Unfortunately, there are dangerous kooks, trigger-happy wackos, and lone gunmen out there. Bad people exist. Crazy people exist -- and every so often, one of them snaps and there's a resulting body count. To most people, this is just a tragic fact of life.
However, to liberals in the media who are forever baffled by events that the average person has grasped since he was a child, these killers tend to break down into three groups. If they're devout Muslims and are connected to terrorists, then they must have killed for some reason OTHER than their religion. If they're conservative murderers, then they must have killed because of Glenn Beck, talk radio, the Tea Party movement, or whoever the hot conservative villain of the moment is and they're obviously part of a wider trend. On the other hand, if they're liberal, well then, at best the killer in question must be some random wacko who should immediately be forgotten. At worst, liberals try to paint leftward leaning killers as conservatives. They did this with Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, who was a registered Democrat and the Holocaust museum shooter, James Von Brunn, who was an "anti-Christian, 9/11 'truther' who hated the Bushes and 'the neo-cons'".
This is actually quite ironic given that openly violent groups have been tolerated, if not embraced by the Left. ELF, ALF, the Black Panthers, G8 rioters, the black bloc at anti-war rallies, and even the Weathermen are looked upon favorably by liberals.
Still, it's not enough to simply point out that liberals wink at leftist groups that engage in violence. When the next nutjob kills someone -- and regrettably, there will always be a next time -- conservatives need examples to point towards when the MSM tries to once again convince the public that only right-wing wackos do that sort of thing. Here are a few worthy examples to throw back at them when they try it.
1) The Earth Liberation Front: Usually, when you point a finger of blame at domestic terrorist groups like ELF and ALF, liberals fall all over themselves to say that, "Nobody has proved that they've killed anyone yet." Well, as long as they're just engaged in arson and bombings, I guess they're just peachy!
John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said animal and environmental rights extremists have claimed credit for more than 1,200 criminal incidents since 1990. The FBI has 150 pending investigations associated with animal rights or eco-terrorist activities, and ATF officials say they have opened 58 investigations in the past six years related to violence attributed to the ELF and ALF....The ELF has been linked to fires set at sport utility vehicle dealerships and construction sites in various states, while the ALF has been blamed for arson and bombings against animal research labs and the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry.
Well, certainly no one could support the actions of a group like this, right? Maybe you can ask the people at the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network about that.
2) James Chester Blanning: Do you remember James Chester Blanning? You probably don't because his bombs didn't go off. But, just to prove a point, I'm going to post an entire story about Blanning from the SFGate so that no one can claim I left anything out:
Gift-wrapped bombs rattle tony ski enclaveAspen, Colo. — A onetime resident of this city who had been bitter over its transformation into a playground for the rich left four gift-wrapped bombs downtown in a bank-robbery attempt, turning New Year's Eve celebrations into a mass evacuation, police said Thursday.
The dangerous bombs were made of gasoline and cell phone parts and came with notes warning of "mass death." The 72-year-old man suspected of placing them in two banks and in an alleyway on Wednesday shot and killed himself a short time later, police said.
Now, here's a detail that would have been everywhere in the press had the politics been reversed. Here's Blanton's note:
Do not f*** with us or there will be mass death like we have all been part of over in that f***ing quicksand trap that rove and chaney's monkey bush put us into where so many of our soul mates and brothers died very horrible deaths.
Funny how they didn't think the Rove and "chaney's monkey bush" comments were worthy of publication, isn't it?
3) The Weathermen: There's no need to go into depth about the Weathermen because you heard it all during the 2008 presidential campaign. But here's what is worth noting about the Weathermen: They claimed to be involved with 25 bombings, they intended to kill members of the military, and in 2001 Bill Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough."
What is the moral equivalent of allowing a man like Bill Ayers to teach college students and become such a big wheel in politics that he is able to befriend the President of the United States? There simply is no comparison on the right. It would be like Eric Rudolph being let out of a jail, given a teaching position at Liberty University, and running fundraisers for Mitt Romney. Conservative readers are undoubtedly grimacing in disgust at the very idea. Liberals haven't batted an eye at doing something just as morally abhorrent.
4) Carol Anne Burger: Burger wasn't just any old leftie -- she was a writer for the Huffington Post who stabbed her roommate 222 times with a screwdriver before she killed herself. Burger's last story for the HuffPO before she went down the memory hole? "Christian School Teacher Takes Female Students to Palin Rally." Yes, those Christians and Palin fans -- they're the ones you have to watch out for.
5) The Animal Liberation Front: If the world were a high school class, the crazies at ALF would be voted most likely to deliberately wipe out the human race with a bioweapon to make the world safe for snail darters:
In 1993 the Departments of Justice and Agriculture issued a report to Congress on the "effects of terrorism on enterprises which use animals," naming ALF as the most significant "radical fringe" animal rights group in the United States. The report stated that between 1979 and 1993, more than 300 incidents of break-ins, vandalism, arson and thefts had been committed in the name of animal rights nationwide. After some ALF members set a fire causing $3.5 million in damages at a veterinary lab in California in 1987, the FBI officially added ALF to its list of domestic terrorist organizations. According to the FBI, between 1995 and 2005 ALF committed some 700 criminal acts.
If some wacko goes to a Tea Party and shoots up a McDonald’s, every conservative in America is to blame, but we're not supposed to draw any conclusions about modern liberalism from left-wing domestic terrorist organizations? Give me a break.