Clipping blog

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• ZOMG! Crosshair Alert!
• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Podcast Prep Tuesday Edition
• Jared Loughner and the National Football League

ZOMG! Crosshair Alert! Posted: 11 Jan 2011 06:12 AM PST How on Earth did Peyton Manning make it out of New York City alive and unharmed after this hit the newsstands Saturday morning? According to the left, he should have been hunted down and shot by all the raving New York Jets fans driven to violence by the presence of a “crosshair”. Anyone from Politics or MS-NBC want to take a stab at why Peyton Manning hasn’t hired a cadre of bodyguards? How about it, Politico? Kos? Yglesias? Come on, guys. You’re smart enough to tell us what we can and can’t say. Certainly this can’t baffle you. UPDATE: The MSM has taken a quick reading of how it’s “bash the right” strategy has worked and things don’t look good. I’d expect a new approach to the same attack very soon. Look for it in a couple prominent blogs first, then a jump to MS-NBC before hit hits the major outlets.

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Podcast Prep Tuesday Edition Posted: 11 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST It is a mortal lock that I’ll be talking about the Tuscon mass shooting and how the left happened upon the exact same narrative entirely by sheer coincidence on the show tonight. Beyond that, I’ve some other ideas for stories, but if you have a couple, be sure to drop them into the comments here so I have a chance to see them before tonight. And now, links! MoveOn, the group that featured a Bush as Hitler poster on its website just a few years ago, has launched a campaign against vitriolic rhetoric. Maybe they should launch a campaign to educate progressive bomb-throwers about what crosshairs look like first. Well, it wouldn’t be a discussion about speech unless whingy speech nanny David Frum stuck his snoot into things. And if you aren’t convinced that the whole “violent rhetoric” crusade has gone completely silly, take a look at what else the Democrats want to banish. It’s never a good sign when The Onion can appropriate a columnist’s work without breaking a sweat. Nanny State at Work: It will soon be illegal to own an uninsured automobile in England. Does socialism cure obesity? Well, yeah, mostly because you can’t get enough to eat. Watch out Nancy, you’re losing the Blue Dogs! Cool Space News: NASA has discovered its first “rocky planet”. It is approximately 1.4 times the size of our own planet and is the smallest yet found. Best Headline of the Year: Wandering Mummy Terrorizes Unsuspectind Texas Neighborhood.

Jared Loughner and the National Football League Posted: 10 Jan 2011 08:12 PM PST Something has been bothering me about the left’s programmed response to Jared Loughner’s mass murder, and it’s not what you think. Oh, I’m plenty bothered that progressives have quite deliberately and with all malice aforethought called me a murderer to advance their totalitarian speech codes, but that’s not what’s really been bugging me. See, the ridiculous notion that the metaphor — a linguistic device at least as old as ancient Sumer where Gilgamesh said his friend Enkidu was awesome like a leopard — drive someone to a shoot up a supermarket parking lot ought to be easily disproven, yet it isn’t. It is as persistent as…well, let’s just say it’s very persistent. But a thought occurred to me this afternoon. If metaphors, especially violent metaphors (you know, the kind that ought to be kept in hermetically-sealed containers and handled only by specially-trained leftists in layers of protective gear), are that potent, then we should see outbreaks of violence in other venues where similar metaphors abound. I’m thinking, specifically, of professional football. Unless you have just wandered down from a mountain cave in which you’ve lived your entire life, you’re familiar with the language of football. Fans talks about how their team crushed or destroyed another team, how defenders annihilated helpless running backs or wide receivers, and how players won battles and broke the other team. Individual players are described either as dangerous threats, barely under control, or weak pantywaists who can’t hoist their own helmet. Watching a football game on television can be like watching a World War II documentary on the History Channel, the war-like metaphors flow so freely. Yet I can’t remember the last time a fan attacked a football player outside the stadium. That’s not for lack of opportunity. Professional athletes go out all the time — to team events, nightclubs, other sporting events — and they don’t travel with security details. They stay at public hotels, take regular passenger buses to the stadium, and travel through commercial airports. Football players are easily accessible almost constantly, but they do so as safely as you or I. Why is that? If violent rhetoric causes people to commit violent acts against the targets of that rhetoric, surely football players would be under almost constant threat. Let’s not leave the fans out of this either. I’ve never been to a big political convention, but I don’t imagine there are people there with their favorite candidate’s name emblazoned on a replica jersey, chugging brews out of a beer helmet. I watched the Democratic National Convention on television and I didn’t see rows of screaming fans with letters painted on their bellies that spelled out “OBAMA”. There is no tailgating at a political convention. I feel pretty confident saying that football fans are far more ardent about their teams than political fans are about their parties, and football fans are a lot more likely to get drunk. They also have more chances for that rhetoric to take effect. We have elections every two years, but the average football fan has 16 weeks to build up a good hate-on against other teams and players, and that doesn’t include the playoffs, when things really get heated. If we’re talking about a constant buildup of hate, remember that most football teams play their most hated division rivals twice a year, every year. So why didn’t a crazed Redskins fan try to off Danny White or Tom Landry? Heck, for that matter, why hasn’t someone tried to take out Dan Snyder after all the heated rhetoric about him we’ve gotten from local sports radio and Redskins fans over the past ten years? The answer is simple. Mere rhetoric, even the rhetoric of crushing and destroying and maiming, does not impel people to violence, not in football and not in politics. What we are seeing now is nothing more than another tired progressive attempt to bend a crisis to their political ends. Their outrage is sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing and we should treat it as such. Better yet, we should take the position taken by Roger Kimball today. What so infuriates the party of the Left is that those on the accusative side of the equation have woken up and have decided they don't like it. It's a bit like the chap who came across the most amazing animal: It protects itself when attacked. Message to the world's Krugmanites: Get used to it. We're on the march, we're targeting you, you're in our crosshairs, and, no, this is not an incitement to "hate" or political divisiveness: It is what politics in a democracy is all about. Indeed it is. Now let’s get our there and crush them.

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