As my colleague Joe Newby noted yesterday, the left-leaning media are champing at the bit, just waiting to hammer the last nail into the coffin of the conservative movement by assigning blame for the Boston Marathon bombings to some right-wing crazy who loves guns and violence as much as he despises people of color. As Joe observes, the FBI has dismissed CNN’s wishful thinking that a suspect has been arrested, though a liberal can dream.
Enter the REM-state musings of Salon’s David Sirota, who delivered this “most read” column a day earlier. The headline and subhead are enough to make any reasonable person first recoil in horror and then weep for our nation. See if you do not have the same reaction.
Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a white American
There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats
The piece is accompanied by the above photo of Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Laden. I urge you read the entire piece because it is a window into a warped left-leaning mind set. In my opinion here is the most offensive paragraph:
Because of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental, political and societal response we see in the coming weeks. That means regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.
Now, here is my theory about why the left and the mainstream media are openly cheering/hoping that the Boston bomber will turn out to be a Timothy McVeigh type rather than an Islamic terrorist.
If the perpetrator was “radicalized” (a term the media is now using) in a training camp somewhere other than in the USA, that could mean President Obama may be forced to take some future international retaliatory action. In fact, that action might even resemble actions taken by George W. Bush after 9/11 when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Oh, that would not sit well with the left, but you have to admit: The irony is priceless.
Furthermore, if the bomber turns out to be influenced by foreign radical Islamic forces, that would also mean homeland security, once again, becomes a front and center issue in our national dialog. It also means that President Obama failed to protect this nation from an Islamist inspired terrorist attack and that would be his worst nightmare — giving his past propensity to want to downplay that kind of threat and talk up his role in taking out Bin Laden (despite the fact that the intelligence gathering that ultimately made the raid on his compound possible began over a decade before Obama set his sights on the Oval Office).
But if the Boston bomber is revealed as a right-wing nut job, then the mainstream media has a more explainable, less feared villain. And that would make similar attacks easier to prevent in the future by just rounding up all the right-wingers and taking away their pressure cookers.
The name of Timothy McVeigh has been mentioned countless times since Monday’s bombing, but wishful thinking will not make it so. The truth is more than likely the real perpetrators may be from the same group that then Secretary of State Condi Rice referred to when she testified before the 9/11 Commission saying:
The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them.
Hopeful if woefully misguided headlines like Sirota’s will not make a 2.0 version of Timothy McVeigh the Boston bomber, no matter how many times his name is mentioned.
