Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “The Lunatic Is In the Press”

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April 23, 2013

The Lunatic Is In the Press

Hatched by Korso

It isn't often that you get to watch a media train wreck moving in slow motion. Usually it happens upon the public with blazing speed, proceeding heedless of logic or even common sense as it tears across the landscape, establishing a meme that quickly becomes impervious to truth and objectivity. It's ironic, then, that the rapid-fire pace of the horrific bombing in Boston last week should put the brakes on things, and allow the general public -- perhaps for the first time -- to see clearly the media bias and outright nuttery that we conservative moonbats have been calling out since time immemorial.

It all started as we've come to expect: No sooner had the echoes of the explosions faded did the commentariat make attempts to link the violence to right-wing extremism. "I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind is -- we really don’t know who did this -- it was tax day,” said Obama consigliere and uber-mustachio David Axelrod. The venerable Chris Matthews proceeded in the same vein, grumbling about his own taxes and then suggesting, "Normally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right."

Unfortunately for Chris, that particular narrative didn't quite pan out; and as the days passed and no suspects had yet been identified, David Sirota of Salon.com shifted gears a bit and openly said what most of his colleagues had only been thinking: "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American." Because white men "are not collectively denigrated" when one of them does something really bad. Seriously.

Now, given how members of the NRA and the Tea Party have been rather heartily denigrated for acts of racism and violence that they didn't even commit, that argument doesn't quite pass the smell test; but it does serve as an effective bait-and-switch to Sirota's larger purpose, which was to use guilt to soften up the public to the eventuality that the bombers could indeed turn out to be (gasp!) Islamic extremists. Never mind that even in the wake of 9/11, the expected dark night of anti-Muslim backlash never actually came to pass. This time, in the media's view at least, bigoted America was poised to run riot.

And then came last Friday.

A cop shot dead, a high-speed chase that left one of the bombers as roadkill, and a manhunt that shut down the entire Boston metroplex has effectively ended the bombing drama -- and even though it was revealed that the bombers were Islamic terrorists, the backlash yet again has failed to materialize. Mosques have not burned. Ladies in hijabs have not been harassed. Everything is, amazingly enough, pretty peaceful. And yet the media have still moved on to a new phase in their narrative: the deconstruction and rehabilitation of the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Megan Garber, I think, summed up the meme perfectly with her article "The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?" In it, we get a lot of psychobabble about how poor Dzhokhar was just a regular guy like you and me, and that we need to appreciate the complexity of his circumstances before we pass judgement on him as a monster. All of that may sound like well-intentioned bovine feces, I suppose, but one has to wonder if Garber would have written the same article about, say, Eric Rudolph -- a man so distressed over abortion that he planted a bomb of his own. No? What about someone like Ted Bundy? He was a pretty complex character too. Good looks, solid family upbringing -- but he also liked to butcher young women. Did his charm and intelligence make him any less of a monster?

Ah, but Dzhokhar is different. He didn't hate the American government, specifically, as a right-wing terrorist would. He probably just hated America -- and that's a concept the leftist media can understand. Coupled with the need to help Barack Obama downplay the embarrassment of yet another terrorist incident on his watch, it's likely that we'll see a lot more of this kind of reporting before all this is over.

Dafydd adds: And probably a lot more of this kind of terrorism, as well. Regardless of whether Napoleon and the Joker were or were not actually members of any organized terror cell, they set a precedent: America cannot, at this point, defend against small-ball terrorism in the heartland. Larger and more organized groups are sure to pick up on that fact and exploit it, so brace yourselves.

I know it's politically correct not to "politicize" such ~~terrorist acts~~ man-caused disasters; but if the GOP doesn't use Obama's utter failure to secure the homeland, even with all the glittering drones his baggy pockets can carry, in our next three political campaigns, then we will have failed the American people and Lady Liberty herself.

Hatched by Korso on this day, April 23, 2013, at the time of 1:42 PM