I had a little flashback yesterday.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course it is.\u00a0 Unless you’re a limited-government conservative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Matt Hoffmann at the ever-less-interesting City Pages marinades in the slander<\/a>:<\/p>\n Crazy Michele Bachmann\u00a0[Uh, Lazy, Cliche-addicted “Writer” Matt Hoffman?\u00a0 That’s “Representative Michele Bachmann, to you]\u00a0has said many foolish things as of late, but who can forget her crusade against the census?<\/p>\n 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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course there is.\u00a0 Giving information to the government is always a two-edged sword at best – as the law-abiding gun owners of Morton Grove, Illinois.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dunno, Matt.\u00a0 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?”<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Eff Bee Friggin Eye<\/em> 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 <\/em>be motivated to violence by Rep. Bachmann’s sometimes-hyperbolic, sometimes malapropic,\u00a0but always benign statements (not that facts mean anything to trained meme-repetition labradoodles like Hoffman). \u00a0<\/p>\n But mostly because most people know that it’s stupid <\/em>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.<\/p>\n Dusty Trice makes the case<\/span><\/a>:<\/p>\n Bachmann went after the census workers, <\/em>[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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Right.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Ditto Jodie Foster and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan…<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This, of course, is Dusty Trice, \u00a0the Walter Winchell of the Twin Cities blogosphere; the guy who conjured an “angry<\/a> mob<\/a>” and a “speech ban<\/a>” apparently from pronto-pup fumes.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so in a world where fact is subordinate to agenda, of course <\/em>every act of violence is going to be tied to Bachmann’s “inflammatory rhetoric”.\u00a0 And Glenn Beck’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s, and for that matter Tim Pawlenty’s and mine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The data is hammered into place to fit the conclusion.<\/p>\n Which seems to be why we still have a City Pages<\/em>.\u00a0 That and the ads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a little flashback yesterday.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course it is.\u00a0 Unless you’re a limited-government conservative.\u00a0 Matt Hoffmann at the ever-less-interesting City Pages marinades in the slander: Crazy Michele Bachmann\u00a0[Uh, Lazy, Cliche-addicted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6680,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions\/6680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}