“It does show how the left has to use magic and mental gymnastics to change history and avoid blame.”
Everybody was shocked at the recent attempted political assassination of multiple Republican congressmen. There were many calls for unity, and Democratic congressmen even tweeted a picture of them praying for the Republican victims. Those were good sentiments that didn’t even last the weekend.
By Monday night, several liberal commentators, including gay activist and former Star Trek actor George Takei and MSNBC commentator Joy Reid, suggested that the critically injured Republican was shot because of his anti-gay stances and moral failures, such as gutting Obamacare. Of course, these are horrendous statements that show little care for the individual still fighting for his life. But it does show how the left has to use magic and mental gymnastics to change history and avoid blame.
The shooter from last week was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter. His social media feed was filled with angry rants against traitors like Trump. And before the attack, he made sure to verify that it was Republicans practicing at the ball field. In a court of law, that would be a convincing case that his motive flowed from his political animus.
But as soon as the day after the event, the New York Times was connecting this shooting to that of Congresswomen Gabby Giffords. The shooter in that case was a mentally unstable extremist, so the comparison is incorrect, but it helps to deflect blame for liberals in this case and was still used.
Moving beyond that, the recent anniversary of what would have been John F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday brought a discussion of his assassination. Leaving aside the conspiracy rhetoric, Lee Harvey Oswald was a committed Communist who defected to the Soviet Union before returning with his Russian wife. Despite the very clear connection that Kennedy was shot by a leftist, the new conventional wisdom is that Kennedy was shot due to a climate of hatred.
Kennedy was in Texas during a time when legislators were contesting the Civil Rights Bill, and passions were indeed running high. The connection is that since most Republicans are against gays and minorities, they must have been the cause of the “climate” that killed Kennedy.
Even assuming that the right-wing climate exists and motivated a left-wing killer, most segregationists were in fact Democrats. These were leftover Democrats who held the “solid South” after the Civil War. Republicans were in fact the party of Lincoln, who freed the slaves, promoted Civil Rights, and were hated in the South until the Democratic party turned to the left starting in the 1960s.
There are many more examples, but the latest attempt by liberals like Takei and Reid shows the mental gymnastics and magic tricks that liberals have to do in order to maintain their moral superiority and attack the hateful right. The shooting last week was done by somebody on the very extreme end, even though he had clear inspiration from the left, and yet because of their magic, the issue instead becomes the supposedly evil and homophobic Republicans who are always creating that climate of hatred.
