Progressives have a very tenuous grasp of the basic realities of causation, but they have an uncanny awareness of the need to control the narrative. If anything whatever happens, of a significance that is worthy of comment, they fit it into their narrative, and they do so immediately. They are marvelous at staying on message. This worked great until everybody got tired of that message, and it has to be said that their message becoming tiresome was helped along by trillions in debt, decades of race-baiting, self-righteous smugness turned up to eleven, and a visceral hatred of their own country. That wears after a bit.
The downside of their ability to stay on message 24-7 is that their souls developed this acrid smell, like sulphur almost, and nobody ever wants to stand downwind.
As mentioned in an earlier post, one of our local bitterness-mongers held me and a friend responsible for the shooting, and may have done this before all the ambulances even reached the hospital.
And within a few hours I noticed that the blogosphere lit up with accusations against Sarah Palin, who had had the temerity to “target” Giffords’ seat in the last election. This, like nothing else, tells me what has the progressives really worried. If they take every opportunity to take Sarah Palin down a few notches, in ways that they don’t bother to do if the person in question is named Huckabee or Romney, then that tells me what they are worried about. Let’s just leave that point there, for the present. What prospect sets them barging into furniture, and baying at the moon? What scenario causes their left eye to start twitching? What set up gets an egg whisk going in their innards at a high rate of speed? Just sayin . . .
In the name of open liberality, these people have grown hearts that resemble little pieces of beef jerky. In the name of winsome tolerance, they ban all opinions that cannot be found within the confines of their own cranium. This seems to them to be quite expansive because they get along with everybody in there. They extol reasonable and sane public discourse, and then if a lone nut shoots somebody on the other side of the country, they are assigning responsibility to all their personal enemies within ten minutes. Remember how the Times Square bomber was blamed on the Tea Party by Mayor Bloomberg? Then it turned out to be a jihadist? Oh. Remember how when a radical Muslim opened fire at Ft. Hood, yelling all the usual stuff about Allah, they were all calling for Restraint, and how we need to Not Jump to Conclusions? Anybody remember that?
So they say that this happens because of the toxic nature of our public discourse. They say this happened because Sarah Palin used military jargon in a political campaign. Note that inflammatory word, campaign. Yeah, tell me about it. If we are talking about toxic rhetoric, I would say that their effusions are Exhibit A.
But they are not really concerned with consistency. If you express concern about the levels of porno-violence in Kill Bill type movies, they laugh you to scorn. “This kind of thing never desensitizes anybody to violence, not even unstable souls, and never pushes anybody over the edge.” Anybody who thinks otherwise is clearly a rube of the first order. Watching people get hacked to pieces for purposes of entertainment is normal. For Rush to say something critical of Obama’s inability to do basic math apparently sets people off, throwing them into a frothing, murderous rage. Don’t worry about them — their lives are their punishment.
But in the meantime, if I could, I would like to take something that was once said of Jonathan Edwards, and apply it to Sarah Palin. That okay? I don’t want to incite anybody to violence. I don’t want 128 comments on this post. I don’t want to unhinge any unstable souls. But here it is. It was said of Edwards that his happiness was out of the reach of his enemies. I think the same thing is true of Palin, and I think that is is part of why her enemies react the way they do.