Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

Call me a cynic…

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…no.  Call Barack Obama a Cynic.

Our Ghoulish President:  The bodies were literally not cold from the Charleston shooting when the President started trying to politicize the incident:

“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.”

Tell it to Charlie Hebdo.

Sure it happens in other countries.  A sickening amount of it.  The US doesn’t even top the list on most categories of “rampage killing”. Not even the “religious or hate crimes” category, where the US isn’t even in the top five (Roof is tied for seventh).  And who’da thunk it; car-crazy Americans barely make the top ten in vehicular spree-killings.   [1]

The US is not uniquely violent – indeed, the left’s constant claim that we’re the most violent country in the world is  wishful thinking.  While 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.  Among large, populous, heterogenous industrial states, Russia and Argentina and Brazil, among others, all have much higher murder rates.

The President is not talking fact.

 And I’m pretty sure the President knows that.  He 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.

Desperately Seeking Boogeymen:  Now, MPR’s listener community doesn’t like to see itself as people who mindlessly gobble up chanting points in the service of political agendas.  And how about those Twins?

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.  And he starts out strong enough:

The sideshow debate has started in the wake of last night’s 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 “hate” crime. Is this “terrorism”?

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.

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.  This is an incident where the DOJ’s hate crime investigation would seem to be justified.

As to “terrorism?”  Leave aside for a moment that we didn’t know his motives yesterday (although they’re clearer today); 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.

But beyond that?

“We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” Gov. Nikki Haley said.

Sure we will. We already do. The only mystery is why we’re reluctant to call it what it is.

And that is…:

In the hours after Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney’s death, a white supremacist group posted on his Facebook page, “Maybe one of my supporters in South Carolina can run for your seat. You don’t need it anymore.”

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.

They’ve been warning about the impending danger of the white supremacist for decades, now.  Actually, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has been warning us about tax protesters, pro-lifers, Second Amendment activists, school choice advocates, anti-socialized-healthcare activists, land rights activists, Montana Freemen, tenthers, Tea Partiers and white supremacists for seven years now.

And there are white supremacists out there.  People I knew ran into them, guns blazing, in Medina North Dakota, 33 years ago.  And 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.  In the eighties, northern Wisconsin reportedly had any number of white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, “Christian Identity” (not to be confused with “Christian”) movements settled in.  In a nation of 300 million people, you’re going to get some of every flavor out there.

Here’s the interesting part, though.  If 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.

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.

You’d think there’d be multiple copycats, and a surge of support.  Hell, 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.  To go with all the “Tim McVeigh is Teh Bomb!” pages that are out there.

But it hasn’t happened – not outside of a dismal little splatter of statistical background noise.

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.

Any day now.

The Whammy:  Actually, I was wrong. I did 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.

Kathleen Soliah.   Whose well-heeled, Volvo-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing, Whole Foods-shopping, NPR-listening neighbors rushed the barricades waving their checkbooks and their indignation.

Other than that?  I’m at a loss…

[1] Purely as a matter of trivia?  The US doesn’t even show up in one category, “grenade amok” killings – spree killings using explosives.

[2] As if ascribing a single ethnicity to a group that includes Sicilians and Scots, Armenians and Icelanders, has any legitimate meaning.

10 thoughts on “Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

  1. Since he went to a church to murder Christians, here’s the headline I’d like to see: “Authorities are checking into any possible links between Roof and the Madison Wisc based hate group People for the Separation of Church and State”. Or perhaps “The ACLU denies having ties to Roof”.

  2. You forgot veterans in the list of people to be concerned about (according to Janet). We are all just ticking time bombs, waiting to explode and/or take our rage out on innocents. It’s the PTSD you know.

  3. Right there at the top of your source material:
    “This list is incomplete”
    For starters the school massacre list does not even include Columbine

  4. Collins, like all leftists, jump on these incidents to 1) assuage their white guilt, and 2) further their agenda. They could give a damn less about who dies or how.

    With the notable (and oft ignored) exception of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, it’s a fact that most mass murders in this country have been perpetrated by white males. It’s also a fact that most of them were certifiably insane.

    But what of the hundreds of blacks that are shot down every month one or two at a time, in the festering streets of leftist dominated cities? No, you won’t hear anything about that from the likes of Collins and his ilk unless it is attached to a fundraising plea for the Brady Campaign or one of it’s copy cats.

    I can smell Collins’ self-hatred from here. Makes me gag.

  5. RickDFL, when I look at the list of school massacres, I see Columbine listed as number 9.

  6. Rick, even if Columbine had been omitted–and as Loren notes, it wasn’t, you’re just looking at the wrong category–the principle remains the same. Dear leader was dead wrong when he tried to make his argument, and should have known it and acted on that knowledge.

    You would think that the guy who accepted his nomination under the fake Greek columns is either entirely disconnected with reality, or has some kind of complex. And we warned you back in 2008.

    Act in haste, repent at leisure, Rick.

  7. BB it is worse than that, Rick actually said the school massacre list, not the other rampage killing list, omitted Columbine, when it is there.

    Number 1 on the rampage killing list for the USA: Kileen, TX Which would be Luby’s Cafeteria, at the time, a gun-free zone.

  8. Obama simply is not a smart person. He is bigoted in the sense that he arrives at opinions through ignorance or faulty reasoning, and then holds tightly to those opinions. Who knows what he means by the term “advanced nations”, other than it apparently does not include certain Eastern European countries, and it does not, apparently, take relative population size into account.
    As a lefty friend reminded me, Obama has personally signed the death warrants for hundreds of individuals, and is responsible for the death of as many civilians in collateral damage from drone strikes.

  9. And, proving my point re; the obtuseness of the Current Occupant, today a crazy guy in Austria goes on a mass killing spree.
    I would pay good money to a journalist who would ask Obama if he thought Austria was an advanced country based on his “no mass killings” definition.

  10. Pingback: Heads? Disaster. Tails? Catastrophe | Shot in the Dark

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