Right-wing media's pathetic attempt to spin the Discovery Channel hostage situation
September 01, 2010 4:21 pm ET by Media Matters staff
As the horrifying hostage situation at the Discovery Channel building in Maryland continues to unfold, some in the right-wing media have chosen to use the incident for political gain.
For example, conservative columnist and regular Fox News commentator* S.E. Cupp tweeted that "Discovery terrorist's ideas, if not his methods, make him ideal WH adviser," invoking smears that have been pushed by the right against science advisor John Holdren.
Similarly, Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft has dubbed the gunman a "leftist activist."
Though at this point we know very little about Lee, his apparent demands indicate that his views are far from being grounded in a definable mainstream ideology, either liberal or conservative. Instead, they show a clearly disturbed individual. While Lee calls for "solutions" to problems that liberals typically highlight, such as global warming and unemployment, his lengthy rant is mainly composed of absurd demands such as the following: "All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."
Additionally, Lee echoes right-wing talking points with his attack on "anchor baby filth":
5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)
* Cupp's position corrected.
And highliter thinks he/she has a "gotcha" by catching the posters here politicizing the tragedy. Brilliant.
And trying to connect this to responsible population control ( arguably a more liberal position) involves ignoring the theme of stopping the birth of, specifically, "third world parasites".
A lot of right wingers wouldn't disagree with that, they just don't want anybody suggesting a limit on good white Christian American babies.
I don't have cable, so I don't get Fox (thank God), but I get treated to right-wing nonsense on WJR radio, and it already happened this morning. Paul W. Smith, who has substitute-hosted for Limbaugh, enough said, was claiming that Lee was an "obvious left-winger" and decried the media for ignoring it.
The truth is, it is not obvious at all, and the media is actually so desperate to claim that there is such a thing as a left-wing terrorist that they're eager to trumpet such a case as this.
Terrorism is the province of cowardly, desperate, delusional, violent people. It doesn't necessarily have to have a political bent, but in practice, the far right generates much more of that kind of behavior.
The terms he used in the paragraph above DOES sound more like something you'd hear on hate talk radio, does it not?
Two examples; the depressed guy who flew his plane into the IRS building, and the nut job that shot that guar at the holocaust museum. This site blamed right wing hate for both these incidents.
Your right these people are simply nut jobs, I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy on this site.
We're left with a lot on unanswered questions....
-- It will be interesting to see if any reports come out of any reading materials found in his home -- txthinker
Nice catch, gang...I'll help you connect the dots:
Lee said at the time that he experienced an "awakening" when he watched former Vice President Al Gore's environmental documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
Oh, and even if he was influenced by Gore's documentary, global warming/climate change is only a left v. right issue to SOME people in THIS country [thanks to strategist/doublespeak master, Frank Luntz]. Most people in this country and in the world think it is a HUMAN issue.
If you read this man's manifesto, he was horribly, horribly mentally disturbed.
As I said, if you read the man's manifesto, he was influenced by many sources . . . some that you, as a faux conservative, would falsely call left and some that you would falsely call "conservative."
Again, the man was mentally ill, political ideology is completely and totally irrelevant.
Lee insane. Lee like Gore. Gore insane too. Dots connected. Ugh ugh. Ha ha. All lib insane. Really showed you.
I may have missed the progressive equivalent of Ted "Pantload" Nugent threatening to give a presidential candidate a ride on the muzzle of his assault rifle. Or the liberal Glenn Beck like TV host who fantasizes how he'd like to poison the Speaker of the House. Or the guy from the left who's "lookin' out for us" repeatedly calling someone performing a legal medical procedure a killer.
I'm not saying that prominent liberal spokespersons haven't been guilty of incitement, I'm just saying I may have missed it.