Nothing displays the blatant hypocrisy of the liberal intelligentsia like an act of mass murder.

There’s many examples to choose from in the wake of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, but take this gem by The New Yorker’s George Packer:

…for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. … This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.)

Got that? On the right, it’s standard operating procedure. It must be Sarah Palin! But on the left, it’s just some fringe forum posters, nothing organized by say the Democratic National Convention or a Democrat politician, right?

Mr. Packer must have missed the 2004 Democratic National Convention election guide titled “Behind Enemy Lines,” and putting a bullseye on key Bush states:

Mr. Packer must have missed popular liberal blogger Daily Kos using the bullseye against none other than… Gabrielle Giffords!

Mr. Packer must have missed this this 2006 election advertisement by Democrat Harry Mitchell placing his Republican opponent in a sniper’s rifle sight:

For eight years of the Bush administration I heard nothing but hate-filled, outlandish angry rhetoric from Democrats. But now, all of the sudden, it’s indecent?

The bottom line is one has to be a complete idiot to believe that if only Sarah Palin didn’t run a poorly-designed graphic, or if only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity weren’t on the air, then we wouldn’t have mass murder.

Don’t believe me? Go ask Gerald Ford’s family what they think of “Squeaky” Fromme.

(Here are some more examples).

Great commentary by Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

“We cannot jump to conclusions,” said CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. “We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever.”

“I’m on Pentagon chat room,” said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. “Right now, there’s messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam.”

The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, “I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president’s remarks.

“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a “transparent” investigation into the shootings “so the American people don’t jump to conclusions.” And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN’s John Roberts was quick to intervene. “Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions,” Roberts said to Hoekstra. “By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?”

Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin.

Read the rest.

An entire commentary of sarcasm by George Will:

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to preemptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity – something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.

It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever – ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama’s idea of unlimited government.

The more he denounced Republicans as the party of “no,” the better Republicans did. His denunciations enabled people to support Republicans without embracing them as anything other than impediments to him.

He had defined himself as a world-class whiner even before Rahm Emanuel, a world-class flatterer, declared that Obama had dealt masterfully with “the toughest times any president has ever faced” – quite a claim, considering that before the first president from Illinois was even inaugurated, seven of the then-34 states had seceded. Today’s president from Illinois, a chronic campaigner and incontinent complainer who is uninhibited by considerations of presidential dignity, has blamed his difficulties on:

George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Supreme Court, a Cincinnati congressman (John Boehner), Karl Rove, Americans for Prosperity and other “groups with harmless-sounding names” (Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” redux), “shadowy third-party groups” (they are as shadowy as steam calliopes), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, finally, the American people. They have deeply disappointed him by being impervious to “facts and science and argument.”

How’s that enlightened progressive superiority thingy working out for you, Mr. President?

Here’s Michelle Malkin:

Every day is a Western flag-burning day somewhere in the Muslim world for every reason under the sun (see here here here here here and here, for starters).

Koran-burning isn’t the real “provocation.” Or Mohammed cartoons. As I’ve said many times over the years, the mere existence of infidels is what provokes and inflames the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Retaliating against Koran-burners or targeting cartoonists is a lingering pretext to demonstrate that centuries-old, Koran-inspired hatred. If it isn’t cartoons, it’s always something else. From fresco rage to book rage to film rage to beauty pageant rage to Koran-dropping rage to cartoon rage to Pope rage, to ceramic Mohammed bobblehead rage to teddy bear rage to Burger King ice cream cone rage to blasphemous soccer ball rage, it never ends.

They never forget and they never forgive. Which is why we must never submit.

It’s not just flags, but Christians too: [June 2007] — Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses. Other than a few words of “we regret this act” blah, blah, blah by the politically correct Western governments, there is no response to this or any of the above acts. And so, the West must reap what it sows. If the West cannot issue stronger words than a few regrets, then why should moderate Muslims — under threat of violence in many countries — do so? Where is the leadership?

Never forget.

The “falling man” photograph is to me one of the most horrifying reminders of that dark day. What hell they must have endured that throwing themselves from 100 stories was the least agonizing option.

A word about all the proposed “Koran burnings.” It’s idiotic, and in this case does accomplish drawing moderate and sensible persons into a war of extremities. Having said that, as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9-11 just 365 days away, it’s also a lesson in the folly of appeasement. For 9 years and two administrations our government and most of our media have gone out of their way to avoid addressing what 9-11 really was. Is it any wonder that all of that political correctness and appeasement has empowered our own elements of extremism? — Ironically, the very thing the kumbayah “Coexist” bumper-sticker movement has championed has made it more likely that a preacher in middle American can feel justified in burning a stack of Korans. Taking a line from the “root cause” playbook, perhaps had our government and media not always taken the side of political correctness, and outlandish double standards, and been a little tougher in some responses to terrorism, such frustration would not be ingrained in the populace.

No matter, as former Sen. Fred Thompson pointed out, when the 9-11 mosque was announced these appeasement fools — including but predictably our president — focused on the legality instead of the sensibility of such an act. Conversely, they do not back a Gainesville preacher’s legal right to burn Korans, rather the sensibility.

That’s the double standard that empowered this act to begin with.

Here’s Kevin Williamson on the curious (0ver) reaction by liberal lamestream media in condemnation of gun ownership.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius  wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops re­quired of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Never mind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu­ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun­dation of progressivism.

Here’s Brian Riedl on why the economy is a mess. Hint: Bush tax cuts aren’t “spending.” (By the way, on that first myth, and this is highly relevant with the news that the Obama administration has turned to former Clinton era budget director Jacob Lew, let’s not forget that Clinton had the benefit of the “peace dividend,” or slashing the defense budget from the 6-7% of GDP it had been in the Cold War to barely 3% it became after the fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a ton of moolah!)

[MYTH #1] • The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade’s budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having “taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see.” That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels.

The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I’ve analyzed CBO’s 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits (and that is according to a “static” analysis, excluding any revenues recovered from faster economic growth induced by the cuts).

The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. If there were no Bush tax cuts, runaway spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007.

…

Over the past 50 years, tax revenues have deviated little from their 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) average. Despite a temporary recession-induced dip, CBO projects that even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2% of GDP by 2020—slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards.Spending—which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years—won’t remain as stable. Using the budget baseline deficit of $13 trillion for the next decade as described above, CBO figures show spending surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter.

Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average.

Entitlements and other obligations are driving the deficits. Specifically, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and net interest costs are projected to rise by 5.4% of GDP between 2008 and 2020. The Bush tax cuts are a convenient scapegoat for past and future budget woes. But it is the dramatic upward arc of federal spending that is the root of the problem.

Quote of the week: “This is what the bloated arrogance of entitled incumbency looks like.” — Michelle Malkin, referring to California Democrat Rep. Pete Stark’s sarcastic responses to the calm and reasonable questions on border security as posed by his constituents.

Wow, what a jerk. There’s a lot of great lines in that 10-minute video that underscore Pete Stark’s arrogance, but my favorite is where Stark belittles the minuteman asking what the government should be able to do and the minuteman never loses his cool, instead simply reiterates to Stark that border security is certainly one of the things the U.S. Constitution specifically reserves as a power — for which Stark, apparently, abrogates his duty to enforce!

The reason I like this is because it truly emphasizes how  today’s liberal Democrats have a total disregard and disrespect for the very legal do0cument that bestows them representative power in the first place. They simply have no use for the document that lays the foundation of the country.

Coming on the heel’s of North Carolina’s Rep. Bob Etheridge’s (D-N.C.) manhandling of a college student it’s not been a great month for the Democrats in office (let alone global warming posterboy Al “crazed sex poodle” Gore). Should make for some great political commercial material come October or so.

Wow, when you’re a former media-darling Democratic president and the Associated Press starts to turn on you, you must have bad ratings. Here’s how the AP describes Barack Obama’s panel to investigate the Gulf oil leak:

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry. A presidential spokesman said panel members will “consult the best minds and subject matter experts” as they do their work.

The commission has yet to meet, yet some panel members had made their views known.

Environmental activist Frances Beinecke on May 27 blogged: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.” And on June 3, May 27, May 22, May 18, May 4, she called for bans on drilling offshore and the Arctic.

“Even as questions persist, there is one thing I know for certain: the Gulf oil spill isn’t just an accident. It’s the result of a failed energy policy,” Beinecke wrote on May 20.

Two other commissioners also have gone public to urge bans on drilling.

Co-chairman Bob Graham, a Democrat who was Florida governor and later a senator, led efforts to prevent drilling off his state’s coast. Commissioner Donald Boesch of the University of Maryland wrote in a Washington Post blog that the federal government had planned to allow oil drilling off the Virginia coast and “that probably will and should be delayed.”

Boesch, who has made scientific assessments of oil spills’ effects on the ecosystem, said usually oil spills are small. But he added, “The impacts of the oil and gas extraction industry (both coastal and offshore) on Gulf Coast wetlands represent an environmental catastrophe of massive and underappreciated proportions.”

An expert not on the commission, Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University and an Obama campaign contributor, said the panel should have included more technical expertise and “folks who aren’t sort of already staked out” on oil issues.

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds with some reminders:

* Obama hand picked McChrystal!
* During the 2008 election cycle the Far Left called Gen. Petraeus “General Betrayus.” But now MoveOn has, well, moved on. I guess Obama gets a pass from them on that. (Flashback of this great parody of MoveOn — General LiesandPower.)
* Hillary Clinton questioned Petraeus’ character.