Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [98]
Again, in January 2011, when twenty-two-year-old, left-wing pothead Jared Loughner shot up a Gabrielle Giffords political event at a Tucson Safeway, killing six people, liberals immediately blamed the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and all conservatives for inspiring the shooter.
To make their case, they needed to prove:
Right-wingers had called for violence against anyone, especially moderate Democratic congresswomen
Loughner was listening to them
Loughner was influenced by them
But as more information came out, the truth was nearly the opposite. Loughner’s attack would have gone down in history as another act of terroristic violence by a right-winger, just like McVeigh, except this time conservatives had the Internet and other media outlets to publicize the truth.
No conservative had called for violence against anyone. Nor had any conservative engaged in any “rhetoric” that was likely to lead to violence. Every putative example of “violent rhetoric” these squeamish liberals produced kept being matched by an identical example from the Democrats.
Sarah Palin, for example, was accused of complicity in murder for having produced a map with crosshairs over the congressional districts being targeted by Republicans. So did the Democratic Leadership Committee. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel went on Fox News and said he invented the bull’s-eye maps.
Similarly, every time liberals produced an example of military lingo from a Republican—“we’re going to target this district”—Republicans produced five more from the Democrats. President “whose asses to kick” Obama had warned of “hand-to-hand combat” with his political opponents and said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”—making Obama the first American president to advocate gunfights since Andrew Jackson.
These are figures of speech known as “metaphors.” (Do liberals know where we got the word “campaign”?) It’s not that both sides did something wrong, neither side did anything wrong. But the drama queens ran riot for weeks after the Tucson shooting. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recalled Palin’s statement “We’re not retreating, we’re reloading” and then he said—I quote—“That’s not a metaphor.” If it wasn’t a metaphor, whom did she shoot?
By blaming a mass killing on figures of speech, liberals sounded as crazy as Loughner with his complaints about people’s grammar. After insisting that we drop metaphors, liberals were on the verge of demanding a ban on metonymies—until they realized no one was buying it. (Wait until they find out about gerund phrases!)
As for Loughner being influenced by Tea Partiers, Fox News, and talk radio—oops, another dead end. According to all available evidence, Loughner was a liberal. Every friend of Loughner who characterized his politics described him as liberal. Not one called him a conservative. One friend said Loughner never listened to talk radio or watched the TV news. Throw in “never read books” and you have the dictionary definition of a liberal. Being completely uninformed is precisely how most liberals stay liberal.
According to voluminous Twitter postings the day of the shooting by Caitie Parker, one of Loughner’s friends since high school, he was “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal,” and “a pot head.”2 If any public figure influenced this guy, my money’s on Bill Maher.
But liberals were so determined to exploit the massacre to get conservatives to stop talking, they told calculated lies about Loughner’s politics. In a shocking example, the New York Times implied—against all evidence—that Loughner was a pro-life zealot. Only because numerous other news outlets, including ABC News and the AP, reported the exact same incident in much greater detail—with eyewitness quotes—do we know that the Times rendition was complete bunk.
ABC News reported:
One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act “wildly inappropriate.” “One day [Loughner]