An Utter Disregard For All Truth And Decency

Ace catches the media doing… well, what the media does.  The shamelessness is breathtaking.

James Taranto has, I think, the best take on all this.

Burning an effigy, like burning an American flag, is constitutionally protected symbolic speech. It is also about as eliminationist as speech can get, short of a true threat or incitement. To Krugman, it is a fun party activity. It is shockingly hypocritical for such a man to deliver a pious lecture about the dangers of eliminationist rhetoric.

The Times is far from alone in responding to the Tucson massacre with false accusations and inflammatory innuendoes against its foes. We focus on the Times because it is the leader–the most authoritative voice of the left-liberal media, or what used to be called the “mainstream” media.

What accounts for this descent into madness? We think the key lies in this sentence from yesterday’s Times editorial: “But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible . . .”

This is a particularly vivid example of the Ann Coulter Projection Principle: if you want to know what kind of vile behavior leftists are engaing in, listen to what they’re accusing their opponents of.

When James says this is about “competition for authority” he could not be more right: this phenomenon is a direct result of the fact we just witnessed the rise of a truly grassroots minarchist movement, culminating in the takeover of the House of Representatives, and the statists are running scared, grasping desperately for any advantage in any crisis that could help them regain the reins of power.  They still believe their problem was “messaging” and so their new message will be “our opponents’ rhetoric causes shootings!” Never mind that the numerous examples showing they engage in exactly the same sort of rhetoric, or that the shooter in the recent tragedy was obviously deranged and described by friends as left-leaning, or that people have died (including a Republican judge), perhaps most tragically a nine-year-old girl whose father showed incredible grace in asking she not be used as a martyr to further restrict our freedoms.  None of that is relevant to them.  What matters is that they bring a gun to every partisan knife fight.  And with the MSM in their hip pocket, they feel they can not only lie and smear with impunity but simultaneously claim to be paragons of decency compared to their opponents… and get away with it.

UPDATE:  More from Taranto.  And Glenn Reynolds is all over this issue — just keep scrolling.