Sheriff Vitriol: It's Palin's Fault

Congratulations, Sheriff Dupnik. You're an overnight media sensation. This is just criminal idiocy. While "overseeing" the investigation of the recent shooting in Tucson, Arizona, Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been all over the news since Saturday, leading the charge for the  "antiinflammatory rhetoric" and the "vitriol" in political rhetoric to cease, while simultaneously blaming the Right and Sarah Palin and "certain mouths" (read, Rush Limbaugh) for being responsible for the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle.

"When you look unbalanced people-how they are-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, I think, has become sort of the capitol. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry." [Wow, "mecca"?--that's a pretty unfortunate metaphor there, Sheriff. But I digress.]

Last night on one of the Fox News shows, Sheriff Vitriol took his own unbalanced rhetoric one step further, blaming the violence on Senator Harry Reid's opponent in the recent election, Sharon Angle, as well Sarah Palin.

"When you have people like Sharon Angle, in Las Vegas, running against Harry Reid, making outrageous statements such as 'We may need to resort to taking the second amendment into certain cases.' And for people like Sarah Palin to say 'We have people like Gabby Giffords in our cross-hairs.' I think those statements are totally irresponsible and they're not without consequences. And we are seeing them here."

The morons in the lamestream press have jumped all over this, calling Dupnik's comments "a bold step" (examiner.com). The Washington Post says that Dupnik's remarks "resonate" with the Left, "who who even before the name of the suspect was released suggested that the shooter may have had been incited by the tea party" [that's Tea Party]. According to the NYT, Dupnik is a man who speaks his mind, and he has "never been one to fan political fires." Really?

Fortunately, there are some voices of sanity still around, including Glenn Reynolds at the WSJ: "The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel." Reynolds points out that when someone on the left, like--oh, Obama for instance--makes comments like the one he made in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to a fight, then we bring a gun"--well, that's evidently merely evidence of "high spirits." However, if Sarah Palin  uses words like "lock and load," then somehow in the minds of people like NYT columnist Paul Krugman, those words from the Right create a "climate of hate." (The full Krugman "thought of the day," that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot because she was “a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona” and “violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate."--for a link to Krugman's writing, see the Update.)

As Reynolds writes in his article, "There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source."

Reynolds goes on to make the point that American journalists know how to be "sensitive" when they want to be: As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?" [The York article is another voice of sanity, an excellent read: "Journalists urged caution after Ft. Hood, now race to blame Palin after Arizona shootings"]

Reynolds concludes by admonishing the "climate of haters" for their own irresponsibility and dishonesty: To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that? Where, indeed.

Update. From The Daily Telegraph, "Allahu Palin," by Tim Blair, further making the point of the utter hypocrisy and clear intellectual dishonesty in the coverage of the Arizona shooter, a young man who is classicly paranoid schizophrenic, compared to the shooting at Fort Hood by Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army major who screamed Allahu Akbar (God is great) as he murdered 13 people.

For his editorial, Paul Krugman ought to be frogmarched out of journalism, although what do we expect, really, from him and the NYT: "We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.” Who needs proof, who needs facts--the left has Paul Krugman.

And Krugman takes the issue one step farther. You could see this coming from 1,000 miles away: Just yesterday, Ezra Klein remarked that opposition to health reform was getting scary. Actually, it’s been scary for quite a while, in a way that already reminded many of us of the climate that preceded the Oklahoma City bombing.

This is classic Leftist strategy: If you can't win an argument (ObamaCare) on its merits, then by all means, do whatever it takes to demonize the other side and/or scare the crap out of people. Or do whatever it takes, period.

Update #2. Michelle Malkin has the lead story: "The progressive 'climate of hate": An illustrated primer, 2000-2010."

The Tuscon massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand.

They need to be reminded. You need to be reminded.

Confront them. Don’t be cowed into silence.

And don’t let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the Right.

They want to play tu quo que in the middle of a national tragedy? They asked for it. They got it.

Update #3. From HotAir: "The shame and hypocrisy of the New York Times": the Gray Lady--a shrieking hysteric and a sickening example of media sources that act more like attack dogs than journalists.