Posted on 01/11/2012 11:20:04 AM PST by DCBryan1
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., speaking in New Hampshire this morning, reminded her audience of the tragic Tucson shooting last year -- and also insinuated that the Tea Party, which she said regards political opponents as "the enemy," has enhanced divisiveness in Congress and had something to do with the shooting, at least indirectly.
"We need to make sure that we tone things down, particularly in light of the Tucson tragedy from a year ago, where my very good friend, Gabby Giffords -- who is doing really well, by the way, -- [was shot]," Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair said during a "Politics and Eggs" forum this morning. "The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular . . . has really changed, I'll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement."
Having brought up the Giffords attack as a political cudgel, Wasserman Schultz doubled down on that attack. "You had town hall meetings that they tried to take over, and you saw some their conduct at those tea party meetings," Wasserman Schultz said today. "When they come and disagree with you, you're not just wrong, you're the enemy."
Warming to that theme, she added that "when they disagree with you on an issue, you're not just wrong, you're a liar."
Giffords' shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was eventually discovered to be a mentally unstable loner with no immediate partisan agenda and a serious alcohol problem. In 2007, he had attended a forum and asked a question of Giffords, which she had not answered to his satisfaction.
(Excerpt) Read more at campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com ...
Don’t laugh. There is purpose behind these continuous charges of ‘terrorists’ and blaming the TEA Party as a threat to national security.
As history shows us, tyrants will demonize their opponents first, thus creating a public perception that will afford and allow the tyrants the ability to criminalize and eventually ERADICATE those they have targeted for destruction.
Despite the fact that Wasserman-Schultz is PROJECTING what she and her party are actually DOING, the end result of all the enemy demonization of Conservatives and TEA Partiers, is prepping us for criminalization - and future annihilation. Already the OWS mob zombies consider the TEA Party to be NAZIS they must put under.
Trust me on this. Satan sticks to what works, and history repeats for a reason. This is not simply desperate idiot-speak by ideologues, this stuff has intent and purpose behind it, and given everything from the April 2009 DHS Terror assessment to the recent NDAA, things can turn nightmarish in very, very short order. All they have to achieve is creating an atmosphere of fear for being associated with the TEA Party - and even ardent TEA Party supporters will melt away like brown sugar and butter in a hot sauce pan to save themselves.
That is why they keep blaming the TEA Party for the nut job shooting of Giffords. They desperately want some TEA Party Conservative tied to some act of violence, which will give tyrants justification to bring down the iron fist.
I’m simply noting history folks.
Yes, it IS happening here.
She is truly an ugly human being...inside & out!!!
The TEA Party, to get the respect of Debbie, should act like the Occupy movement. That’s the standard of “good behavior” for the left and the media.
Gee, we didn’t hear a word out of her when Jimmy Hoffa, while introducing Barack Obama, shouted that the members of the Tea Party need to be “taken out”, did we?
As opposed to Occupy?
Arrests of Tea Partiers at rallies since 2009: 0
Property damaged at Tea Party rallies since 2009: 0
Policeman injured at Tea Party rallies since 2009: 0
Tear gas canisters deployed at Tea Party rallies since 2009: 0
Fear of the Tea Party struck in the hearts of Democrats and Establishment Republicans since 2009: PRICELESS !!
DWS is an odious character. In the interviews I’ve seen of her on TV she is incapable of spouting anything besides basic talking points. I do not believe it is possible for her to have an original thought.
Andrew Wilkow on XMRadio already has.
What right do they have to make such an accusation. That is slander. She should be forced to step down.
GEEEZUZ GAWD, what are you trying
to do to my eyes?????
Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz does it again.
Also see this article Woman Who ID'd Arizona Shooter As Liberal Reflects On Experience (Media Not Happy With Description)
She calls the actions of CNN's Piers Morgan "scumbag" and thinks the media tried to put a "right spin" on the political leanings of the Arizona shooter.
bttt
01/16/2011
Andrew Breitbart:
“The call for toning down the ‘heated political rhetoric’ is a convenient scheme by the permanently intemperate and propaganda dependent political left,” Mr. Breitbart said in an email to Washington Wire. “Once this heinous and uncivil strategy of blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for Jared Loughner’s act imploded, there were not only no apologies from drawing these false conclusions, the perpetrators outrageously doubled down on a more generic yet equally cynical strategy to stop heated political rhetoric.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2657720/posts?page=12#12
NYPOST
Where the media leads, we don’t follow
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/where_the_media_leads_we_don_follow_1ykcLkS1e2v97rUHj1LtQO
By JONAH GOLDBERG Last Updated: 5:00 AM, January 16, 2011
Well, that was a week we could have all done without.
As President Obama declared in his legitimately moving speech to what seemed to be the homecoming rally of the Arizona Wildcats, now is a time to re-embrace civility.
To that end, now might be a good time to examine the media’s role in this mess. There’s no disputing nor any surprise that left-wing activists didn’t need to wait for accurate reporting to jump to conclusions about the “real” culprits in the Tucson massacre.
For instance, within minutes of the news hitting the wires, commentator Markos Moulitsas wrote on Twitter, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.” David Brock, the head of a left-wing activist outfit called Media Matters for America, wrote a laughably self-important “open letter” gloating how he had “warned” Fox News about its dangerous rhetoric. Sounding a bit like Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office” penning an urgent letter to the head of the FBI, Brock wrote: “My previous warnings were laughed off and ignored. For the country’s sake, I hope you take them more seriously now.”
Of course, activists and pundits play a different role than allegedly straight reporters. And yet, the “mainstream media” seemed to be suffering from the same groupthink. Even as evidence mounted that Jared Lee Loughner was no Tea Partier, was not a Sarah Palin disciple, and didn’t even listen to talk radio or watch cable news, media outlets seemed to tighten their grip on the story they wanted rather than the story they had. At the end of the week MSNBC was still using a graphic for its news coverage showing Loughner’s deranged mug shot along with the text “The Power of Words.”
Confirmation bias is a problem for all people and institutions of all ideological stripes, but in this instance it is synonymous with liberal media bias. Richard Nixon reportedly once said that it was obvious the world is overcrowded, because everywhere he went he saw huge crowds. Similarly, reporters “knew” beforehand that this must have been a right-wing nut, and so, like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, they recognized only evidence that proved their theory.
They also took cues from such authorities as the editors of The New York Times, who assured readers discomfited by the lack of evidence that it was still OK to blame Republicans for the crime (an approach the Times describes as “Islamophobic” when killers are Muslim). Maybe the lucid-dreamer Loughner lived “well beyond usual ideological categories,” but that’s no reason not “to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.”
This was something of a fatwah for straight reporters and TV hosts to stay focused on Sarah Palin and Republican rhetoric generally. They used the weaselly rationalization that the murders had started a “national debate” on the political discourse. But this is somewhere between an outright lie and a wild distortion.
Loughner’s actions didn’t spark the conversation, the media (and the Democratic Party) sparked that conversation because they were already locked into a storyline, like a newspaper that has already written an obituary for a still living actor. “People are debating” or a “national conversation has started” is a cheap gimmick for the author or his editor to talk about whatever they want to talk about. If The New York Times ran an untrue story tomorrow announcing that I beat my wife, it would be the Times that sparked the conversation about my wife-beating, not anything I did.
And this is hardly an isolated incident. It’s understandable that journalists would want to set the national agenda by providing new information. That’s their job. But sometimes the press just won’t take no for an answer, when the public refuses to see events the same way. For instance, last summer the Times worked valiantly to cast the Ground Zero mosque controversy as a symptom of Islamophobia sweeping the nation, even though the data on anti-Muslim hate-crimes undercut the claim entirely. The press routinely floats the idea that the country needs a “frank” or “honest” “national conversation on race” but viciously punishes anybody who says something they don’t want to hear.
It seems every week there’s another thumb-sucking seminar on public radio about how dismaying it is that the public doesn’t share the elite press’ global warming hysteria. Despite the fact that ObamaCare was persistently unpopular, it seemed news reports often focused on how the public didn’t understand what’s good for them.
Last month, The Washington Post refused to print the results of its own poll, showing that ObamaCare was at an all-time low in popularity. And, right now newspapers are debating whether they should adopt “undocumented immigrant” instead of “illegal immigrant” not because the latter term is inaccurate but because they think their readers will fall for the subtle manipulation.
Just because everyone at the Huffington Post and The New York Times reader forums is regurgitating the same pre-baked narrative isn’t proof the narrative is right, it’s just proof that everyone in the bubble needs to get out more.
Indeed, it’s deeply reassuring (though no doubt dismaying to the Times, MSNBC and other outlets), that the American people didn’t buy it.
After three days of “discourse hysteria” a CBS poll released Tuesday found that 57% of Americans found the killing unrelated to the political discourse. By Friday a poll by Quinnipiac found that only 15% of Americans blamed the murder spree on “heated political rhetoric.” A generation or two ago, this would never have happened.
The myth that JFK was killed by a “climate of hate” a common falsehood endlessly repeated this week (Kennedy was murdered by a communist) was made possible by a near monopolistic control of the press by people who all thought the same way.
Today, thanks to the breakdown of the old monopoly and the rise of the Internet and a conservative-leaning alternative media, such instant mythmaking is a lot more difficult. Indeed a lot of “extremist” discourse is really just inconvenient truth-telling by political opponents the liberal establishment would rather not hear from.
Obviously, even The New York Times eventually got the story right, and the facts eventually won out (though apologies have yet to materialize).
But it is also abundantly clear that many of the people and institutions piously speechifying about the desperate need to moderate the political discourse had no problem falsely indicting others in a horrendous murder, not because they knew the charge was true but solely because they desperately wanted it to be.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.
Aw, jeez... (you know the rest)
There fixed it.
Good points, good to see them altogether.
He’s one of theirs, they need to own him.
She has no shame. She defines the term “talking head,” unfortunately there is a vast wasteland between her ears.
Spot on! I hope we wind up in the same camp.
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