This week a religious fanatic, driven by his ideological fixations, shot and killed a man that, for political and religious reasons, he considered a murderer. The fanatic drove off and was later caught by police. Of course, the killer himself harbored a idiosyncratic mix of toxic religious and political ideology that led him into violent hatred of the institutions of freedom and those who live in freedom. But was he also not encouraged by a background of more “mainstream” partisanship in which political spokesmen—television and radio talk show hosts, bloggers, and political leaders—speak in increasingly angry, bitter, and violent terms of their political opposition? The political atmosphere has seen more and more spokesmen speaking in anger, hostility, and disrespect about those they view as their enemies, and this breakdown in civility must have had some impact on this gunman.
By the way, I’m not speaking of the murder of George Tiller in Kansas.
I’m speaking instead of the murder on Monday of 24 year old U.S. Army Recruiter William Long in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was gunned down by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, evidently a member of the Nation of Islam, who also injured two others before driving away in a truck full of other weapons.
The left exploits political murders as an opportunity to portray the right as dominated by fanatics and whackjobs. Given the left’s domination of the media, they can exploit the opportunity by talking for days on end on about how nasty and ignorant and dangerous conservative talk radio and television shows are. And no doubt there are many ignorant and dangerous conservatives and conservative talk show hosts. But when a political murder occurs attributable to a leftist ideologue, they don’t even try to fit the shoe on that foot. There’s no discussion of the fanatics on the left whose rhetoric is every bit as intense and uncivil. In that case, the killer is just a lone fanatic, you see. And many on the left don’t even realize that they are fostering the double standard.
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