I had a little flashback yesterday. One of the obnoxious lefties in my neighborhood still has his “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” sticker on his rusty, oil-belching Subaru.
Of course it is. Unless you’re a limited-government conservative.
Matt Hoffmann at the ever-less-interesting City Pages marinades in the slander:
Crazy Michele Bachmann [Uh, Lazy, Cliche-addicted “Writer” Matt Hoffman? That’s “Representative Michele Bachmann, to you] has said many foolish things as of late, but who can forget her crusade against the census?
Bachmann proclaimed that she wouldn’t fill out the census form because she was worried about being rounded up and put into Japanese internment camps (sorry folks, there’s no making sense of it).
Of course there is. Giving information to the government is always a two-edged sword at best – as the law-abiding gun owners of Morton Grove, Illinois.
Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?
Dunno, Matt. If someone shoots Michele Bachmann (hint: don’t), will all of you leftymedia lemmings who’ve been dutifully parrotting the “Bachmann is Crazy” meme for the past ten years “own some responsibilty?”
The answer, of course, is “no”, partly because “lefties never believe they’re responsible for the consquences of their words and deeds” – and partly because we have no idea what motivated the killer (and kudos to Matt Hoffman for being the Eff Bee Friggin Eye to figuring out the motivation!), and partly because it’s an incredible stretch to think that anybody outside of Karl Bremer and Bill Pendergast would ever be motivated to violence by Rep. Bachmann’s sometimes-hyperbolic, sometimes malapropic, but always benign statements (not that facts mean anything to trained meme-repetition labradoodles like Hoffman).
But mostly because most people know that it’s stupid to blame free speech, even dissent, even heated, sometimes hyperbolic dissent, for the occasional, isolated action of (someone we can fairly assume is) an insane person.
Dusty Trice makes the case:
Bachmann went after the census workers, [er – actually, she went after the Census – Ed.] saying she was worried that the information they collected might be used to put Americans in concentration camps. Then on 9/12/09 a census worker is found hanged near a cemetary in Kentucky, his corpse desecrated with what appears to be anti-government language carved into his chest.
Right.
In similar news, in 1969 the Beatles released “Helter Skelter”; the Manson family shortly went on a crime spree for which John Lennon is rightly blamed. Ditto Jodie Foster and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan…
I’m going to say it again because sadly I feel it bears repeating. I strongly believe that the inflammatory rhetoric Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks passes for policy debate is going to end in violence.
This, of course, is Dusty Trice, the Walter Winchell of the Twin Cities blogosphere; the guy who conjured an “angry mob” and a “speech ban” apparently from pronto-pup fumes.
And so in a world where fact is subordinate to agenda, of course every act of violence is going to be tied to Bachmann’s “inflammatory rhetoric”. And Glenn Beck’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s, and for that matter Tim Pawlenty’s and mine. Because the left doesn’t like the way the public discourse is going for them; things have taken a sharp, unexpected swerve since The One took office. And the only response they know, indeed the only tool they have in the toolbox, is to defame, demonize and slander dissent; to try to get “the faithful” to feel like they’re the white hats surrounded by the benighted and icky.
The data is hammered into place to fit the conclusion.
Which seems to be why we still have a City Pages. That and the ads.
Not to worry. You benighted and icky types remain very much in the minority, despite all the noise you make shouting people down at meetings.
very much in the minority,
Til the next election!
How about the Noo Yawk governor’s race?
So says an occasionally unhinged clown who visits MANY of the comment threads on Shot in the Dark to…
…shout down anyone to the right of Che and Stalin.
There’s a race? Ten bucks says Andrew Cuomo is going to be the next governor of New York.
At the time Bachman made her comments, the Obamatons had planned to use acorn to assist the census takers.
Needless to say, events of the past two weeks have forced a change in plans.
Here is the Bachman quote:
If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947,” she said, “the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up.
An article from the Seattle PI (with an NYTimes byline) described\s the scholarship behind Bachman’s claim:
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/cens17.shtml
Here are a few quotes from the article:
Also from the article:
“We’ve always suspected this,” said Norman Mineta, a former California congressman who was relocated with his family from San Jose to a detention camp in Wyoming. “After all, they are the keeper of this kind of information.”
Mineta is a democrat and an Obama supporter.
Yeah, Clown!
Calling the jack-booted thugs under the direction of the Census Czar jack-booted thugs is as American as calling for an investigation of the Anti-American members of Congress. Calling for Obammy to show his birth certificate is just as much a part of America’s Great Democratic Tradition as calling for Bush to show the recount certificate from Florida. Everybody does it.
And if some nutjob kills a few census workers or Oklahoma City federal employees, don’t go blaming the people who called those bureaucrats the vanguard of the Socialist Takeover of Real America.
Isn’t that what Libruls do when they called Bush stupid?
/jc
Actually lefties have called for Congresswoman Bachmann’s death on the Star-Tribune’s comment section.
Also….Fritz Mondale called Obama opponents racist today. Yesterday the National Review online reported that Jimmie Carter was a hard core segregationalist while serving on the Plains Georgia school board in 1956. He pledged to ingnore the Brown decision.
Hey, not all Subaru owners are lefties! I’ve got a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” sticker on mine.
I found a few interesting left-weird-insane uses of the Bachman quote.
The first is the appearance of the quote in thinkprogress:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/25/bachmann-fox-census/
Ahh! There’s ACORN again, the moronic left has recently shown more . . . subdued support for their favorite NG0 lately.
The Bachman quote was also carried at left-wing site thedailybeast http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/bachmann-census-will-lead-to-interment/bachmannalia/
under the headline
Bachmann: Census Will Lead to Internment
This is hilarious because the bachman quote beneath the headline she clearly states that she is not saying that census will lead to internment.
I don’t think Mitch is referring to STi owners…
“But police officials admit to being baffled by the killing of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old substitute teacher and Boy Scout leader. They are also exploring the possibility he was murdered because he stumbled on some illegal activity, such as methamphetamine labs, while knocking on doors in the area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural south-east Kentucky.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/24/census-worker-hanged-fed
In some areas, just knocking on doors can get you killed.
Like the Southside of Chicago.
AC: despite all the noise you make shouting people down at meetings.
Clearly the irony of a lefty assclown making this statement is lost on him.
Also, is there a right-wing equivalent to CP? If not and some venture capitalist has some spare change I have an idea 🙂
Finally, AC and others there’s the NJ and VA guv race in 40 days. I’m pretty sure the last time a R had the governers mansion in NJ we were still recovering from the Great Depression… of 1893
Yes, that crazy Michele Bachmann going on and on with wild theories about corruption at ACORN, that fine upstanding civic organization. What world does she live in anyway?
BTW, I’ve forwarded slashes’ last comment to the FBI.
Obviously a right wing nut job.
Nobody on the left (or right, for that matter) made Bachmann go nuts. She did that all on her own. The examples of the absolutely senseless rhetoric she’s come off with are too numerous to list here. She is a national embarrassment to the State of Minnesota.
BTW–I own a labradoodle. Damn fine dog. I wish you wouldn’t refer to them in such a denigrating fashion…
“denigrating”
racist!
So, bphoon, is Bachman more or less crazy than Cynthia McKinney?
“Like the Southside of Chicago.”
That’s the baddest part of town, Kerm.
McKinney and Bachmann are both crazy.
That’s the baddest part of town, Kerm.
Nicely played, AC.
That’s the baddest part of town, Kerm.
And if you go down there you better just beware of a man named Angryclown.
Chuck Norris tugged on Superman’s cape.
Very nice, Kerm.
Flush drives a Subaru?
“BTW–I own a labradoodle.”
Yeah, Okeedokee. And you were saying?
“That’s the baddest part of town, Kerm.”
The pizza and chicken at the Beverly is worth the risk.
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