The Assassination Tango

I’m sure the subtext behind these two posts quoted below is entirely unrelated:

According to a story at the [Washington Examiner], attempted mass shooter Floyd Lee Corkins told the FBI he picked his targets off the Southern Poverty Law Center website:

He told the FBI that he wanted to kill anti-gay targets and went to the law center’s website for ideas. At a court hearing where his comments to the FBI were revealed, he said that he intended to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.”

In August 2012, Corkins targeted the Family Research Council offices in Washington DC. He shot the group’s security guard in the arm before the guard managed to disarm him. At the time, Corkins had the names and addresses of “four socially conservative organizations” on him.

It’s impossible not to notice that this is precisely what many on the left accused Sarah Palin of doing in January 2011 after Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords and several bystanders in a Tucson parking lot. At the time, the left claimed Palin’s district map featuring crosshairs might have given Loughner ideas. No connection between the map and the shooting was ever found. Indeed, it turned out Loughner had been obsessed with Giffords before Palin’s map even existed.

— “SPLC Website Provided Shooter with His Targets,” John Sexton, Big Journalism. Or as Jim Treacher writes, “Floyd Corkins pleads guilty (and there’s a reason you’ve never heard of him)”.

And there are assassinations on the macro level:

KIRSTEN POWERS: I mean, they’re clearly hypocrites. They clearly don’t really care about human rights. They only care if it helps them politically. That’s all I can say. There are a couple of people who are great on this issue. Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian, Conor Friedersdorf out at the Atlantic. There are, you know, a couple of people that are very consistent on this, but for the most part, yeah, it’s completely despicable.

The idea that, you know, you think that George Bush is a war criminal for water boarding three planners of 9/11 attacks, but you don’t have a problem with the President having a kill list. Again, we knew he had a kill list before the election, this is not new information. We, it’s just gotten worse because now we’ve seen that they’re doing exactly what President Obama criticized Bush for which is basically making up, making the law fit around his already preconceived notions.

And what Obama is doing an un-Constitutional and it’s illegal. There’s no question. There is no way you can argue that you can kill an American without due process, and that he’s not being held accountable by the media, I mean, he has not even addressed this memo. Could you imagine if this was Bush?

CAMEROTA: Monica, take that up. Thee’s lots of people, obviously we’ve had our own legal experts on here talking about how the President is taking great liberties with the Constitution. They’ve gone further to say that he’s actually sort of bastardizing the Constitution, but yet, this is not a topic that you’re hearing, I mean, the New York Times took it up today.

POWERS: Yes, today, I mean, Abu Ghraib was on the cover of the New York Times for weeks, you know, which it should have been.

CROWLEY: But Kirsten is totally right when she says, “Can you imagine if this was President Bush?” If this were Bush, and he had a kill list targeting American citizens un-Constitutionally, going about it in a very shadowy way where you have some defense intelligence bureaucrat who’s making sort of arbitrary judgment about whether or not this American is engaging in terrorist activity or planning an imminent attack. It is an incredible slippery slope. If this had been the Bush administration, these same Democrats who are quiet now would be starting impeachment proceedings on this President.

— “Kirsten Powers: Liberal Media ‘Don’t Really Care About Human Rights’ Unless ‘It Helps Them Politically,'” Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters. 

To get a sense of how quickly the far left can pivot on a dime, Toure of MSNBC and Time magazine goes from 9/11 Truther to this: “New unmanned drone superfan Touré ‘very comfortable’ with killing Al-Qaeda leaders.”

While we’re waiting for Winston Smith to call his office, Big Journalism’s John Sexton asks, “Now that anti-right, anti-hate SPLC is implicated in providing targets for a politically motivated mass shooter will the national media turn on the SPLC the way they did on Sarah Palin? Is it time for a national conversation about the dangers of left-wing extremism?”

Not a chance — doesn’t fit the decades-old narrative.