty and his shameless prevarications in the service of Stalin’s killing machine and moving up through the years to the present moment in which conservative public figures are blamed for Jared Lee Loughner’s murderous insanity, the litany of left-wing agitprop and duplicity has become nothing short of a demonic political discourse.

Its influence has penetrated everywhere. I open our metropolitan newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, expecting to find commentary on local politics, and am greeted by a cartoon depicting a tea kettle whose spout is a pistol barrel. Naturally, the Gazette’s superannuated cartoonist, who goes by the moniker of Aislin, still lives in a hippy-left alternative universe that has no relation to the world most grown-ups live in, suggesting that the paper is badly in need of an infusion of — pardon the metaphor — fresh blood.

Next I turn to our village weekly, the Hudson Gazette, and find that the editor singles out Fox News as an Al Jazeera-type operation (but not MSNBC), berates Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and O’Reilly (but not Matthews, Schultz, Krugman and Olbermann), and censures the apparent machinations of that “unprincipled power seeker,” Sarah Palin, concluding that “Palin’s rhetoric might have triggered Loughner’s rampage” — the sort of hypothetical logic that even the president of the United States rejected in his memorial speech.

This is the typical liberal-left calumny we’ve all become used to by now. The flight of fancy of a small town editor’s op-ed, as is the case with the ignorance and indecency of his big-time congeners, is utterly impermeable to facts that counter the drift of leftist invective. To take just a few examples: Saul Alinsky’s Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” (italics mine); Obama’s “thuggish rhetoric” (in Diana West’s phrase) advocating bringing a gun to a knife fight, or in Victor Davis Hanson’s recounting, Obama’s “potpourri imagery of knives, guns, enemies, punishing, kicking ass, relegation to the backseat, get angry, getting in their face, hostage takers, trigger fingers, tearing up, etc.”; the Democratic Leadership Committee’s 2004 publication of a bull’s eye map targeting Republicans; Gabriel Range’s film Death of a President envisaging the assassination of George W. Bush; the slew of leftist death-rhetoric against Bush; Cindy Sheehan’s book Peace Mom in which she fantasizes about killing Bush in the cradle; the foaming tirades of MSNBC, Washington Post and New York Times media hitmen; a Daily Kos correspondent opining that Gabrielle Giffords is “dead” to him for voting against Nancy Pelosi; a Salon.com  correspondent recommending the electrocution of Sarah Palin like one of Michael Vick’s dogs; and most recently the series of threats against Palin’s life on YouTube/Twitter.

In this demented thought-world, it’s completely OK for Chris Matthews to imagine someone jamming a CO² pellet into Rush Limbaugh’s head and watching him explode, but let Palin correctly assert she has been the object of a blood libel — prominent Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach has justified Palin’s use of the term — and the left goes into a feeding frenzy. “The righties are gunning up,” smarms Ed Schultz on The Battleground (nota bene: the battleground). There can be no doubt of this: the rhetoric of violence on the left eclipses that on the right by an order of magnitude.

The rest here.