By Steve Sailer
01/10/2011
It was only natural during the early hours of Saturday for liberals to hope that the Arizona shooter would turn out to be their Marinus van der Lubbe. Yet, within a few hours, it was obvious that the killer was a long-term loon who didn’t fit into the usual political categories. (VDARE has the facts.)
Those facts dissuaded quite a number of commentators, who have since moved on to gun control as their salient for squeezing some advantage out of the massacre. (Of course, in a country with 200,000,000 or so existing guns, gun control is hardly much of a deterrent to this kind of — fortunately, quite rare — homicidal maniac. Gun control can play a role in dissuading criminals who don’t want to get caught, but not much of one in slowing down the few who have thought things through and don’t care about consequences.)
But, the editorial board of the New York Times, which led a campaign of opprobrium against the voters of Arizona for most of 2010 over SB1070, is trying to rewrite history through sheer control of the bullhorn. From the Monday edition, long after the facts were out:
Shooting in Arizona
Editorial: Bloodshed and InvectiveArizona should take the lead in quieting the voices of intolerance and imposing sensible gun control laws.
In other words, No Tolerance for anybody we can’t tolerate.
… It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members.
But … we don’t care, so we're going to do it anyway:
But it is legitimate 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. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman is, not surprisingly, enraged about what he sees as a climate of hate.
Climate of Hate
By PAUL KRUGMANWhen you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
Who cares about facts? What is important is how Paul feels about things. Because Paul is such an even-tempered individual who always has a kind word for everybody, Paul is just furious — furious — about hate. Paul hates hate. Paul smash hate!
(By the way, it’s instructive to compare press coverage of this massacre to that of the Omar Thornton massacre last August.)
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.