Leftist Smear Campaign Will Backfire

Hillary Clinton absurdly equates loughner with islamic terrorists while in Dubai. Notice how Hillary uses the plural “extremists” to refer to the shooting even though it was only one person responsible. It was a pathetic attempt on her part to equate this lone shooter with atrocities perpetrated by jihadis who represent an ideology which has millions of followers around the world and thousands of active terrorists ready to kill in its name. The ugly attempt by the left to exploit the horror in Arizona to damage conservatives and suppress their free speech rights will backfire.

The mean spirited vitriol of the left




By Melanie Phillips, The Spectator

I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief at the attempt to blame the Tea-Partiers and ‘the right’ for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others in Arizona by a mentally disturbed individual, Jared Lee Loughner. Even more outrageously, America’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has effectively equated this mentally deranged loner with the Islamists who committed the 9/11 atrocities:

In a television broadcast filmed before students in Abu Dhabi, Mrs Clinton was asked why the 9/11 terror attacks, the work of a handful of men, had been allowed to colour American views of a whole people. ‘We have extremists in our country,’ she said. ‘A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman congress member was just shot by extremists in our country. We have the same kinds of problems, so rather than standing off of each other we should work to try and prevent the extremists wherever they are from being able to commit violence.’

The moral corruption of Mrs Clinton’s equation is not only obscene – it actively endangers America and the free world. Can it really be the case that an American Secretary of State believes that an attack upon her country that murdered thousands of people and which chalked up another marker in the holy war against the west being waged from within the Arab and Muslim world — in the defence against which America is sending its young men to die on the battlefield — has the same significance as one deranged gunman running amok? But then, who can forget Mrs Clinton’s dark imprecations, in her earlier incarnation as the President’s wife, against the

vast right-wing conspiracy

which was how she characterised opponents of the Democratic party?

It would seem that it is not just this gunman who has become wholly detached from reality but – as I have now observed many times over — a great swathe of the western intelligentsia and political class.

As soon as the bloodbath in Arizona took place, the liberal intelligentsia – led by the intellectually corrupt New York Times — leapt to blame Sarah Palin and the ‘extreme right’ for creating a climate of murderous hysteria towards Democrats such as Gabrielle Giffords. The atrocity provided the opportunity they had been waiting for to smash the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News — by accusing them all of inciting murder.

No matter that there was not a shred of evidence to link Loughner’s behaviour with any of these organisations. In the UK, the Independent pronounced that the Arizona attack represented the

fruits of extremism

by the American ‘right’. This hysteria extended beyond the left. The Telegraph declared:

Inflammatory rhetoric draws real blood;

And the Times decided that the shootings were caused by

a mean spirit

on the ‘extreme right’ — by which it appeared to mean Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

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