“The gun just went off!” My wife and I often joke about the story she heard at a cocktail party from an attorney defending a client for murdering her husband, who blurted out that excuse as a motive. “I didn’t kill him — the gun [which for some unexplainable reason I happened to be pointing at his heart] — just went off!”
The Islamic world somehow professes to believe that The Film Just Went Off. Followed previously by The Book Just Went Off, and The Magazine Article Just Went Off, and the Cartoon Just Went Off. As if these inanimate objects possess special talismanic powers that can magically inflame the True Believer’s heart. (Funny though, how those who follow other faiths simply stand there, grit their teeth, and take it, when they’re offended, as highlighted by the spectacularly not safe for work Onion cartoon that’s currently making the rounds.)
And the media isn’t immune to such magical thinking either: “Mitt Romney Kept Us From Reporting on Security Failures!”
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Talk about the conservative critique–and I think it’s a fair critique, the conservative critique: that all you guys in the media were talking about Mitt Romney, you should have talked about the warnings with the embassy, etc., etc. And yes perhaps we should have. But you know who didn’t allow us to do that?
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Mitt Romney.
SCARBOROUGH: Mitt Romney. If Mitt Romney had kept his mouth shut, if he had not acted like a rank amateur, if he had not embarrassed himself–and by the way internally the campaign understands they screwed up, he’s moved on, they know that. So no conservative can say “oh, the mainstream media, blah, blah.” They know how badly they screwed up, and they were having the fight internally before he even went out and did it. But Romney got in the way of the media looking at the president, going, wha-, wha-, what happened here? How did this happen? Now, those questions are going to be asked in the coming weeks. But they weren’t asked in the first 24 hours because Romney was holding this horrific, irresponsible, press conference.
Or as Joe and Mika’s fellow MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews tweeted on September 12th:
The tragedy in Benghazi that cost Ambassador Stevens his life has been overshadowed by the desperate reach by Mitt Romney
Related: Ed Morrissey flashes back to growing up in the small southern California town of Cerritos, now the home of this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein (or wannabe Bill Maher, depending upon your point of view) to explain how “Media endangers entire neighborhood to pursue thoughtcrime suspect.” As to why they would want to do such a thing, Ace has you covered: “How To Not Solve A Problem But Get The Public To Think You Did.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member