Tiller Murder: Rerun of a Bad Movie

When I first caught wind of George Tiller’s murder it came to me, as news does so often these days, from the lips of a blogger. Robert Stacey McCain published a piece titled “Oh God, not this.” Then it popped up at Hot Air, Michelle Malkin’s joint, and the Weekly Standard. Shortly thereafter the news broke on all of the usual right-wing sources, and I couldn’t help but notice a pattern beginning to emerge.

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There was the requisite throat clearing and disavowal of assassination as a remedy to political or judicial malfeasance, but underlying that the reader would find a worried tone. The authors seemed to engage in a collective shuffling of feet and careful scrutiny of shoelaces while muttering: “Who? Us? Nope. Not one of us. Nothing to see here. Move along.”

The mostly unspoken message came across as, “Oh God. Here we go again.”  There was a girding of the loins going on as the Right prepared for an onslaught from the Left, ever vigilant against examples of right-wing extremist violence. And of course it came, but not only from the liberal bomb throwers at KOS. It was coming from all quarters. The real question for us, gentle readers, is why would you expect anything else? We’ve seen this movie before. It played on a seemingly infinite loop throughout much of the 1990s.

It’s a familiar story. Sometimes it stars the members of isolated militias, holed up in the Appalachians and hopped up on a combination of home brewed moonshine and delinquent tax bills. In other performances we find gun-toting good ole boys heading for the borders to do the job that the lily-livered, sissy Democrats refuse to handle. And when it’s not them it’s the members of Operation Rescue and their ilk, out to provide a “pro-life” world for the rest of us, even if they have to do it through the pronghorn sights of a deer rifle.

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Out here in the wilds of western New York, if you follow the news at all closely you know that we’ve had enough of Randall Terry and his crew to last a lifetime. I’ve stared into those wild, burning bush eyes in person and I’m here to tell you that the machine behind them has more than a few cogs spinning in the wrong direction. Of course the media had to dredge old Randall up as soon as the news broke, and he spun up to speed in predictable fashion. Terry could barely contain his glee while delivering the requisite, mealy-mouthed disavowal of the violence. Even then he couldn’t resist calling Tiller a mass murderer, a baby killer, and the usual litany of explosive rhetoric which should serve nicely to incite the next Scott Roeder to homicidal violence.

Let us make no mistake here, by the way. The hard Left has been blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to whack-a-doodle pirates riding the lunatic fringe. The difference, though, is that they seem to engage in a different sort of mayhem in the 21st century which softens the media focus on them. They’re generally found burying steel spikes in trees, burning down laboratories where animal testing takes place, or releasing imprisoned chimpanzees back to their native habitat in the wilds of downtown Chula Vista.  What they’re completely failing to do is summoning up whatever monstrous nature is required in the rotting core of a blackened soul to walk up to somebody they don’t agree with and repeatedly fire a high-power weapon into their body.

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Some have been quick in attempting to pounce on Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad as a counterpoint. It’s true that he shot up an Army recruiting station, was a recent convert to the Muslim faith, and made statements to the police about being “angry” regarding the war in Afghanistan.  It’s also true that he’s better known as Carlos Bledsoe and is pretty much a gang banger — hardly a paragon of left-wing radical ideology.  So who else do we have for examples of liberal, radical violence?

Sure, it’s nice to still have Bill Ayers to kick around, but let’s face the facts. A beginner course in probability and statistics informs me that something between one third and one half of the people reading this column were either not yet born or still in diapers the last time ole’ Wild Bill blew anyone up. The hard Left seems to trade in a whole different brand of crazy these days.

So what is it that brings these dealers in mayhem out of the woodwork? The last time Mr. Roeder was arrested (with all the fixings for a nice bomb in his trunk) was back in 1996.  His activities tapered off after getting out of jail and he seemed to go dark until just recently. A series of other bombings and shootings listed in reports of this event were also executed by people who were either stirred up over abortion or angry at them darned revenuers coming to tax them. The funny part is that they took place in the 90s and similarly seemed to peter out until this year. Anyone else noticing a pattern here? It seems to flare up whenever there is a Democrat in the White House. Obama has barely had time to find where the bathrooms are and we’ve already had the shooting in Pittsburgh and now this.

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Are we really supposed to feign that much surprise at the public reaction? Recently, when the humorously named Department of Homeland Security issued its report on the dangers of right-wing extremism in our country, the proverbial offal hit the fan. Many of my favorite conservative writers, such as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, were up in arms. “Execrable!” he called it. How dare they!

In the cold light of day, I think such authors were less upset with the perceived slight than they were worried about what it might portend. You see, we’ve watched this movie before. Trust me. It doesn’t end well.

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