NRO's Andrew McCarthy doesn't read too good
June 12, 2009 8:56 am ET by Eric Boehlert
Over at The Corner, McCarthy's busy bashing the Department Homeland Security that warned about possible acts of anti-Semitic violence from lone wolf white supremacists, just like the one that struck the Holocaust Museum. Y'know, the report that also warned about right-wing domestic terrorists, like the one who is accused of assassinating abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, and the right-wing gun nut charged with killing Pittsburgh cops.
But McCarthy's angry because despite that obvious trend of far-right attacks, he's sure the DHS report, which warned about precisely that kind of violence, was somehow off the mark. Whatever you say Andrew.
But this passage was especially embarrassing [emphasis added]:
The DHS report was noxious because it smeared conservatives as bigots and claimed, in the absence of any evidence that “right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruits”
Number of times "conservative" was mentioned in the DHS report? Zero.
Why conservatives continue to see their own reflection in a report that's basically about skinheads and white supremacists remains one of the more troubling political questions of 2009.
If there were a resurgence in the Weather Underground or domestic Communist terrorists and the DHS issued a report about them, my reaction as a left leaning individual would be "Good, I hope they catch those creeps, violence is wrong and these idiots give my beliefs a bad name" not "STOP PICKING ON ME!" which seems to have been the conservative media's response to a report on neo-Nazis.
Like, in the recent past when the Bush administration issued a report about possible left wing extremist groups who wish to do damage to people, and or property in pursuit of their "beliefs". I say, get them. They do something, or are planning to do something illegal, get them. Toss them in jail, and I hope to never see them free again. Groups like that give the mainstream folks a bad name, but you can dissociate yourself from them. It just seems that the right wingers are trying really hard to NOT do that.
I wonder if any of them actually read said report? Probably not.
But hate on the radio - and who keeps proping up poor Ann Falter? What does she have to say except hate and bitter bile? - doesn't have any negative effects?
Conservatives want to be the hero, not the terrorist. So therefore, when reality intrudes and says, 'Right-wing extremists are dangerous,' they throw a fit.
Because they're narcissists.
These are the people who adopted the Minutemen as a fountain of useful rhetoric, because hateful white people usually vote Republican. Bush played victorious warrior on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the Minutemen played posse in the mythical American west. Not as a cynical ploy, but as wish-fulfillment.