By Rick Manning –
The person who appears to be responsible for attempting to commit mass murder at Times Square in New York is not a member, nor has he ever been a member of the tea party. He is one of the usual suspects – a Pakistani born Muslim who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
But this story isn’t about the war on terror, but instead on the left’s strange view of the world.
The disappointment over the nationality and religion of the Times Square bomber is resonating throughout the crazy left. We have once Republican, now Independent New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s infamous bet that the bomber was disenchanted with the health care vote.
As well as MSNBC host Contessa Brewer’s confession that she was disappointed that the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic extremist. We were cautioned not to “draw any premature conclusions” by Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano in an article in the UK’s Guardian subtitled: “Whether the person behind the bungled Times Square bomb was Taliban or Tea Partier, all we have to fear is fear itself”
Yes, that’s right, the left actually believed that the tea party members were as likely suspects as Al Qaeda.
Remember the caution shown by authorities over alleged threats made by the tea party movement against individual members of Congress who voted for the health care bill. To date, no arrests have been made, no charges have been filed, and those wild reports seem to wholly unsubstantiated.
There wasn’t a whole lot of caution by the media and left wing politicians when unconfirmed allegations of racially insensitive slurs were made against the tea party members by political opponents.
In fact, the major characteristic of a tea party rally seems to be that the rally location is cleaner than when they get there. Civic pride is rarely a characteristic of a terrorist.
Not surprisingly, there has been no national media outcry related to this past week’s immigration reform rallies and marches. In Chicago, dozens were arrested. In Arizona, five were arrested for attacking police officers. And in Santa Cruz, California an anarchist May Day rally resulted in two arrests as a riot broke out leading to more than $100,000 worth of damage to local shops. There wasn’t even national media outrage when some attendees of the tea party rally in Searchlight, Nevada were accosted and their buses egged by Reid’s labor union supporters.
In Washington, DC, we have grown accustomed to the variously festooned left wing protests against the IMF, World Bank, G-7 and any other international body, and the arrests that follow. Call an IMF meeting and it seems like a Grateful Dead concert has broken out on the streets without any of the mellowness.
Yet, somehow, Katie Couric and her friends didn’t speculate that the Times Square bomber might be a disgruntled undocumented worker, or an anarchist protesting America’s unwillingness to prop up the failing Greek government, or even a member of organized labor, no, somehow the mainstream media immediately jumped to their hoped-for conclusion that the tea party could be blamed.
As the attempted terrorist attack in Times Square illustrates, real terrorists don’t care if they kill Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians or Independents. What they care about is striking at the heart of America. Hopefully, the mainstream media will remember this fact the next time they feel moved to demonize the peaceable assembly of law abiding Americans under the “terrorism” banner.
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government, and the former Public Affairs Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Labor.
