JOURNALISM: CNN’s Tapper sits back as student equates Rubio to school shooter. That’s the standard lefty line: If you don’t support my policy preferences, you’re literally a murderer! Which, conveniently, also serves to justify actual violence against people who don’t support your policy preferences.
Plus: Shooting Survivor: CNN Gave Me “Scripted Question” After Denying Question About Armed Guards. Fake news.
NEW CIVILITY UPDATE:
● Old and busted: The wrong political clip art can get people killed.
● The new hotness: “Democrats should fight dirty, play dirty, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes. ‘When they go low, we go high’ doesn’t work. Playing nice got us to this point with President Trump.”
Earlier:
As Steve Green once said, come and see the violence inherent in the leftism.
WATCH: RADICAL MSNBC DONNY DEUTSCH GUEST SAYS ‘PEOPLE NEED TO START TAKING TO THE STREETS’ FOR A ‘REVOLUTION.’
Earlier:
As Steve Green once said, come and see the violence inherent in the leftism.
ONLY IN THEIR WEST WING/NPR FANTASIES: Does the Left Lose because It’s Too Civil?
We’re still endlessly debating how we “got Trump” in 2016. But one of the chief reasons is that many Republicans — down to the very marrow of their bones — believed that the GOP had been “too nice,” and that nominating gentlemen like Mitt Romney meant that the party was unilaterally disarming in a no-holds-barred political war. There is still deep rage at the way in which lefties who allegedly yearn for civility painted Romney as a greedy, racist monster who was indifferent to cancer deaths and sought to put African Americans “back in chains.”
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?
No, the next step is physical violence, and we’ve seen plenty of that from the left over the past year, up to and including, as the Daily Caller noted in August, “Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.”
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Andrea Mitchell: Dems Must Get Deal ‘Written in Blood’ to Avoid Shutdown.
Earlier today: “CBS This Morning co-host John Dickerson on Friday touted Democratic talking points regarding a government shutdown. Talking to Senator Cory Gardner, Dickerson tried to explain away demanding a DACA fix in return for keeping the government open. He lectured the Republican: ‘Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.’”
Earlier:
As Steve says, come and see the violence inherent in the leftism.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH:
CBS This Morning co-host John Dickerson on Friday touted Democratic talking points regarding a government shutdown. Talking to Senator Cory Gardner, Dickerson tried to explain away demanding a DACA fix in return for keeping the government open. He lectured the Republican: “Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.”
Yes, Dickerson is paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, but murdering Republicans seems to be a recurring fantasy for the CBS anchorman:
Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.
—Headline, John Dickerson’s column at Slate, January 18, 2013.
Earlier:
● NBC’S RACHEL MADDOW SHOW SPARKED FBI INVESTIGATION INTO DEATH THREATS AGAINST MCCONNELL, PRUITT.
● Rand Paul: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
● FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
● Terry McAuliffe says he’d punch Trump: ‘You’d have to pick him up off the floor.’
As Steve says, come and see the violence inherent in the leftism.
SCALISE SHOOTING FALLOUT: Resisting the Label of Victim, but Forever Scarred by a Mass Shooting.
Give the NYT some credit, the story does mention that the shooting was of Republicans, at the hands of an anti-Trump loon. Which is better than usual.
NBC’S RACHEL MADDOW SHOW SPARKED FBI INVESTIGATION INTO DEATH THREATS AGAINST MCCONNELL, PRUITT:
Drinking while watching MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show led to death threats against Republicans Mitch McConnell and Scott Pruitt that sparked an FBI investigation.
An individual admitted to sending threatening tweets against the Senate majority leader and Environmental Protection Agency administrator, according to the EPA’s inspector general investigation document, first reported by E&E News.
Earlier:
● Rand Paul: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
● FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
● Terry McAuliffe says he’d punch Trump: ‘You’d have to pick him up off the floor.’
As Steve just said in response to that last item, come and see the violence inherent in the leftism. (Bumped, by Glenn, because they keep trying to bury this stuff.)
RAND PAUL: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) discussed his recovery after he was attacked by his neighbor outside of his Kentucky home in November, calling the process “a living hell.”
“It was sort of a living hell for the first four or five weeks,” Paul told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“Couldn’t get out of bed without assistance. Six broken ribs, damage to my lungs two bouts of pneumonia,” he continued. . . .
The incident marked the second time Paul had been attacked last year after he and other members of the GOP congressional baseball team were shot at during practice in June.
The senator was not shot in the attack.
Paul went on to discuss the safety of elected officials while not in the capitol.
“I was also at the baseball field when we were shot at with semiautomatic fire,” he said.
“People don’t want to think it is open season on our elected officials.”
Well, only the Republican ones. Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
And not just the elected Republicans: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED PRESIDENT, WE’D SEE DEATH THREATS AGAINST INDIAN-AMERICANS AND THEY WERE RIGHT! FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
I EAGERLY AWAIT PAUL KRUGMAN’S DENUNCIATION OF THIS VIOLENT ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC. Bette Midler on Manafort: ‘Roll Out the’ Guillotine Carts!
TO PARAPHRASE BRECHT, WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER FOR THE DNC-MSM TO DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND ELECT ANOTHER?
● Shot: “Hearing more reports of some journalists — an embittered minority — giving up on the public. ‘If they don’t believe us, nothing we can do.’”
—Tweet today by leftwing NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen.
—Headline at the Washington Free Beacon today.
● Reminder: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
(Headline inspired by Ben Domench.)
PEAK SALON REACHED. “My liberal white male rage: What should I do about it?”
I’m a left-wing white guy. And a Jew. Since Charlottesville, I’ve noticed some strange changes in myself.
At work, I’ve spaced out for 20 minutes at a time during meetings, daydreaming about committing violence, always righteously, in overly dramatic, obnoxiously heroic ways, with a very troubling overtone of white saviorism. In addition to saving the girls from a male predator with my brute strength and righteous rage, I’ve had another recurring fantasy of saving the passengers on a plane hijacked by “911-esque” terrorists. I tackle an armed hijacker, turn his gun on him, immediately inspire the other passengers to team up to distract the terrorists, and then deftly fire bullets into all three terrorists’ heads. Dark blood drips down their noses from the wounds on their foreheads. If the meeting is particularly boring, I’ll concoct permutations, new endings. Because it just feels so damn good. Like the dopamine rush of a sex fantasy.
The Bernie tattoo on the arm of the man-bun coiffed Resistance-T-shirt guy atop the article adds a particularly creepy touch considering the ideology of the attempted assassin Of Steve Scalise.
LEFTIES LOVE VIOLENCE: @Twitter openly shames Steve Scalise, who barely survived a Leftist assassin’s attack, for not learning his lesson.
Plus: “The collective shrug after this shooting was most deeply troubling thing to me of 2017. The news moved on in two days. No soul searching.” To be fair, you have to have a soul first.
Flashback: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
NEW REPORT: GOP BASEBALL SUSPECT COMMITTED ‘ACT OF TERRORISM’ ‘FUELED BY RAGE AGAINST REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS.’ “The report also indicates that Hodgkinson planned out the mass assassination attempt months in advance.”
Flashback: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
TENNESSEE CHURCH SUSPECT MAY HAVE SOUGHT CHARLESTON REVENGE:
The note could offer a glimpse into Emanuel Kidega Samson’s mindset at the time of Sunday’s shooting and a possible motive for the rampage, which left a woman dead and six other people wounded. The Associated Press has not viewed the note, but it was summarized in an investigative report circulating among law enforcement. Two officials read parts of the note to the AP.
The report said that “in sum and in no way verbatim,” the note referenced revenge or retaliation for Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black worshippers at the South Carolina church in 2015 and has since been sentenced to death. It wasn’t clear what precisely Samson is alleged to have written about the Roof shooting, or whether his note contained other important details that might also speak to a motivation or state of mind.
Related flashback: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
THEY’D NEVER DO THIS IF THE RACES WERE REVERSED: Trinity College Reinstates Professor Who Said White People Should ‘F***ing Die.’
Four days after James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, Trinity Professor Johnny Eric Williams sided with anonymous blogger “Son of Baldwin,” who proposed that black emergency personnel should let wounded white people die rather than lend assistance. Baldwin posted his opinions under the hashtag, #LetThemFuckingDie.
Professor Williams linked Son of Baldwin’s statement, adopted the hashtag as his own, and posted some additional denunciations of white Americans for “their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system.” Referring to all “self-identified ‘whites,’” he wrote, “The time is now to confront these inhuman assholes and end this now.”
Prof. Williams, I know you think you want a race war. But you really don’t. And I think it’s fine for Trinity not to punish faculty for “extramural utterences,” except that I don’t really believe they’d apply that policy to a white professor who thought white EMTs should let black people die. Instead, I feel fairly confident they’d weasel around it somehow.
Cost of attending Trinity College: $68,940 per year. A lot to pay for a “platform from which people can shout their disordered fury.”
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: The FBI’s Briefing On The GOP Baseball Shooting Couldn’t Have Been More Bizarre.
The FBI admits that Hodgkinson:
•vociferously raged against Republicans in online forums,
•had a piece of paper bearing the names of six members of Congress,
•was reported for doing target practice outside his home in recent months before moving to Alexandria,
•had mapped out a trip to the DC area,
•took multiple photos of the baseball field he would later shoot up, three days after the New York Times mentioned that Republicans practiced baseball at an Alexandria baseball field with little security,
•lived out of his van at the YMCA directly next door to the baseball field he shot up,
•legally purchased a rifle in March 2003 and 9 mm handgun “in November 2016,”
•modified the rifle at some point to accept a detachable magazine and replaced the original stock with a folding stock,
•rented a storage facility to hide hundreds of rounds of ammunition and additional rifle components,
asked “Is this the Republican or Democrat baseball team?” before firing on the Republicans,
ran a Google search for information on the “2017 Republican Convention” hours before the shooting,
and took photos at high-profile Washington locations, including the east front plaza of the U.S. Capitol and the Dirksen Senate Office.
•We know from other reporting that the list was of six Republican Freedom Caucus members, including Rep. Mo Brooks, who was present at the practice.So what does the FBI decide this information means? Well, the takeaway of the briefing was characterized well by the Associated Press headline about it: “FBI: Gunman who shot congressman had no target in mind.”
The FBI is going to have to do better than this if the Bureau wants to earn back the reputation squandered by James Comey.
THE LEFT-WING TERRORIST’S CAPITOL HILL COUP D’ETAT: A Democrat-controlled House would overturn the election and impeach Trump. And James T. Hodgkinson knew it.
UPDATE: Thank you Instapundit commenters. I know it takes 2/3rds to convict in the Senate. An early version of the essay speculated that Hodgkinson thought a 50-50 Senate might convict. He may have thought so, it’s impossible to know. But the published essay implied it was possible if a few votes shifted and that’s my fault. This error has been corrected.
BASEBALL GUNMAN WAS A BERNIE BRO WHO HATED REPUBLICANS.
The shooter who was killed during gunfire at practice for a congressional baseball game Wednesday morning was from Belleville.
The shooter was James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, who belonged to a number of anti-Republican groups, including one called “Terminate the Republican Party.”
President Donald Trump said Hodgkinson died during gunfire exchanged with congressional security workers.
Hodgkinson, 66, owned a home-inspection business. Hodgkinson was a licensed home inspector from 1994 to 1997, when his license expired, according to records from the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. He also held a license from 2003 to 2016, but it was not renewed.
Two days ago, Hodgkinson posted an angry tweet about President Donald Trump on Facebook.
“I Want to Say Mr. President, for being an ass hole you are Truly the Biggest Ass Hole We Have Ever Had in the Oval Office,” he wrote on Facebook.
Hodgkinson is a member of a number of anti-Republican groups on Facebook, including one called “Terminate the Republican Party.”
▪ “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans”
▪ “Donald Trump is not my President”
▪ “President Bernie Sanders”
▪ “Illinois Berners United to Resist Trump”
▪ “Boycott the Republican Party”
▪ “Expose Republican Fraud”
▪ “Terminate the Republican Party”
…Hodgkinson took a Democratic ballot in the primary election in 2016.
The climate of hatred and violence that the Democrats and media have fostered has claimed more victims.
UPDATE: Thoughts from John Hinderaker.
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