Michelle Malkin can't explain away O'Reilly's "Dr. Killer" rhetoric
June 03, 2009 2:05 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
This is an argument the right-wing is desperate to make this week in the wake of the domestic terrorist who is accused of killing Dr. George Tiller, which was quickly followed by news that an American Muslim had killed an Army recruiter in Arkansas. The argument that GOP Noise Machine leaders like Malkin want very badly to make is pretend the circumstances surrounding both killings are exactly the same; if media conservatives are to blame in any way for Tiller's death, than media liberals are to blame for the killing of the recruiters because liberal pundits created a dangerous, anti-military atmosphere
Yet Malkin's recent column only highlights how there's no connection between the two events. (As CF earlier noted, that's not the only hole in Malkin's column.)
Malkin is desperate the link the two shooting because right-wing pundits, like Bill O'Reilly, are under fire in the wake of Tiller's murder for the kind of vigilante rhetoric they used against the abortion provider over the years. They're under fire because people are asking the rather obvious question of, if the relentless hate language pinpointed at Tiller by the likes of O'Reilly and others in the conservative media helped foster a dangerous atmosphere where a right-wing terrorist would put those words into action and eliminate Tiller.
Not fair, cries Malkin, who clings to the Arkansas tragedy as proof that liberals are guilty of the exact same thing; that liberals in the media created a dangerous atmosphere with their anti-recruiter rhetoric, which then prompted a killer to put those words into action and eliminate one recruiter. (Glenn Beck made that very claim on his radio show yesterday.)
Slight problem. Neither Malkin nor anybody else on the right this week can find any hateful, violent anti-recruiter rhetoric used by any liberal media personalities. Why can't they find the rhetoric? Because nobody on the left with any sort of national platform has targeted Army recruiters in recent years. Period. (If they did, Malkin would have included the damning quotes in her column. Either that, or she needs to hire a new researcher.)
There are no gotcha, hateful get-the-recruiter quotes to hang around the necks of Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow--which Malkin and company are desperate to do--for the simple reason that high-profile media liberals haven't led dangerous crusades to target military recruiters the way O'Reilly led a dangerous crusade against Dr. Tiller.
As a rule, media liberals don't traffic in irresponsible, militia-style rhetoric. Conservatives like O'Reilly and Glenn Beck do though, and now conservatives can't make it go away.
Of course there have been many on the left opposed to half-baked wars, and the criticism goes mostly to government policy, the solution offered is the voting booth.That's how civilized people correct these things, go to the top.Even efforts at removing recruiters from certain areas are not based on any problem with the recruiters, but the bigger machine they represent.
It's only the desperate, those who know that they can't win through rational debate, who fly airplanes into buildings and murder innocent citizens as a way to advance their agenda.
The only person talking about violent retribution was O'Reilly and company who suggested that San Francisco would deserve violence if the will of its voters was respected. No one -- certainly no one with any credibility with anyone to my knowledge -- was targeting recruiters, nor putting lists of recruiters with home addresses on the internet, nor shooting them in the arms, nor stalking them in their places of worship, nor likening them to Hitler, etc..
Their statements imply that all of the talking heads on the right are pro-military.
And I guess they are as long as it's someone else wearing the uniform. Their content to wear just the flag.