The Late, Great State of Israel

There’s much to discuss in terms of implication, as regards the shooting of abortionist George Tiller, none of them particularly complimentary to those claiming to take up Tiller’s side.

Even from the outset, my instinct was that the reaction to the Tiller story was overblown… intentionally so.  Whatever else might be said, we’re talking about one man’s death. Absent the issue of Abortion, and in light of the seven men in Chicago alone, shot in the same 24 hour period, one man being shot just isn’t national news, sorry.   It also and most certainly doesn’t rise to the level of ‘terrorism’ as some have been loudly claiming.

It’s interesting, too, how the word “‘Terrorism” has been rediscovered by the left, to be applied to this thing, isn’t it?   Let’s examine this, for a moment:

Since back in 1993, there have been seven abortion clinic workers killed as such. If this constitutes an organized bit of terrorist activity, I suggest it to be so far below the radar as to be invisible. This is a misapplication of the term terrorism, in light of the much larger terrorism we’ve seen in the last decade… terrorism that for the most part, the left ignored.  They also ignore that the killing of Tiller has been condemned by every mainstream pro-life group. Their entire response seems out of the bounds of reason.

 So unreasonably loud is the howl over this one in fact, that one cannot help but wonder if it wasn’t orchestrated so. If we take what we see on the web as indicative, for the most part these are leftists…. who are people already used to making noise far in excess of their actual numbers.  I think we can take this level of noise as an indication of the number of organized mouthpieces on the web right now. (And I think that has implications for our political future.)

There are a goodly number of left-of-center bloggers that have blamed Bill O’Reilly and other more-or-less mainstream conservative commentators for creating the tension that made murdering Tiller more likely. I reject that argument on its face.  Unless of course we’re going to see admissions on the part of pro-abortion types that their rhetoric is directly responsible for an environment conducive to the attacks on those who, while non-violent, oppose abortion.

Or, we’ll see them admit that anti-military protests from the left has generated an environment where recruiters are far more likely to get shot at, as we saw yesterday. That happening, and the reaction from the left on that score… or more correctly, the lack of it, is instructive.  The leftie blogs who were all over the Tiller shooting, using all kinds of overheated rhetoric to make their case, were all but silent, as the news broke from Little Rock, yesterday afternoon.  Clearly, someone in uniform is of less import to these than is one late-term abortionist. Consider that for just a moment. Let it roll around in your head for a bit.

At the bottom line,, then, this noise from the left is an attempt at martyrdom for Tiller, so as to impose a particular point of view.   What we also have is a group of people who in the words of Rahm Emanuel, don’t waste any ‘crisis’ toward that end.  Tiller’s family is still making funeral arrangements. That  fact, however doesn’t slow down those seeking political points on Tiller’s body before it’s cold, though. Gotta use the crisis for the political aims of the left. And so, they are.

Regardless of your views on abortion, that much must be acknowledged.

 Start adding the actual issues directly surrounding abortion to that discussion, however, and the situation makes a rather foundational change.  There seems to me an internal conflict inherent in arguing, as the noisemakers have been doing on this,  that Tiller as a victim was wronged, and that his death was wrong, but that Tiller’s victims… those aborted… were not wronged. Is either, less dead?

That logical conflict seems to me indicative of a movement more dedicated to imposing views, than changing minds.  The resistance to the government just now in terms of tea parties and whatnot seems suggestive to me of how much of a success impositions have been having of late.  That position is a sure-fire turn off to anyone not pro-abortion, and I suspect a goodly number of those who ARE pro-abortion.

Then again, all this noise was never about discussion, was it? See, here’s the thing; If Tiller’s murder is the result of overheated rhetoric, what does anyone suppose the kind of overheated rhetoric we’ve seen in response to it, will bring?

I’m sure there are those who will suggest I’m trying to paint the murder of George Tiller as no big deal.  It’s not true, of course, but we’ll see such charges, as surely a the sun will rise tomorrow. (I’ve checked the weather report… we can be reasonably assured the sun will in fact rise. )  I’ve been writing political commentary since Jimmy Carter was in office, in various forms, and based on that experience, this kind of attack is eminently predictable, particularly when they run out of logical defenses.

To people making such charges, I will point out that there is a very thick line between saying an event is no big deal, and saying that certain political factions have overblown the event for their own political ends.

The difference in the reaction to the Murder of Abortionist George Tiller vs the murder of Pvt William Long, are the clue to that fact. Clearly, one must be in the political favor of the left to garner their concern when they get murdered, and Pvt Long being military… and the left being anti-military and pro-abortion as a rule, Pvt Long’s murder doesn’t merit the leftist outrage that George Tiller’s murder does.

Private William A. Long, United States Army, of Conway, Arkansas has died iu line of duty, Associated Press:

Police Chief Stuart Thomas identified the victim who died as 24-year-old William Long of Conway. He and the second soldier, both wearing fatigues, had recently completed basic training and volunteered to help attract others to the military.

Salute to Private Long and his family.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BigsBlog Nightly Ramble.

This is the Railroad Station Edition.

• A political shooting you won’t hear about: Jonah Godberg points out an incident I’d not heard of,and I’ll bet most of you haven’t either. Fox News:
  

   DEVELOPING: A gunman opened fire Monday at an army recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark., killing one army recruiter and seriously wounding another, FOX16.com reported.

  A man in a black SUV drove to the recruitment office and began shooting at around 10:19 a.m., a spokesman with the Little Rock police department told FOX News.

  The suspect, who immediately fled the scene, was later apprehended approximately four miles from the center with an assault rifle in his vehicle.

  Little Rock authorities detected a “suspicious device” inside the vehicle and called a bomb squad to the scene, according to FOX16.com.

   Now, I’ve already commented on the George Tiller shooting, and so has David.   But there is, I’ll admit, an irresistable urge to compare this shooting to the incident with Tiller.  Both are certainly politically motivated killings But I wonder how many will consider these attacks as equal?  

   We have been hearing that the attack on Tiller is the result of being blamed on ‘overheated rhetoric’ from such as O’Reilly. Will we now hear these same folks admit that the attack on the recruiting staion is the direct result of ‘overheated rhetoric’ from such as Air America, or (Gasp!) Leftie Bloggers? I doubt it.

   

• Steve Benen: Fully Tanked: If there’s any better indication that Steve Benen is in the tank for Obama, and will make excuses for him regardless of the provocation, I can’t think of a better one, than this article yesterday in Washington Monthly.   I think we both very well understand, you and I, that the specter of the Republican president going for a night on the town mostly on the taxpayers dime with the country in the midst of a recession and companies, and families, are struggling to survive, would have brought unprecedented amounts of anger from the dinosaur media.  You can bet your butt cheeks that  Benen would be among those who would be screaming the loudest.  As it is, The Chosen One is the subject, and quite predictably, Benen goes to bat for him, becoming the consummate apologist.  Forgive me for thinking that there might actually be a bias/ credibility issue for Benen here. Obama would have to be caught on camera shooting puppies and kittens with a huge smile on his face, for Benen to suggest that Obama might have a public relations issue going forward.
• Rangel and the Cop Shooting: The NY Post, yesterday:
  

  There’s nothing like a tragic police shooting to bring a tasteless guffaw out of Rep. Charlie Rangel.Speaking yesterday at a rally in honor of slain cop Omar Edwards — gunned down by a fellow cop in a case of mistaken identity — the embattled congressman outrageously quipped that President Obama, in town for a date with First Lady Michelle, should watch his back walking around the Big Apple because he is black.

  “Make certain he doesn’t run around East Harlem unidentified,” the controversial lawmaker snarked.

  “If [he] did not have the Secret Service . . . around him, [city cops] wouldn’t know if he was president of the United States.”

  The remark brought raucous cheers and laughter from the crowd of around 100.

  I wonder; Is this the conversation about race that Jen Rubin spoke of at PJM over the weekend? See, here’s the problem; Such discussion, as Rubin points out with linking the New Haven Firefighter case, only goes one way.  As Thomas Sohl says, Racism is under new management.

• The Car: P.J. O’Rourke in The Wall Street Journal:
  

  I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car.

  Indeed… what did I say about The Prius, the other day? Why is it so popular among the left? The Prius is the perfect car for people who don’t like to drive and want that dislike reinforced. What’s happening is we’ve given the power of government to such people.     Steven Green At Pajamas Media has comments there, as well. So, the obvious question: The locus of all of this is government and pointy headed liberals. Why are we letting them do this to our country?

• The Car Makers: General Motors went bankrupt this morning.  Bankrupted by unions and government regulations. Of course, the unions and the government now own what’s left of GM.  In short, the workers control the means of production.  I gather that Chrysler is preparing to come out of bankruptcy sometime this week, quite possibly by the time you read this.  Since they too are owned by government and the unions, I do not regard this as a good thing.  What should have happened is that the places should have gone bankrupt, without the government jumping in. The result? No more unions, and far less government involvement. Far less taxpayer involvement, too… our grandkids wouldn’t be paying the price for the amount of unionizing and government we heaped on the car companies. We’d have done far better all around.
• Pravda:  Did you guys see this Pravda rant over the weekend? Ponder both the words and the source, here:
  

  First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

  The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

  I doubt I have to comment further on that one. They’ve come far closer than even they know, I think.

• In your face, buddy: Sorry, but I can’t work up any sympathy for “Eminem.”  Sorry, I just can’t. I wasn’t watching last night, but that hardly matters since it was sprayed all over the news shows this morning. No question in my mind that Sacha Baron Cohen is a hemmeroid, but frankly, given the history of both of the individuals, here, and for that matter, MTV, the question of who to cheer for leaves only indecision. ( And anyway…Remember when MTV used to be about music? I can’t help but think we… and they… were better off sticking to that.)  
• Personal notes:?
  • The Airshow did come to town this weekend, and I’ll have some photos for you soon as I get the downloaded and processed for posting. Lots of great action. but the lighting was all wrong. For one thing, the sunlight was so strong I couldn’t see how I was focused. I put it in autofocus and shot everything that moved, in the hoeps of making it all good on the editing screen. 
  •   The new BitsBlog Logo is a little weird in the background yet. The problem has to do with the way GIF transperency works… or in the case of this CSS, doesn’t work. What’s up there will do for the moment.
  •   Writing has been a problem for me the last week or so. I’m unsure why. I’ve jotted ideas down for posts both here at at Pajamas Media but never seem to get them where I want them.  They remain half written, at the moment. Annoying, really.

Words of wisdom mere words from the one, via Useless Toady:

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.

From the Daily Herald:

Chicago had seven shooting deaths in 24 hours this weekend, and police say they have no suspects in custody.

All seven victims were men in their 20s or 30s, and all were shot to death.

That is seven more heinous acts of violence, in addition to the million heinous acts of abortion each year, to which Barack Obama remains stone cold silent.

I haven’t commented on this Tiller thing yet, mostly because  there hardly seems a point in discussing at any length, something that wasn’t “all in”, as yet. You will admit the story broke rather quickly. I didn’t comment on it at all, (here, or elsewhere…) though David did pretty well with it, here, insofar as laying down the facts as they became known.

Even from the outset, my instinct was the reaction to the story was overblown… intentionally so. 

Myself, I find it hard to get too worked up in either direction for the moment.  I mean, let’s face it, gang… one guy being shot isn’t national news.  It happens quite a few times per day.  It most certainly doesn’t rise to the level of ‘terrorism’ as some put it. The reason the ‘sphere are collectively wetting their panties right now, is because the guy shot was an abortionist.  So unreasonably loud was the howl over this one in fact one cannot help but wonder if it wasn’t orchestrated so. For the most part these are leftists…. who are people already used to making noise far in excess of their actual numbers. Frankly, a lot of the traffic on this issue, seems to me to be pushed by a group of people making use of a network of noisemankers… such as what Dale Franks comments on at Q&O this morning.  I think we can take this as an indication of the number of orginaized mouthpieces on the web right now.

Joyner notes yesterday, that

Andrew Sullivan and a goodly number of left-of-center bloggers I read blame Bill O’Reilly and other more-or-less mainstream conservative commentators for adding to an environment that made murdering Tiller more likely. I reject that argument wholeheartedly.

I, too. Unless of course, we’re going to see the left admit that their non-stop bleeding on all things to the right of Fidel Castro, increases violence against Republicans. And it’s interesting how the word “‘Terrorism” has been rediscovered by the left, to be applied to this thing.  Of course, they’ll say nothing about the idea that the killing of Tiller has been condemmed by every mainstream pro-life group.

At the bottom line,, then, is an attempt at martyrdom for Tiller.  What we also have is a group of people, who in the words of Rahm Emanuel, don’t waste any ‘crisis’. Regardless of your views on abortion, that much must be acknowledged. Thus is the argument of the pro-abortion types diminished by their own conduct.

All that absent the abotion issue itself.  Start adding abortion to the discussional mix, however, and the situation makes a rather foundational change.  There seems to me am internal conflict inherent in arguing, as the noisemakers have been doing on this,  that Tiller as a victim was wronged, and that his death was wrong, but that Tiller’s victims… those aborted… were not wronged.  That position is a sure-fire turn off to anyone not pro-abortion.

And I question the timing. As Michelle Malkin suggests:

Tiller’s family is grieving. Those who have jumped to score political points before Tiller is even buried are no better than the Phelps family thugs of the “Westboro Baptist Church” who respect no bounds of civility.

But then, we’ve come to expect that from the left, haven’t we?  We’ve also come to expect a double standard applied. Sister Toldjah points to Bill Ayers and suggests he’s an unrepentant terrorist, as well.  Quite right. As with hate laws, which I’ve discussed here several times, it’s not that you hate, it’s whom. It’s not that you employ violence, it’s against whom that matters to these morons.

Just things to consider as we watch this parade.

Matthew Yglesias,goes over the deep end:

Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn’t have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic. Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

I agree with Yglesias’ point about random violence.    Anti–abortion violence might, or might not, in theory be an effective weapon.  However in practice it is so rare as to virtually non-existent. from NARAL:

• Since 1993, seven clinic workers – including three doctors, two clinic employees, a clinic escort, and a security guard – have been murdered in the United States. 
• For every murder, there are many more attempts on the lives of abortion providers and clinic staff. 
• In fact, opponents of choice have directed more than 4,200 reported acts of violence against abortion providers since 1977, including bombings, arsons, death threats, kidnappings, and assaults, as well as more than 92,000 reported acts of disruption, including bomb threats and harassing calls.

OK make that eight murders since 1993.   If this represents an organized campaign of terror, it is barely detectable, and given the circa one million abortions a  year, totally ineffective.    I cite NARAL, because I assume they have no reason to understate the magnitude of anti-abortion violence.

I call for the end of all abortion related violence, and I urge Yglesias to do the same.

I ask, is Yglesias being willfully ignorant or deliberately provocative?    To wit, is Ygleaias attempting to incite a campaign of terror where none currently exists?   Is this Yglesias own ill inconcieved talking point or the White House’s.   See what the head Obamatard has to say.

Addendum:  (bump)

Attaturk, Fire Dog Lake imbides the same Kool-Aid, “They are ‘Terrorist.””

Sure, now let the nice man take you back to your room.

• @PatrickRuffini Not sure I accept that, Pat. Are you saying we shouldn’t respond to the headlon g rush to the left, of the GOP?  in reply to PatrickRuffini #
• @HeyTammyBruce What would the Democrat reaction have been if Bush responsedcorrectly to the NORK threat? Can you say “War Monger?” #TCOT in reply to HeyTammyBruce #
• RT @TheFlaCracker: Sadly BOTH Bushes while gr8 men to react to “get along” with Libs, needs to stop its why we lose #tbrs #tcot #
• @goldman Take one picture and copy the element. Hey… ir works for Iran’s missle program… http://bit.ly/15J9AY in reply to goldman #
• Honor Them, Today. #HHRS #TBRS #RedState #TCOT #BitsBlog http://bit.ly/IAfZD #
• Frustrated Conservative Base Itching to Take Off the Gloves http://bit.ly/z6K1y #
• eating at Jim and Ralphs on Manitou #
• @mkhammer And global warming… it’s raining all the time.  #

The abortionist known as George Tiller has assumed room temperature, Stan Finger, Wichita Eagle:

WICHITA – George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim

Neither the numbers nor names Tiller’s victims were available.   My sympathy to Tiller’s victims.

Hat tip:  Gateway Pundit.

Diversity is not a synonym for affirmative action.   Rather diversity is code speak for bigotry.   Affirmative action is a narrowly tailored remedy for past proven discrimination.   Whereas diversity does away with the requirement to establish past discrimination,    It is  flat out racism, the dubious proposition that merit some attach’s simply by the trait of not being white.    When the ilk of David Duke argue that being white is somehow a virtue, that is racism.   Likewise when Sonia Sotomayor argues that virtue attach’s itself by the like process for not being white, that too is racism.

Chief Justice John Roberts:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Given the Robert’s Remedy, there is no why for a bigot like Sotomayor to ever help move her nation past the question of race.   Further complicating the matter is that  Stotomayor is sexist as well, David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times:

Judge Sotomayor, whose parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico, has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career – as a student activist at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as a board member of left-leaning Hispanic advocacy groups and as a federal judge arguing for diversity on the bench.

Given that Sotomayor has been nominated to replace the truly mediocre David Souter,  it should have been easy for President Obama to upgrade the quality of the Supreme Court.   Sadly, for the one, doing the right thing is never easy.

Hat tip photo:   Seeetness & Light.

Yeah, I know the logo’s a little scrogged.

I’m working on it.