One way you can tell our most undeservedly prestigious media outlets are liberal is that Liberalism with a capital L has never been blamed for anything heinous. Mass killing -- like the more than 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion -- would never be blamed on their political movement.
On April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was blown up by a truck bomb, killing 168 people, including 19 children. It took just two days after the FBI tied Timothy McVeigh to the bombing for those prestigious media outlets to blame conservatives. The Sunday shows were unofficially indicting a "climate" of rhetoric.
In January, Republicans had taken the House majority for the first time in 40 years. On CNN, then-Washington Post writer Juan Williams typified the smear: "You have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, and you know, gone berserk ... some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that. But it's the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington."
Some journalists openly blamed then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Many pointed fingers at Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. Time magazine proclaimed, "the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast."
That old smear is now being renewed by liberal legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin, who is shamefully associated with the words "Zoom masturbation incident." He has a new book titled "Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism." The publisher touts his thesis with a blurb from The New Yorker, Toobin's long-time employer before the indecent incident: "In Toobin's view, it wasn't just militarism that made McVeigh -- it was Republicanism." The book reviewers hailed it as "depressingly relevant" to today.
Politico's "Playbook" team helpfully promoted Toobin's statist thesis, warmly touting, "Jeff emailed Playbook with a preview." Toobin explained his book is meant to show "that the conventional view of McVeigh -- as an 'antigovernment' 'lone wolf' -- is wrong." He was "part of the conservative movement opposing Bill Clinton's federal government, not all government," and that's just like today's conservatives "seen most dramatically on January 6, 2021."
Just as the media-Democrat complex have been using Jan. 6 as a political weapon against Republicans in the post-Trump era, they used McVeigh to reelect Clinton.
Toobin added: "I had long interviews with Bill Clinton (arguably the hero of the book) and Merrick Garland, who supervised the [McVeigh] prosecution as a Justice Department official in the nineties. Garland's experience in Oklahoma City is clearly shaping his conduct of the Trump investigation."
Of course, Toobin would make Clinton the "hero" of his book -- two exposed sexual harassers trying to remake themselves into noble public servants. But as the New Yorker piece on Toobin's book pointed out, McVeigh was obsessed with the disastrous Waco standoff in 1993, which ended in a federal raid that caused the deaths of 76 people, including 28 children. Was President Clinton the "hero" of that fiasco?
The liberal elite's first draft of the Clinton presidency was ridiculously self-serving, and Toobin is providing the second verse, same as the first. That doesn't make it accurate.
In the broadest sense, this is why liberal journalists cannot be trusted. They offer no respect to conservatism as a legitimate philosophy. How can you tell conservatives to trust you at the same time you associate them with domestic terrorism? Toobin is underlining the problem. Liberal journalists don't want the conservatives to trust them. They only want conservatives to be defeated and exiled from Washington, scattered to their cartoonish fringes.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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