Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [99]
Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well. “A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,” Ali said.
Here’s the Times version: “After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a ‘terrorist for killing the baby.’ ” That’s how the Times transformed Loughner from a sicko laughing about a dead fetus to a deadly earnest pro-life fanatic. (Never believe a news story written by Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage, or Scott Shane of the New York Times—or, for simplicity, anything in the Times.)
Loughner’s liberal worldview might have passed unnoticed, as it has with other random nuts committing violence. But liberals opened the door by blaming what they hoped would be Loughner’s right-wing politics.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman got the ball rolling two days after the shooting spree in a column titled “Climate of Hate,” announcing that the cause of the shooting was “toxic rhetoric” coming “overwhelmingly, from the right.”3 This was followed by the usual torrent of exactly zero examples.
Rather, Krugman cited the McVeigh canard, as well as this crucial evidence: Other liberals saying right-wing rhetoric is dangerous! This would be like one birther citing another birther as proof that Obama was born in Kenya.
Thus, Krugman said the Obama administration had issued reports claiming “right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.” Liberals spend a lot of time worrying about the “potential” of violence from the right, whereas conservatives have to worry about actual violence from liberals.
But according to Krugman: “[T]here’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.”
Only a complete zealot like Krugman could say black is white and white is black—not even gray!
Krugman was referring to a remark Bill O’Reilly made about Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank that had roiled the mainstream media for weeks in 2010.
To be fair to O’Reilly, which he wouldn’t be to me, he was joking. We know that because he specifically said so. Milbank had flat-out lied in a column, claiming that Fox News’s election night coverage included only one Democrat. There were, in fact, at least six. O’Reilly called him out on it, then switched to a story about Sharia law in Oklahoma and asked his guest: “Does Sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank? That was a joke for you ‘Media Matters’ people out there, because you know—‘O’Reilly says we want to behead Dana!’ ”4
In response, Milbank wrote what has already been recorded as the gayest column in world history that didn’t include a picture of the cast of Glee:
Bill O’Reilly wants my head—literally. On Thursday night, the Fox News host asked, as part of a show that would be seen by 5.5 million people: ‘Does Sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?’ He then added, ‘That was a joke.’ Hilarious! Decapitation jokes just slay me, and this one had all the more hilarity because the topic of journalist beheadings brings to mind my late friend and colleague Danny Pearl, who replaced me in the Wall Street Journal’s London bureau and later was murdered in Pakistan by people who thought Sharia justified it.… But what was he trying to say? That America would be better if it were more like Iran?5
The liberal blogs soon lit up with red-hot indignation over O’Reilly’s direct threat to personally behead Milbank. It was even discussed on CNN’s Reliable Sources, with Milbank again bleating,