![\"chanting_points_200px\"](\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/chanting_points_200px.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n…no. \u00a0Call Barack Obama a Cynic.<\/p>\n
Our Ghoulish President<\/strong>: \u00a0The bodies were literally not cold from the Charleston shooting when the President started trying to politicize the incident<\/a>:<\/p>\n “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he continued. “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Tell it to Charlie Hebdo<\/em>.<\/p>\n Sure it happens in other countries. \u00a0A sickening amount of it<\/a>. \u00a0The US doesn’t even top the list on most categories\u00a0of “rampage killing”.\u00a0Not even the “religious or hate crimes<\/a>” category, where the US isn’t even in the top five (Roof is tied for seventh). \u00a0And who’da thunk it; car-crazy Americans barely make the top ten in vehicular spree-killings<\/a>. \u00a0 [1]<\/p>\n The US is not uniquely violent – indeed, the left’s constant claim that we’re the most violent country in the world is \u00a0wishful thinking<\/a>. \u00a0While the rate is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, it is higher than European countries – whose populations tend to be small, homogenous and very orderly. \u00a0Among large, populous, heterogenous industrial states, Russia and Argentina and Brazil, among others, all have much higher murder rates.<\/p>\n The President is not talking fact.<\/p>\n \u00a0And I’m pretty sure the President knows that. \u00a0He was elected by low-information voters who believe and robotically chant what they’re told, no matter how preposterous, and it’s to them he was speaking yesterday.<\/p>\n Desperately Seeking Boogeymen<\/strong>: \u00a0Now, MPR’s listener community doesn’t like to see itself as people who mindlessly gobble up chanting points in the service of political agendas. \u00a0And how about those Twins?<\/p>\n Yesterday, MPR’s Bob Collins (of whom this blog has been a fan for the better part of a decade) posted a piece on the Charleston shooting<\/a>. \u00a0And he starts out strong enough:<\/p>\n The sideshow debate has started in the wake of last night\u2019s killings of nine black people in a church in South Carolina at the hands of a young, white man: The debate over how to classify the horror. Was it a \u201chate\u201d crime. Is this \u201cterrorism\u201d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’d rapidly becoming a “Berg’s Law”; don’t believe anything you read in the media about a spectacular crime for at least a week, until the story isn’t “sexy” to editors any more, and some real reporting might, possibly. happen.<\/p>\n We don’t know what motivated Dylann Roof, but there seems to be credible evidence that race motivated him; in at least one photo, he’s seen with an apartheid-era South African flag, which would seem to be an endorsement of racism by someone who was at most a toddler when the Botha government collapsed. \u00a0This is an incident where the DOJ’s hate crime investigation would seem to be justified.<\/p>\n As to “terrorism?” \u00a0Leave aside for a moment that we didn’t know his motives yesterday (although they’re clearer today<\/a>); it’s ghoulish to split hairs over definitions, but “wants to start a race war”, if accurate, would seem to qualify, even if Roof is otherwise batspittle crazy.<\/p>\n But beyond that?<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,\u201d Gov. Nikki Haley said.<\/p>\n Sure we will. We already do. The only mystery is why we\u2019re reluctant to call it what it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And that is…:<\/p>\n In the hours after Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney\u2019s death, a white supremacist group posted on his Facebook page, \u201cMaybe one of my supporters in South Carolina can run for your seat. You don\u2019t need it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Islamic radicals drove planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the most dangerous terror threat to the nation, the FBI warned, was the white supremacist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n They’ve been warning about the impending danger of the white supremacist for decades, now. \u00a0Actually, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has been warning us<\/a> about tax protesters, pro-lifers, Second Amendment activists, school choice advocates, anti-socialized-healthcare activists, land rights activists, Montana Freemen, tenthers, Tea Partiers and\u00a0<\/i>white supremacists for seven years now.<\/p>\n And there are white supremacists out there. \u00a0People I knew ran into them, guns blazing, in Medina North Dakota<\/a>, 33 years ago. \u00a0And not long after that, around the time my talk radio career started, when Denver liberal talk show host Alan Berg was murdered by neo-Nazis. \u00a0In the eighties, northern Wisconsin reportedly had any number of white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, “Christian Identity” (not to be confused with “Christian”) movements settled in. \u00a0In a nation of 300 million people, you’re going to get some of every flavor out there.<\/p>\n Here’s the interesting part, though. \u00a0If Roof’s goal was to “start a race war”, he joins a short rogue’s gallery of white Americans who’ve hoped to start race wars with their crimes; Tim McVeigh was another.<\/p>\n Now, if you think there’s a huge groundswell of racial hatred brewing in the hearts of “white America” [2], you’d think that actions like McVeigh’s and Eric Rudolph’s and, eventually, Dyllann Roof’s, would show some evidence of striking a chord with “white America”, things like the sort of dancing in the street like Palestinians do when suicide bombers kill Jews or terrorists ram planes into skyscrapers.<\/p>\n You’d think there’d be multiple copycats, and a surge of support. \u00a0Hell, in an age when it takes ten seconds to set up a Facebook page, you’d think there’d be a wave of “Dyllann Roott is Teh Dreamy!” Facebook pages sprouting up. \u00a0To go with all the “Tim McVeigh is Teh Bomb!” pages that are out there.<\/p>\n But it hasn’t happened – not outside of a dismal little splatter of statistical background noise.<\/p>\n Our PC-addled government has been warning us for half a dozen years now about a wave of “white terror” that, we’re told, is just around the corner.<\/p>\n Any day now.<\/p>\n The Whammy<\/strong>: \u00a0Actually, I was wrong. I\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>think of one white terrorist who generated a groundswell of support; someone who specifically carried out acts of premeditated violence to inflict terror with the intent to change society, who got a huge wave of public support.<\/p>\n