Here’s one for the Hall of Shame.
A few months ago, US Census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead. The death was suspicious – he was found hanging, with anti-government graffiti scrawled on his chest.
This happened not long after Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke about her ambivalence about cooperating with a census that, at the time, the Obama Administration was overtly politicizing.
The Sorosphere leapt into action. To pick three examples:
- The direly-misnamed “Thinkprogress” took all of a day to conjure up a mythical right-wing terror movement based on the death.
- City Pages generic angst-filled hYpStR Matt Hoffman went all CSI on us before the police were even done at the crime scene: “Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?
- Dusty “The Michael Brodkorb Of Snark” Trice delivered a verdict before they’d actually cut Sparkman’s body down: “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. “
“Inflammatory rhetoric”. Heh.
Heh. Heh.
Oh, yeah. It’s official; they were full of s**t (emphases added by me):
A part-time U.S. Census worker found dead near a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a murder, authorities have concluded.
Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, apparently was trying to preserve payments under life insurance policies he had taken out, one as recently as May, which paid benefits if he died as a result of murder or accident, but not suicide or natural causes, police said.
Sparkman had survived a bout with cancer a few years ago, but he told a friend he believed the cancer had returned and that he would die, police said.
In a two-month investigation, police marshaled a number of reasons to conclude Sparkman ended his own life. Among other things, only Sparkman’s DNA was found on evidence at the scene, and he had told a friend details of his plan that matched what happened, police said at a news conference Tuesday.
And when, not if, some leftyblogging hamster tries to equivocate on this result, let it be repeated:
Police interviewed potential homicide suspects but ruled them out and found no evidence pointing to any conclusion except that Sparkman killed himself.
Matt? Dusty? “Think?”
All of you leftyblog hamsters?
Do you have something to tell all the sane, responsible people?
Followup question: Sparkman could have chosen many, many ways to cover up his suicide. But as his last act on this earth, Sparkman apparently chose to go out in a way that, he would seem to have known, would implicate in his death a whole lot of peaceable, law-abiding people whose only “crime” is distrusting government; people like Rep. Bachmann and, incidentally, me (in addition to committing fraud). Question: Whose rhetoric is really doing the harm, here?
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