Willfully Blind
Monday 18 April 2011 - Filed under Dumbassery + Journalism
Paulie Krugnuts apparently has some form of self-inflicted blindness syndrome in his latest opinion column on political violence:
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.
Yeah; liberals are better than that. Or not. It just couldn’t be that the media actively downplays (if not outright ignores) any leftist political extremism and violence. Money quote:
Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right wing media really isn’t exaggerating — proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.
[. . .]
Unlike many on the left, I didn’t view the Wisconsin battle as the end of days. I wasn’t convinced that I had a dog in that hunt, in part because I think there’s a strong case to be made those public employees shouldn’t have the same collective bargaining rights as private sector workers — a case made well by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said…
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”
Roosevelt’s statement makes sense to me; it does seem that public employees are different than private. I’m not at all anti-union. (I’ve publicly supported unionizing the visual effects industry, for example.) I’m open to a good rational argument against the case FDR made but in discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, all I got in response from people on the left was anger and insults. I saw little light and felt much heat.
That tone of extreme hostility I experienced brings me back to the death threats in Wisconsin. Frankly, the bile and invective in that threat reminded me of the tone I saw directed at me from many so-called liberals because I committed the heresy of taking a different position from them on the issue of collective bargaining for public sector employees… based on something FDR said.
Is this really what liberalism has come to in 2011?
Since working with Breitbart, my position on political issues hasn’t changed but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m deeply disappointed by the virulent, lockstep attitude I see on the left. My experience in the last few months tells me what I would not have believed possible; on any number of issues (including Pigford, by the way) I’ve seen liberals act much nastier and with less factual honesty than the conservatives… and this includes on issues where I disagree with conservatives.
Burying the death threat story is a clear example of intellectual dishonesty and journalistic bias.
Though I’ll be the first to admit that a google search doesn’t exactly represent the pinnacle of scientific inquiry, one search will absolutely include any references to these vitriolic death threats from union supports that are on the intertubes, and but a singular mainstream news site had a story on it, and it was little more than a passing glance. It isn’t that leftists don’t engage in violence violence, it’s that the media conveniently ignores it when they do in order to further their narrative that those on the right are the only ones capable of violent political actions.
2011-04-18 » madlibertarianguy