Lefties fostering a climate of violence.

But this was different. This was a politically correct climate of violence.

Back in 2009 - when dissent was still patriotic, rather than a horrifying foreshadowing of the incipient violence of right-wing anarchist, Dr. James Hanson - "father" of the Global Warming hysteria - called for civil disobedience at the Capitol Coal Plant.

The Capitol Climate Action was supported by the typical melange of cover names for the same small group of "activists."  Check out the advertisment for the "Climate Action" - it has the usual tasteful Soviet-style layout and color palette favored by such folk.

No one seemed disturbed by the latent anti-semitism of a call to action, action calling to mind the SS Einsatzgruppen - the SS "Action Groups."  Using words like "action" are obviously could obviously have been interpreted by some people as a call to, you know, "action."

But that was back in 2009 when dissent was patriotic.  That kind of thing is so passe in our enlightened times.

Good times, though, good times....

[Via Watts Up With That.]

Speaking of disengaged from reality.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg debates liberal talk show host Nancy Skinner on whether "anti-government rhetoric" was a cause of the Arizona massacre.



The Left's newfound realization that "ideas have consequences" and its apparent willingness to restrict or chill political speech is something to behold.

Confirmation Bias - Storyline first, facts later, maybe.

Matt Welch at Reason Magazine does a "compare and contrast" with the sedate and measured - or non-existent - response when lunatics clearly associated with Environmentalism or Anti-Globalism commit acts of violence and the hair trigger accusations that spew from media sources, including the LA Times which is continuing the meme of linking the Arizona shootings with the Tea Party.  In the course of which he scores a major point by linking the phenomenon with the known psychological trait of "confirmation bias":

Question: Where were the major-media thumbsuckers about the dangerous rhetoric of radical environmentalism after James Jay Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel and issued a list of specific (and insane!) environmental policy demands? Answer: Outside of a few sprinkled non-liberals, they largely did not exist. Even though Lee was far more explicitly and identifiably ideological, even though his views did have some overlap with the outer fringes of environmental Malthusianism, most MSM types, if they discussed extreme green rhetoric at all in the wake of the incident, concluded that Lee's manifest weirdness and grievance-fueled fixation on the Discovery Channel trumped all similarities and chains of causation. This was, I think, a defensible response.

Why so different now? The answer is obvious: We are nearly two years into a media panic about grassroots right-of-center/limited-government activity and rhetoric. They have been predicting imminent race-fueled mayhem for so long that there is no way a lack of connective evidentiary tissue was going to stand in the way of pinning this murder spree on The Climate of Hate. In the immortal words of Paul Krugman, which stand as the best definition of "confirmation bias" I've seen yet,

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

The media wasn't expecting a Malthusian crime spree, just as it wasn't suspecting scruffy anarchist protesters to stomp on and break the leg of a Republican woman outside of a New Orleans fundraiser (note: I don't know if they ever nabbed anyone in that almost totally ignored case; the point is that if there was an existing anarchists-attack-Republicans storyline and fear, it would have made national headlines long before any arrests). Much of the world's most damaging journalism–initial reports on Hurricane Katrina, for one of a thousand examples–are a direct result of confirmation bias overwhelming the industry's traditional standards of verification. Embattled Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik may well turn out to be the analogue to former New Orleans Police Superintendent Edwin Compass in this case: official permission to run with a story that just seems like it must be true.

Only this this time the L.A. Times cannot claim the excuse of not having access to a catastrophic reporting zone. And in making tenuous claims between rhetoric and action, the newspaper has succeeding in poisoning the very well it is trying to clean. Even if evidence surfaces to support the hunch, it will not excuse the speculative pre-writes.