Shut up and die

I recall an anecdote my father used to relate from time to time concerning a young man he'd seen on the way home from his job in Manhattan one evening during the mid-1960s. This man had been standing on a retaining wall, passionately preaching peace, love and tolerance to passers-by. What gave my dad pause always came at the end of the story, and had to do with this young orator's tone, his general comportment, body language and so forth.

He had looked like he wanted to rip someone limb from limb.

On Jan. 8, 2011, 22-year-old Jared Loughner shot 20 people at town-hall style meeting in Tucson, Ariz. Six were killed, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. Gabrielle Giffords, a congressional representative, was critically injured with a gunshot wound to the head.

Regardless of what political leanings, if any, it turns out that Jared Loughner had, he did not pull the trigger for political reasons; he did so because he is dangerously deranged. This fact, more than any information yet revealed, stands out more than any other.

Within minutes of the tragic incident initially being reported, however, emissaries of the political left had convicted those on the political right – from prominent entertainers, commentators and politicians, to grass-roots activists – of either provoking or inspiring Loughner's attack.

All of this was exacerbated by the blatantly partisan and irresponsible blabbering of Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. As though he were qualified to make the above diagnosis, this armchair psychiatric clinician chimed in with liberal politicians, activists and the establishment press, essentially blaming talk radio, conservative Internet publications, blogs and Fox News for somehow pushing the demented young man over the edge. Since then, the instances of prominent progressives taking to the airwaves to condemn the right have been nearly too numerous to mention.

Though it has long been and remains a wholly baseless claim, those on the left have long charged those on the right with advocating violence, fomenting civil unrest, employing "hate speech" and generally advancing a militant worldview. Thus, it was not surprising that the incident of Jan. 8 precipitated the left's attempt to make political gains out of it.

Earlier this week, WND's Bob Unruh detailed a few of many of the antagonistic terms and phraseology used by President Obama over the last two years. In October, ex-Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., said that Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott should be put against a wall and shot. And just last week, one of Obama's idols, communist professor Frances Piven (whose methodology was used to bring about the financial implosion resulting from the subprime mortgage debacle) was calling for violent revolution in America.

So, who is employing inflammatory rhetoric?

It is incontrovertible that inciting violence is, and always has been, the domain of the political left. It is they who fomented violence during the 1960s, and who used violence and murder throughout the last century on every continent on the globe to achieve their political ends.

They will now attempt to use the Tucson tragedy to place Americans in a position where, if we do not capitulate to their renewed calls for gun control and the stultification of free speech, it will be inferred that we are just fine with members of Congress, judges and little girls being gunned down in the street.

What adds insult to injury – or disaster to tragedy as the case might be – is the necessity that existed for political factions to capitalize on this horrible event. In the face of the incremental bloodless coup that is taking place in America, progressives' adversaries must exploit the left's reaction to the shooting. In addition to the obligatory damage control called for in order to neutralize the wholesale liberal propaganda being churned out by the establishment press, they have no choice but to draw attention to progressives' dogged and misplaced efforts to tie conservatives to Loughner's actions.

For the left, the cause and target must be guns, talk radio, free speech, etc. It must be because they are losing, and they are desperate. The outrageous, groundless rhetoric to which we are being exposed by the left is a product of their desperation.

You see, they didn't expect us to fight. Americans who do have an idea of who we are and what our nation represents were supposed to shut up and die – or more accurately, to stay asleep, to lay down and just let the socialists have their turn. Why? Simply because they want it.

And that's just not a good enough reason, in my book.