Oct 18, 2008 
Never underestimate the ability of the Right to stoke its victim complex. Headline at Pajamas Media:
As the media fumes over nonexistent hate at Palin speeches, it ignores leftists who go berserk on city streets.
While the Democrat-leaning media continues to scare undecided voters with bedtime stories about some mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen, here is a real district attorney’s complaint documenting an unprovoked assault by an enraged Democrat against a McCain volunteer in midtown Manhattan: “Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”
I make no excuses for the assailant, and I sincerely hope he is punished to the full extent of the law.
BTW, here are some of the “mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen.”
The distinction between angry McCain supporters and the one assailant in New York, beside numbers, is in the word incite. The Palin-McCain campaign is inciting rage. It’s stoking rage as hard as it can stoke. Veep candidate Palin insinuated that entire parts of America are anti-American.
Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.
The Obama-Biden campaign is not inciting rage. There are enraged Obama supporters, but the Obama campaign is not demonizing McCain as un-American or a traitor or someone otherwise outside the mainstream of American politics.
See, righties, that’s why one of these things is not like the other.
For example:
This woman is not some random whackjob off the streets like the New York assailant. She’s an elected whackjob in the U.S. Congress who is speaking on behalf of the McCain Administration. She’s ready to reconstitute the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Rep. Bachmann, btw, has had some of her own “guilt by association” problems. Maybe she’s anti-American too. Click here to donate to the Dem running against her.
I’m sure if one looked hard enough one could equally crazy Obama supporters. But in Congress? or in a paid position with the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party? Not so likely.
Yesterday I linked to a blog post that accused “the Left” of totalitarianism because the news media had the nerve to publish unflattering stories about Joe the Plumber. Apparently someone reminded the blogger of the Right’s rabid hyena attacks on the parents of SCHIP poster child Graeme Frost. Not the same thing, the blogger argues. The Frosts were acting as spokespersons for the Democratic Party. All Joe did was ask a question.
Well, no. Nobody gave a bleep about Joe until John McCain made him the centerpiece of his election campaign. It was McCain, not the question, that made Joe a news item. If Joe decides the media attention has been detrimental, I hope he sues McCain and the GOP out of its socks. And I think a case could be made that using a private citizen like that without the citizen’s permission ought to be criminal.
However, it appears the Joe the Plumber ruse is coming back to bite McCain. After explaining why Joe the Plumber is not, in fact, Joe, or a plumber, Joe Queenan writes (emphasis added),
There is nothing wrong with being as phony as a three-dollar bill. It is, in fact, a rich American tradition. But there is something unnerving about a supposedly sophisticated political organisation that trumpets the dodgy virtues of grassroots phonies when millions of authentic working-class people could have handled the mythological chores perfectly well. All across America, there are plumbers named Joe and Jim and Jack and Mike and Dan and Dave and Ed and Fred whom the McCain campaign could have recruited to be their mascot.
In my own family, there was Joe the truck driver, Joe the postman, Bill the typewriter salesman, and Johnny the jack-of-all trades. Right here in my own neighborhood, I can point to Tony the deliveryman, Vinny the postman, Charley the cook, Tony the token collector. Any one of these guys qualifies as a real-life working class hero. Instead of them, McCain’s people went out and corralled themselves a 24-carat phony. What’s more, they found themselves a phony who doesn’t even pay his taxes on time. This strongly suggests that nobody in the McCain camp has ever met a working-class person before; they think anybody with a shaved head and a hoody must be “authentic”.
Bingo.
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