FMJRA 2.0: I Can’t Stay Long

The Republican Party used to be very good at targeting voters. We asked the Senator what he thinks happened to the party’s ability to do this well:

Well, I think we tend to put political people into positions where we should have CEOs who know how to run things. When you’re running a big organization its not the time for red meat for the grass roots. Its the time to make good people around you with good data. And, there are some groups out there beginning to do that…the expertise is out there.

In general, and the Sandy Hook reporting fits my amorphous theory: appeals these days are purely emotional, as though our leadership has either

lost faith in the ability of the people to reason, or
is deliberately undermining the ability of people to reason, as this may make them more docile.

So, what I crave from Mr. DeMint at Heritage is a renewed emphasis on reform. Put the facts out there, make the case for a responsible government, in contrast with the current clown car on parade.

We The People are deeply aware that we have, as a whole, shanked it badly for decades. Let’s have a dispassionate, non-hormonal come-to-Beavis meeting, and set ourselves on a course to fix it, knowing that we’re talking about a decades-long project.

via Jewish Odysseus

Category: GOP

Chris Rock Was Right

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 68 Comments

“Liberals talk about banning guns as if it’s the same as banning murder and banning evil.”
— Ace of Spades

“Gun-free zones are premised on a lie: that murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers. That’s an insult to honest people. Sometimes, it’s a deadly one.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

“Who to blame for mass murder? This may sound weird, but my gut hunch is it’s probably the homicidal psychotic’s fault.”
— Robert Stacy McCain

When I got up Friday morning, live-blogging a mass murder was not part of my plan for the day. In fact, at the end of a post Friday morning about labor union violence in Michigan, I promised further developments on that story. As I was researching that, however, the TV kept updating with news about a shooting at a school in Connecticut and I figured this might be a story worth mentioning on the blog.

The original 12:15 p.m. ET post relayed reports that “three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead,” but added the caution that “early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.”

To say the very least.

By the time I added the first update, NBC was already reporting 20 dead and next it was 24, then 26, then 27, and all these changing numbers were coming amid a welter of confusing (and, as it turned out, largely wrong) details about the shooter, about the victims, etc. And this kept going for about six hours. Everything is still pretty sketchy, but we now have the bare-bones facts of the story. The Associated Press:

The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28, authorities said. Police shed no light on the motive for the attack. The gunman was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother in Connecticut . . .
[Police] gave no details on the victim discovered at another scene, except to say that the person was an adult found dead by police while they were investigating the gunman. A law enforcement official identified the gunman as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the son of a teacher. A second law enforcement official said his mother, Nancy Lanza, was presumed dead. Adam Lanza’s older brother, 24-year-old Ryan, of Hoboken, N.J., was being questioned . . .
Ryan Lanza told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010. . . .
The gunman drove to the school in his mother’s car, the second official said. Three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car. . . .
Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.

OK, so the Associated Press description of the gunman as having “a personality disorder” matches what ABC News is reporting:

Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut this morning, was “obviously not well,” a relative told ABC News.
Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described his mother Nancy as very rigid. “[Adam] was not connected with the other kids,” said one friend.
Late today, police said Nancy Lanza’s body was found in the family home. According to sources, Lanza shot his mother in the face, then left the house armed with at least two semi-automatic handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.

“Obviously not well.” In other words, Adam Lanza was nuts.

Psycho, loony, bonkers, daft, zany, berserk and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Advocates for the mentally ill discourage such colloquial terms as tending to stigmatize psychiatric patients. But we might ask whether stigma — and the consequent damage to the fragile self-esteem of kooks — is really worse than turning loose a homicidal schizo who kills 27 people.

I saw we might ask that, except that it’s politically incorrect to do so. We have been carefully taught that wackos are victims, and we’re not supposed to talk about the possibility that they might also be dangerous, lest we infringe the “rights” of murderous lunatics.

To quote Dirty Harry, “Well, I’m all broken up over that man’s rights.”

You’ll excuse me if I sound somewhat bitter about it, but this school shooting kind of spoiled my plans for the day. And also, some kids in Newtown, Connecticut, will miss the rest of their lives.

Our culture has lost all sense of perspective, of reasonable balance, so that we are unable to make common-sense judgments about risks. Which is the greater danger: That a schizophrenic might have his feelings hurt, or that a schizophrenic might go off his meds and kill people?

Common sense is quite nearly illegal nowadays and it’s certainly unfashionable in the Obama Age. So the usual liberal dingbats — including the ACLU types who assured us it was “a fearless, independent life style” for a crazy woman to defecate in public on the streets of Manahattan — are telling us we need more gun control.

And I say, no, what we need is more kook control. But no member of Congress in either party would have the guts to introduce “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013,” which would put wackjobs like Adam Lanza some place where they couldn’t kill people.

Chris Rock was right: “Whatever happened to ‘crazy’? . . . What? You can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary?”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! If you’ve enjoyed the reading, please feel free to hit the tip jar and/or shop our Amazon links to help support the blog during this holiday season. God bless us every one!

Category: Connecticut, Crime, Culture

“That Concludes Today’s Live At Five Report With Stacy McCain And Smitty”

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

American Glob picks up on the notion in the more swank right-of-center blogs that deep pockets like the Koch Brothers should buy MSNBC. The mental image of Rachel Maddow dissolving upon encounter with a teleprompter loaded with truth is satisfying (starting at 0:24):

Aliester:

The Koch Brothers should buy MSNBC and turn it over to conservative bloggers. That concludes today’s Live at Five Report with Stacy McCain and Smitty. Coming up at 6, Bill Whittle followed by Jim Geraghty and William Jacobson at 7 and Glenn Reynolds at 8. Ratings at MSNBC would go up as FOX News found itself competing for viewers for the first time since launching.

I’d vary the theme slightly and offer up the notion that the Koch’s do a KickStarter-esque project, with the notion that people putting up money have the option of converting their boodle into equity shares of The Koch Channel, or whatever. Spread the risk and build an instant market.

I don’t know that Stacy and I could anchor a show without vast amounts of training and more work than Pamela Anderson and Elizabeth Taylor combined, but I do thank Aliester for the complement.

Meanwhile, there’s a tangentially related gag on Twitter about putting (D) behind your name, so that you can say all manner of nonsense and get a media pass for it. Join the fray!

@jimmiebjr @jonahnro Hovering around asin-eight-point-five, so: yes, but not by much.

— Asin8.5 (D-NOVA) (@smitty_one_each) December 15, 2012

via Insty

Category: Uncategorized

CONNECTICUT SCHOOL SHOOTING UPDATE: Death Toll 27; Gunman Now Identified as 20-Year-Old Adam Lanza

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 55 Comments

UPDATE 6:20 p.m. ET: Nearly everything originally reported about the gunman was wrong, as Ace of Spades notes. Reports had ID’d 24-year-old Ryan Lanza as the shooter, but now it is reported that in fact the shooter was his 20-year-old brother Adam Lanza:

According to a report from ABC News, neighbors of the Lanza family “described Adam Lanza to ABC as ‘odd’ and displaying characteristics associated with mental illness.”
It is unclear who makes the accusation, but ABC is updating with new reports here.

PREVIOUSLY (12:15 p.m. ET)

Shortly before 10 a.m. ET, there was an incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., about 12 miles from Danbury.

The early information indicates that the school’s principal was the target of the attack. It was initially reported that three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead. We have additional reports from ABC News and the Hartford Courant, but I emphasize that early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.

A 1 p.m. ET press conference has been scheduled.

UPDATE: Chicago Tribune:

Multiple people have been killed in a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. Police said some of the shooting victims are children, but it is not clear if they are among the dead. An official with knowledge of the situation says a gunman is dead.

NBC News is reporting that 20 people have been shot, including some children. It is not known how many are dead and how many are wounded.

UPDATE II: Now being reported by NBC News that, according to law enforcement, 17 adults and 7 children have been shot dead. I repeat that early reports can be inaccurate or confused.

UPDATE III: The death toll is now reportedly at 26 — 18 adults and 8 children — and I’m watching this on MSNBC, where they’re alternating between reporting the news and advocating gun control. As far as the news half of their programming is concerned, it is being reported that the shooter was 20 years old and was dressed in all black. As far as the opinion/advocacy:

Blaming guns for school shootings is like blaming spoon manufacturers for Michael Moore’s obesity.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 14, 2012

I’m trying to update the actual news here, and it’s not made easier by having to listen to idiots like Andrea Mitchell rhetorically bathing themselves in children’s blood in order to advance a political agenda.

UPDATE IV: There were “several fatalities at the scene,” Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police said at a press conference in Newtown. Both students and staff of the school were among those dead, as was the shooter.

Lt. Vance did not give information about the shooter, nor give a number of those dead or wounded in the incident. He said that the first 911 call came “just after 9:30 a.m.. When state troopers and local police arrived on the scene, they “immediately entered the school” and began a thorough search for the gunman, Lt. Vance said, emphasizing that officers’ first priority was the safety of the children.

Lt. Vance added that are now “many agencies working together” to investigate this atrocious crime, explaining that search warrants have been used to gather additional evidence.

UPDATE V: It is now being reported that police have found the body of one of the 20-year-old gunman’s parents at a home in New Jersey. Summarizing more from The Hill:

Twenty-seven people including 18 children were killed Friday in a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, according to the Associated Press. . . .
NBC news reported the gunman at the school was a 20-year-old man from Connecticut who carried two handguns. Law enforcement authorities were continuing to search the school and it was not clear immediately whether the gunman — who is dead at the scene — acted alone.

At this time, it is unknown when, how or why the gunman traveled to New Jersey and then back to this school in Connecticut.

UPDATE VI: OK, sources are now telling WNBC in New York that the shooter was actually 24 years old, not 20. His father’s body was apparently found in Hoboken, N.J., and that his mother was a teacher at the school in Connecticut.

The gunman’s name is being reported by MSNBC as Ryan Lanza, and reports also that Lanza’s mother is among those slain at the school.

UPDATE VII: The earlier report about a parent being killed in New Jersey was, apparently, incorrect: The gunman’s mother was shot dead in Connecticut, not in New Jersey, according to the latest reports from NBC. Lanza’s mother was a kindergarten teacher at the school, and it is reported that most of the dead children were in her classroom. Meanwhile, it’s being reported that Lanza’s attack on the school involved three weapons, a rifle and two 9mm pistols.

UPDATE VIII: Just now, one of my 20-year-old twin sons came by the house to help with the family Christmas tree. The TV was reporting this crime, which was the first he’d heard of it. “Twenty-seven people? What the hell happened?”

“Evil,” I said, and made the darkly sarcastic suggestion that Congress would pass the “Evil Control Act of 2013” to outlaw evil.

Dark sarcasm is just a habit, and perhaps not the best way of expressing my frustration toward idiots (like Alex Wagner of MSNBC) whose reaction to news like this is to share her cheery enthusiasm for new federal gun-control legislation.

What a pathetic soul. Ace of Spades has an excellent contemplation on why pathetic souls are capable of evil:

[A] certain form of intensely narcissistic psychopathy . . . spurs people to kill everyone close to them rather than just . . . suicide. . . .
nutters see themselves heroically, sort of as bigger-than-life agents of mayhem and evil. Now that may sound like a bad thing to you, but it doesn’t sound bad to them: They’ve embraced it. . . .
Yes, Evil is horrible, but these guys are embracing it for the Power of it. Because they are failures and hopelessly inadequate in their own lives, they contrive a fantasy in which they become Dark Heroes — larger than life and big as death — by murdering a lot of people. . . .

Read the whole thing. There was just another press conference in Newtown, and it was reported that there 20 children dead and 6 adult victims at the school, plus the shooter, as well as another victim at an “ancillary” scene, which we may guess was the shooter’s father.

UPDATE IX: Twitchy has a good round-up of tasteless remarks about today’s shooting made on Twitter by various celebrities, among them CNN’s Piers Morgan (who was hashtagging #GunControl) and Michael Moore, about whom my personal regard is just slightly higher than my opinion of Ryan Lanza.

My own previous outburst on Twitter, I actually rather regret, but decided to include it so that I could put it in context: I was sitting here trying to update the news as quickly as I could and, while NBC’s news reporting about the crime was very good, it was being sandwiched in between irrational lectures about gun control from Andrea Mitchell and others.

Focusing on the gun as The Source of Evil is simply absurd, an idea so false it deserves to be ridiculed at every opportunity. And so, after more than an hour of this on MSNBC — “We now interrupt our breaking news for another tendentious lecture about the need for new gun-control laws” — I simply felt an overwhelming urge to mock those useless assholes. Perhaps this wasn’t the appropriate time or venue for such mockery, and I apologize to anyone offended.

Except that fat fool Michael Moore, who can kiss my ass.

Linked at The Lonely Conservative and Victory Girls — thanks.

Category: Connecticut, Crime, Education

Left’s ‘Tent Truthers’ Claim Union Attack on AFP in Lansing Was an ‘Inside Job’

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 13 Comments

Right now I have a former police officer, heavily armed at my house protecting my wife. The threats are severe. Prayers appreciated.

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) December 14, 2012

Steven Crowder is being targeted for smears and terroristic intimidation by the radical Left, possibly including Anonymous/Occupy anarchists who have come under suspicion for targeting Americans for Prosperity during a Lansing protest this week. This is the outlaw fringe of the anti-business movement, even more dangerous than thugs like Tony Camargo, identified as the union member who sucker-punched Crowder.

Joe Newby at the Examiner reports how the Left is now blaming AFP just like 9/11 Truthers blamed the U.S. for terrorist attacks:

According to an article at Talking Points Memo, AFP spokeswoman Annie Patnaude said protesters “threatened to blow up propane tanks inside the tent, potentially creating a deadly conflagration.”
Patnaude also suspected that at least one mask-wearing protester was an anarchist possibly connected with Occupy Wall Street.
“I don’t know if this was a union person or not. I think there’s a good possibility it was an Occupier or a radical anarchist,” she said.

AFP is now trying to get police to investigate this criminal attack, and Joe quotes Twitchy’s sarcastic response:

“But by taking its case to the police, doesn’t AFP open itself up to an investigation? Won’t authorities uncover AFP’s plot to smear peace-loving union protesters by destroying its own tent and hitting people’s fists with Steven Crowder’s face?”

Expect further developments in this story today.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Crime, Labor Unions, Michigan, Terrorism

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.14.12

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
Susan Rice Withdraws As Candidate For SecState

UN Ambassador Susan Rice and SecState HIllary Clinton

Lies about Benghazi made it impossible for her to be confirmed; way now open for John F’ing Kerry*

Direct Talks On Fiscal Cliff Yield Same Result
White House refusing to budge on top tier rate increase, entitlement preservation

Russian Foreign Ministry Walks Back Bogdanov’s Speech On Syria
Says DFM just quoting opposition, not expressing policy

POLITICS
Booker: Acclaimed Nationally, Still Slogging In Newark

Newark Mayor Cory Booker with a constituent

Potential candidate for governor still putting out political fires at home in Newark

Army Sergeant Sentenced To Life In Stockade After Colorado Killing

Friday Throwdown: Massachusetts State House Dominoes

Hagel Tops Obama’s List To Replace Panetta At Defense

Florida Supreme Court Strikes Down Noise Law

Deposit Insurance Bill Blocked In Senate

Senate Takes Steps Toward Banning Stalking Software

Hillary For Mayor? Not So Fast, Say New Yorkers

THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Dip As Traders Take Profits: NYMEX $86.15, Brent $109.02
Euro Stocks Edge Higher As PRC Data Inspires
Yen Slips To Nine-Month Low On Anticipated BOJ Easing
Sprint Offers $2.1 Billion For Clearwire And Its Spectrum
Walmart, Kroger Among First-Round Bidders For Hostess Brands
Barcode Co-Creator Norman Woodland Dies, 91
US retail Sales Up 0.3% In November, But Department Store Sales Tumble
Wheat, Cattle Close Higher; Corn, Soybeans Dip
New Google Maps Boasts Big Improvements
CANUKUS Powers Refuse To Sign UN Internet Treaty
iPhone 5 Officially Goes On Sale In PRC
App Turns Video Clips Into Instant Movie Videos
Best Buy Joins Staples In Flogging Surface

SPORTS
Bengals Keep Pace In AFC Playoff Hunt, Bury Eagles 34-13

Bengals QB Andy Dalton gets sacked

It’s unanimous: Bengals didn’t win, Eagles gave it away

Josh Hamilton Signs With Angels For Five Years, $125 Million

Carmelo Anthony Injured As Knicks Beat Lakers 117-106

Dempster Reportedly Signs With BoSox For Two Years, $26.5 Million

Big East Hoops Breakaway On The Horizon?

Brazil’s Soccer Image Licked In The Shins With Violence-Marred Copa

Rutgers Suspends Hoops Coach Three Games For Bad Behavior

Plenty Of Laughs As Braylon Edwards Rejoins Jets

Duncan Fletcher Can’t Escape Criticism For India’s Disastrous Performance

Franchise-Based T20 League Coming To West Indies

MASN/TV Revenue Argument Update From The WaPo’s James Wagner

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Olivia Wilde, Jason Sudeikis Secretly Engaged

Jason Sudeikis, Olivia Wilde

Planning wedding in Kansas City

Liam Hemsworth Unleashes Beatdown In Street Brawl

L.A. Reid Not Returning For Third Season Of “X Factor”

LiLo Owes $16K For Storage Locker, Faces Auction

Taylor Swift & Harry Styles Get Far, Far Away For Her Birthday

Bon Jovi Ecstatic Over Golden Globe Nomination

Garrett Hedlund To Star In “Tron 3”

Jenni Rivera’s Remains Identified, Turned Over To Family

Baba Wawa Names David Petraeus Most Fascinating Man Of 2012

Daniel Radcliffe: Harry Blotto?

Amar’e Stoudemire Marries Longtime GF Alexis Welch In Secret Ceremony At Home

In Truth, Ravi Shankar Couldn’t Stand The Hippies

FOREIGNERS
Norks Mark Rocket Success With Huge Rally
IAEA Confident Of Nuclear Deal With Iran
Egyptians Speak Out On Constitutional Referendum
Knife-Wielding Man Slashes 22 Children In PRC’s Henan Province
Reuters Journalists Accuse Israeli Troops Of Assault
Brawl Erupts As Ukraine Parliament Tries To Pick Speaker
Israeli Foreign Minister Faces Indictment On Lesser Charges
LDP On Course To Win Majority In Japanese General Elections
Russian Protest Leader Navalny Faces New Charges
Thai Red Shirts Protest Leaders Go On Trial
Hmas Cry Of Victory Rings Hollow For Battered Civilians

BLOGS & STUFF
Allahpundit: Susan Rice Withdraws From SecState Consideration
AmSpecBlog: What Really Sank Susan Rice?
Weasel Zippers: Obama Likely To Nominate Anti-Israel RINO Chuck Hagel As SecDef
Israel Matzav: Bad News For Israel – Obama Wants Hagel At Defense
NR Online: Hagel For Defense?
John McCormick: Purge-Worthy?
Jawa Report: Democracy Win! Death Star Petition Reaches Critical Mass
NRO Corner: Some Spending In Sandy “Emergency” Bill Doesn’t Start Until 2018
Allahpundit: Cavuto Cuts Off Dem Rep When She Won’t Offer Any Spending To Cut
Glenn Reynolds: Where Big GOP Bucks Could Matter
Power Line: A Modest Proposal
NRO Agenda: Kate Zernike’s Unflattering Portrait Of Cory Booker

*Who apparently served in Vietnam.

Category: Live at Five

‘Through a Plate Glass Window’: How Liberal Media De-Legitimize Dissent

Posted on | December 13, 2012 | 27 Comments

Patterico did a post yesterday about the “Accuse the Accusers” strategy that I meant to link and discuss at length, but I didn’t get around to it because new outrages were piling up quicker than I could keep track. In just the past couple of days:

Stephen Crowder got sucker-punched in the head by Michigan union goon Tony Camargo;
Hot dog vendor Clint Tarver was called the “n-word” when the Americans for Prosperity tent in Lansing was attacked by allies of the same goons who punched Crowder; and
The son of Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran pleaded guilty to an assault charge after police say Patrick Moran broke his girlfriend’s nose and fractured her skull during an argument outside a D.C. bar.

Perhaps you see a pattern here: Democrats and their political allies engaging in thuggish violence which no one could possibly defend or endorse. And in each case, liberals used a variation of the same distracting “Accuse the Accusers” defense: Whatever wrong was done by Democrats was minimized or dismissed as irrelevant in comparison to some greater wrong that liberals alleged had been done by the conservatives involved in calling attention to these incidents.

Call it “Wheelerization,” in tribute to the way Marcy Wheeler deliberately smeared Crowder as having somehow faked his own beating, simply because . . . well, James O’Keefe! Breitbart!

This magic incantation automatically de-legitimizes any story. Also, “selective editing,” as if there is such a thing as non-selective editing.

Today, the Left decided that Patrick Moran’s brutality toward his girlfriend was not a legitimate story because . . . Ace of Spades!

Leftwing Blogs Discover The Real Culprit
Behind Pat Moran’s Woman-Beating: Me

This Wheelerization of the Moran story was expertly performed by the ridiculous Tommy Christopher:

It’s a horrible story that highlights an important, serious issue, but shortly after the news was reported, Michelle Malkin‘s Twitter repository, Twitchy.com, had decided that the real villains were Rachel Maddow, Sandra Fluke, the media, Rep. Moran, and, somehow, me, while using Ms. Hoffman’s injuries as inspiration for pop-culture riffs. . . .
Finally, the folks at Twitchy chose to highlight a series of tweets that featured domestic violence-related riffs on Meadowlark Lemon, Star Wars, and even the headline from one of my columns.

Shorter @tommyxtopher: Patrick Moran beat up his GF, but I’m the REAL victim, because @aceofspacehq is a meany-butt.mediaite.com/online/conserv…

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 13, 2012

Seriously, notice how this works: The story is not about the heinous brutality of Patrick Moran or the preposterously lenient sentence handed down to the son of a Democrat congressman (who, of course, has his own lengthy history of brutality). Nor is the story about the hypocrisy of liberals who routinely ignore or excuse such misconduct by Democrats while simultaneously accusing Republicans of being anti-woman.

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Because the story can never be about the wrong done by Democrats, when Democrats do wrong, the media need some excuse to ignore it, or some pretext to make Republicans the bad guys: “Ken Starr is on a witch hunt! Everybody lies about sex! McCarthyism!”

And, unfortunately, Fox News functions as a foil for this tactic: As soon as Media Matters, Crooks & Liars, Firedoglake, DailyKos and others in the merry band of disinformation blogs find some connection between a story and Fox News — “Crowder and Malkin are both hired stooges of the Murdoch empire!” — then no journalist at CBS, NBC, ABC or the New York Times can possibly treat the story as serious and important, or else his inbox/Twitter feed will blow up with angry messages accusing him of betraying the cause by repeating right-wing lies.

Did I ever mention that studies have shown journalists vote Democrat by margins of at least 7-to-1? And that most reporters, editors and producers are therefore emotionally predisposed to tell stories that favor Democrats and avoid stories that favor Republicans?

This is why, in the Patrick Moran case as in so many other cases, the Left endeavors to distract from the facts of the story by focusing on the political orientation of those telling the story: “Twitchy is run by Malkin and Malkin works for Fox — not a legitimate story!”

Also, Twitchy quoted Tweets by Ace of Spades in which he made sarcastic reference to Tommy Christopher, and therefore Tommy’s a victim, because conservatives hate Legtimate Journalists.

Logic so sharp it could split atoms.

We are watching the Spencer Ackerman idea of smashing conservatives “through a plate glass window” — never mind the truth, just win.

This brute-force approach to Narrative Management is astonishingly successful. Allahpundit is in such a fugue of despair about it that he has resorted to linking me to prove his case:

If you’re a reporter and you’re taking conservatives seriously, you’re doing it wrong. [Chris] Matthews goes so far as to identify Romney’s utterly benign aside in the second debate about “binders full of women” as one of the reasons the media should move, en masse, even further to the left. That’s not a serious critique; it’s a fig leaf of outrage designed to apply pressure towards the desired political outcome. And it works.

You should read the whole thing because, after all, it’s not every ~~day~~ year I get linked by Allahpundit. Meanwhile, returning to the original model of Wheelerization, Patterico recounts this colloquy:

Wheeler: You said Crowder shouldn’t report the assault!
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did!
Wheeler: Incredible that an ADA doesn’t think crimes should be reported!
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did!
Wheeler: Wow. I think I’ll tell your boss that you don’t believe in reporting crimes.
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: Sheesh. A law enforcement officer saying crimes shouldn’t be reported. Can you believe it?
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: Looks like it’s time to ask your boss why their ADA thinks crimes should not be reported.
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: [more of the same, ad infinitum]

Marcy Wheeler’s narrative involved the argument that Crowder should have filed an assault charge against his attacker before reporting it as news, and she got it in her mind — an idée fixe — that Patterico had somehow discouraged Crowder from filing charges. Because he is by trade a prosecuting attorney, it might somehow be construed as wrongful for him to be “saying crimes shouldn’t be reported,” and so Wheeler began repeating this allegation as if the repetition proved it was true, and as if Patterico had an obligation to prove himself innocent.

“Accuse the accusers,” see?

As for Marcy Wheeler’s absurd claim, let me offer this example: Hunter S. Thompson was once brutally stomped by the Hell’s Angels, and never reported it to the police. Thompson was a journalist writing a book about the Hell’s Angels, and it might not have been altogether ethical for him to be trying to put several of them in jail for assault as a complainant while he was also being paid to tell their story.

And let’s face it, Thompson was on shaky ground from a legal standpoint, because he witnessed a good deal of other criminal behavior by the Angels that he never bothered reporting to police.

The story you’re covering is more important than whatever hassles you suffer as a consequence, and if those hassles involve getting your head bashed in — well, hey, that’s part of the coverage, too. In that sense, Crowder’s big day in Lansing was totally gonzo.

Speaking of hassles and important gonzo stories, I was intrigued yesterday by that Pastebin file in which Ron Brynaert mentioned Marcy Wheeler in connection with Neal Rauhauser and Patterico and SWATting and the Anthony Weiner scandal. Just happened to find that when, on a crazy hunch, I Googled “Marcy + Wheeler + Rauhauser.”

Maybe just a coincidence. Maybe not.

Category: Ace of Spades, Crime, Fox News, Labor Unions, Media Bias, Michelle Malkin, Patterico, Twitchy

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

FMJRA 2.0: I Can’t Stay Long

DeMint Hasn’t Departed Senate Yet, Already Placing Markers

Chris Rock Was Right

“That Concludes Today’s Live At Five Report With Stacy McCain And Smitty”

CONNECTICUT SCHOOL SHOOTING UPDATE: Death Toll 27; Gunman Now Identified as 20-Year-Old Adam Lanza

Left’s ‘Tent Truthers’ Claim Union Attack on AFP in Lansing Was an ‘Inside Job’

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.14.12

‘Through a Plate Glass Window’: How Liberal Media De-Legitimize Dissent

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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