Posted on 09/22/2009 5:09:30 AM PDT by IbJensen
For one, brief shining moment last week, I thought Nancy Pelosi must be the bravest American politician of the century, standing up to her own nutball constituency in the interest of American political politesse.
After all, when she tearfully told a press conference that the partisan bombast should be dialed down several notches lest it turn bloody -- ``I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric . . . it created an environment in which violence took place'' -- she had to be talking about left-wing violence, right?
Because when you talk about political murder and mayhem in San Francisco 30 years ago, the trigger was almost always pulled or the cyanide Kool-Aid poured by a leftist. There were the revolutionary nihilists of the Symbionese Liberation Army, assassinating an Oakland school superintendent, kidnapping Patty Hearst and finally shotgunning an innocent bystander during a bank robbery.
There were the cop-killing drug dealers of the Black Panthers, who began murdering their own sympathizers to keep them quiet. And of course the Black Liberation Army, a Panther offshoot that bombed a church where a policeman's funeral was being held. We think it was the BLA, anyway; in San Francisco those days, you couldn't tell your bombers without a scorecard. The Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, the Revolutionary Army, they were all blowing something up on practically a weekly basis.
And who can forget Jim Jones and his communal cult that ended in an orgy of murder and mass suicide in 1978? Well, most Democrats can; otherwise, they have to explain why people like Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale and Jerry Brown were such enthusiastic supporters of Jones until his infamous Kool-Aid party.
But no, Pelosi wasn't thinking of any of those examples. Shortly after she quelled her theatrical sniffles, her spinmasters clarified that she was referring only to the 1979 murders of liberal politicians George Moscone and Harvey Milk by a conservative rival, Dan White, dramatized in last year's film Milk.
Now that's the Pelosi I know: conveniently ignoring the corpses of literally hundreds of victims of organized left-wing violence while using two murders committed by an unbalanced (and, to be sure, evil) individual to make it sound like the San Francisco of the 1970s was a hellhole of right-wing terrorism. How silly of me to think she might, however briefly, have lapsed into intellectual honesty.
Unfortunately, Pelosi is alone in neither her equation of conservative politics with bloodlust nor her willingness to shade the truth to make her case. Lately, the favorite talking point of America's chattering classes has been that to oppose President Obama's economic policies is to court presidential assassination. MSNBC's Chris Matthews and the New York Times' Frank Rich have even gone so far as to say that it's happened before.
Rich compared the anti-Obama tea-party rallies to ``the walk-up to the Kennedy assassination, [when] there was all this hate talk about Kennedy.'' Matthews chimed in that ``the mood we're in right now'' reminded of him of when ``Jack Kennedy was killed in an open car in Dallas.''
Neither Rich nor Matthews offered a plausible explanation of how right-wing hate could have triggered the death of Kennedy, killed by a Marxist who six weeks before the assassination was begging for visas from Cuba and the Soviet Union. There's no need. The idea that conservatives (especially Christian conservatives) are a homicidal mob eternally poised on the verge of bloodshed is an article of faith on the left.
Rich in particular has practically made a career of predicting mass murder by the right. He wrote column after column warning that Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of The Christ would touch off worldwide slaughter: ``Its real tinder-box effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11.''
Five years later, we're still waiting for the first riot, just as we're still looking for the anti-Asian bloodshed that was certain to follow the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, which indelicately suggested the guys dropping the bombs that day were Japanese. Or the angry white male who was, we were repeatedly assured, behind the Washington Beltway sniper murders of 2002. (Actual killers: a pair of black Muslims.)
The unavoidable fact is that there is a rich history of violence on the fringes of both sides of the American political spectrum. The right, as liberals are fond of pointing out, has Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray. The left has the Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire on the floor of Congress, animal-rights nuts and eco-terrorists. If Nancy Pelosi really sees trouble coming, she needs to look in both directions.
Hyperbole gone insane!
The right, as liberals are fond of pointing out, has Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray.
These are handly 'members' of the right. They were lone nutcases. In the case of Ray we still don't know who financed his misadventure. Both killers could have been financed by the leftists!
No, it was the horrible flashbacks to the Haight-Ashbury drug scene...
Whenever inalienable rights have taken a long train of abuses, strife, discord, and violence ensue. The right to the fruit of ones labor is an inalienable right.
Dan White wasn’t a conservative either.
I remember that Harvey Milk was terrified by the Jones cult, whom he often did work for.
Matthews feeling that tingle in his leg?
Nancy is trying to invoke a period of 100% lefty violence and pretend that it was right-wing violence - and also pretend that it will happen again due to what she clearly regards as illegitimate dissent.
She and that witches cat Matthews, and others like Boehlert, are creating a 'frame' for future events. I have a nasty feeling that before 2010 the left are going to dispose of their bleeding albatross and make him into a martyr.
Now you'd best believe that old bat knows where some bodies (of neighbors, friends, business associates, political allies, relatives) are buried!
Bravo, Mr. C! You NAILED it, brother!
I agree - WHY aren’t more conservatives, especially ELECTED REPUBLICANS calling this out for what it is?!?!
Ok, let's assume the James Earl Ray and Timothy McVeigh were right wing(I don't think they were). This guy left out a whole slew of people on the left, for instance every assassination and assassination attempt made on a US President has been by the left wing and assorted nut cases throughout history.
If we want to branch out world wide the left far outstrips any violence the right has ever done against innocent people(I am not counting defending yourself), Communist China and Russia both make Hitler look like a humanitarian, and speaking of Hitler he was left wing also, as was Mussolini.
Anyone comparing the left and the right for violence just doesn't know what they are talking about or are spinning the facts.
He and his ilk are so sickeningly disgusting.
To believe as she and her cohorts believe would have, just a few decades ago, put her in a strait jacket. They have to be insane to be shoving this nation pell-mell to oblivion.
Now 10 months later and after 8 months of rule, they are shell-shocked and quite maddened (Whom the Gods would destroy ...). Some of the best and brightest of the cabinet picks turned out to have feet of clay and even when they were able to be confirmed, their actions were subject to scrutiny in light of their past sins. Other persons well regarded in liberal circles for their ability to 'fight da man' became liabilities when resurgent talk radio and an aberrant cable TV channel started exposing their roots. A gadfly with minimal audience who moved media homes on TV suddenly made 5PM ET a 'must see TV' hour. A staple of leftist power, exercised exclusively for 40 plus years, suddenly is taken up by the right and small street demonstrations of CONSERVATIVE protestors morphed into enormous events that had to be sneeringly covered by the 'reliable media'. Staid and controlled constituent meetings suddenly turned into vituperative interchanges where these elites became forcibly reminded that they were subject to job loss for being 'stuck on stupid'.
Now this great expedition to move America to a permanently governmental nanny state is in very real peril. Massive programs now are endangered by liberals elected by pretending that they share their conservative constituent's desires and thus in the course of the above mentioned meetings feel the potential wrath of the voting booth. Now they fear job loss and are mush less amenable to top-down liberal coercion. Suddenly all of these power-loving people realize that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. They were elected and have a base constituency from the left and far-left but most voters are center and trending right. Can they be re-elected without the leftist money and action groups like ACORN but can they still get votes if they are tied to their votes and their support.
No wonder they are pulling on every possible emotional string that they have been using for decades. Their problem is though that they are the 'boy crying wolf' and they have been doing it perhaps once too often? Does anybody but the nut-roots left believe Jimmy Carter when he says opposition is mainly based upon RACE? Does anybody believe except for the deranged that the KKK will ride again? Does anybody but the latte-left believe that the conservative demonstrators are paid poltroons of the evil corporations and secret Nazis as well?
But, Milk’s death was the springboard for the lovely Diane
Feinstein.
How old is Mathews?? Kennedy was killed 47 years ago. Mathews isn’t old enough to know anything about the political winds at the time Kennedy was shot, except by selective reading of history.
There certainly have been countless documentaries and books about Oswald and the assassination. I have yet to hear one bit of evidence suggesting Oswald was motivated in any way by right wing vitriol against Kennedy. Matthews, Rich and their ilk are just slime for trying to equate today’s conservatives and protesters with that act.
This article is excellent and tears Pelosi’s idiotic comments to shreds. I had forgotten about the SLA and other dirtbag organizations who must have made SF a terrible and scary place to live in the 1970s. Thanks to “PC” scrubbing of certain facts, I suppose most Americans would be shocked to read this column and remember the real truth.
Great points, SES!
47 years ago Matthews was getting a thrill up his leg as his dog took a whiz.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/22/still-lying/print
Has some information I did not know about Dan White.
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