Media Blame ____ on the Tea Party, Conservatives

The Tea Party did it. Or maybe it was those other evil conservatives. Journalists can never quite decide which they hate more.

It’s the modern answer to an old-time whodunit – instead of the butler, we the get Tea Partiers, right wingers or whatever pejorative noun the left churned out that day.

Shooting somewhere in America? Blame the right. Especially when it’s the answer to who did something bad.

In the past few weeks, liberals and their media proxies have made allegations of racism against the right and repeatedly used shootings to whine about gun owners. Somehow liberals forget many of those shootings occur in urban areas populated by and run by liberal Democrats. The left has wrecked nearly every major city in America, but let’s blame the right.

In one of the most extreme examples, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen has repeatedly compared conservatives to Muslim terrorists: “In the decade since 9/11 right-wing extremists have demonstrated their ability to be just as deadly as their homegrown jihadist counterparts,” he wrote.

Rancher Cliven Bundy speaks at a news conference near Bunkerville, Nev., Thursday, April 24, 2014 (AP)

Those comments followed the Las Vegas shooting that killed five. A husband-and-wife nutball couple was so extreme that they were kicked out of the Cliven Bundy ranch protest. That didn’t stop the lefty media from linking them and their murderous attack to the right.

The deranged duo, Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers and covered them with a Gadsden flag. According to The Washington Post, “the flag has been more recently associated with the American Tea Party movement and, by some, with the Confederacy.” Hey, why not also paint the right as unreconstructed Confederates, too? CBS Las Vegas, argued, “The Gadsden flag has been an adopted symbol for the Tea Party.”

Several other outlets made the same ridiculous claim from Huffington Post to the UK Telegraph. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (one of the wonks with the dorky glasses, but I forget which one) argued it “has come to serve as a Tea Party, far-right symbol in the Obama era.”

Journalists, who apparently have no sense of history or knowledge of Google, completely forgot that the violent, revolutionary Occupy Wall Street movement also embraced the flag. That group mustered more than 7,700 arrests for arson, attacks on police, rioting and more as tallied by OccupyArrests.com.

Just ask The New York Times about the left’s use of the flag: “‘End the Fed’ signs -- and even some of those yellow Gadsden flags -- have found a place at Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests alike,” the paper wrote Oct. 21, 2011. But discover lunatic shooters and that OWS link is forgotten – even by the Times.

That’s not all. The flag was the symbol of anti-Bush protests throughout his eight-year presidency. On the popular novelty site Café Press, you can still buy memorabilia sold under the header, “REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME 2004: Remind Shrub what ‘Don't Tread on Me’ means.”

“Shrub,” or little bush, was one of many disparaging names used by the left for President George W. Bush. Liberals spent eight years attacking Bush, comparing him to Hitler, even making a movie where he was assassinated.

All of that is forgotten by the unethical opportunists of the left. Southern Poverty Law Center mouthpieces go on TV show after TV show complaining about dangerous conservatives when their own organization was cited by a domestic terrorist as where he got his information.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush (Getty Images)

Floyd Lee Corkins tried to shoot up the Family Research Council in 2012 and later admitted he targeted the organization because the SPLC called the FRC a “hate group” for its “anti-gay” stance on marriage. No supposedly neutral news outlet ever brings up that data point.

No, they have the audacity to blame conservative media. The Daily Beast (remarkably, still publishing as of 8 a.m.) went after “the unhinged right-wing echo chamber and its constant drumbeat about government tyranny being imposed on freedom-loving citizens.”

MSNBC’s Eric Dyson, who never met a stupid comment he wouldn’t make his own, took the same approach on the June 9, “Ed Show.” He blamed, “the constant drum beat of negativity that rolls so easily and so glibly from the tongues of conservative politicians and right-wing media.” Obviously the irony of his own negativity never occurred to the Georgetown professor.

All of this is enough to make you shocked by the left’s brand of stupidity. But in today’s media environment, even calling out moronic liberal comments gets you labeled a hater. Trying to explain the difference between global terror groups bent on destroying America and a psychopathic couple bent on their Columbine could probably get you labeled a villain in the next “news” story.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for TheBlaze. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

--

Front page image via Shutterstock.com

–

TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.