Mission accomplished, Markos Moulitsas.

The Left gets its violent responder to hate speech, after all: the only problem is, from their point of view he’s aimed the wrong way.

I started following the saga of J. Eric Fuller a couple of days ago: the short version is that he was one of the victims of the Tucson attack of last week that killed six people and nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Despite the fact that the consensus is, from the President on down, that harsh political rhetoric had nothing to do with the attack (the shooter is generally conceded to have been motivated by violent paranoid schizophrenia, not political beliefs), Mr. Fuller has made a name for himself by declaring that the right wing is responsible for the attacks, to the point where he is calling for Sarah Palin’s arrest for treason.  And I was going to let all of that go: the guy did get shot*, he was a hardcore Democrat beforehand – and, honestly, Fuller didn’t sound all that much different than this fool (more here) or this fool or the fools found here (and see here for much, much more).  Free speech is free speech, even when the guy’s cynically milking the fetishes of the Left, am I right?

Except that Mr. Fuller wasn’t being cynical.  He really, truly believes what he’s been told by the netroots; which is why he’s under arrest tonight for making actual, public death threats against Trent Humphries, who was not involved with the Tucson attacks in any way, shape or form but who is the president of the Pima County Tea Party.  Mr. Humphries has, in fact, been getting death threats all week; this was just the first time it was done in a fashion that the media couldn’t ignore.

Continue reading Mission accomplished, Markos Moulitsas.

#rsrh Left-bloggers hate, envy @markos .

Not having read American Taliban – and not particularly being interested in reading American Taliban, either – I don’t particularly plan to care overmuch about the blipping thing.  But after flipping through these self-congratulatory missives on how the book sucks just as badly as they think that Liberal Fascism did, I have to say: Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and the rest of them seem rather blatantly upset that Markos Moulitsas can get books published and they can’t.  Couple that with an existing desire to malign Jonah Goldberg’s (quite good) book – and if you wonder whether Jonah got under the Left’s skin with his insights, read their complaints and wonder no further – and you end up with this kind of petulant whining.

I’d be sympathetic, except that it’s Moulitsas, which means that this is totally deserved from a karmic perspective.

Moe Lane

PS: My colleague Dan McLaughlin wrote a very good article on this subject here.

UPDATE: I see that Jonah’s noticed this backward recognition, too.

John Spratt (D, SC-05) and his American Taliban.

Tell the truth, Spratt.  You mumble when people ask you which district you represent.

It sounds like that book will get at least one South Carolinian purchaser: Spratt’s campaign manager Wayne Wingate, who is completely behind the idea that Osama bin Laden would receive widespread support from Republicans in SC-05.  An opinion that Spratt apparently shares, given that he didn’t immediately turn on Wingate and lay him out on the ground for saying filthy trash like that about Spratt’s constituents.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the report:

“If Osama bin Laden ran in this district as a Republican, he would get 38 to 40 percent of the vote in any election year,” says Wayne Wingate, Spratt’s communications director, as he walks alongside the congressman at the festival. “This is a very Republican district. So you’ve got that plus this tea party angst against any incumbent in the world right now.”

In point of fact, Mister Wingate – and Mister Spratt – if Osama bin Laden ran in SC-05 as a Republican somebody would come up to bin Laden and put a bullet in his brain.  This does reflect a change from our past methodology of capture and interrogate, but better safe than sorry. After all, since January 2009 there’s been a growing understanding among the American people that the political party running things can’t exactly be trusted with keeping the really bad illegal combatants under wrap. Continue reading John Spratt (D, SC-05) and his American Taliban.