Thursday, July 1, 2010

Looking for Violence in All the Wrong Places

A number of articles have appeared in the media expressing fear that Tea-Party protests will turn violent and that some TPers may be on the brink of doing something, well, Nazi-like. Meanwhile, there's been real fascism afoot - people being beaten, property being destroyed - and not much is being said about it on the port side of our media ship. Guess why:

Police say the incident began Wednesday morning when non-union construction workers attempted to gain access to the new Toys R Us site, but were blocked by protesting union workers.

When the victims were unable to gain access to the construction site, they drove to the area of the Transportation Center in the King of Prussia Plaza lot to wait for police assistance.

Authorities say while waiting for police to arrive, a black sedan pulled up and several white males exited with baseball bats and shattered both rear windows of the two work trucks. As the victims exited the trucks in fear, police say at least two were physically assaulted with the baseball bats. One of the victims was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for treatment.

Then, of course, there are the rioters at the G20 conference in Toronto:

Black-clad demonstrators broke off from a peaceful protest and torched a police cruiser in the financial district and smashed windows in a shopping district after veering off from the planned protest route.

A group, dressed all in black, smashed the windows of a bank, a coffee shop and some stores before heading to an area where Canada's largest banks are headquartered, smashing restaurant windows there.

Parenthetically, here's video of one Toronto citizen doing the job the police should have been doing:

Anyway, even when the liberal media reports these outrages but they do so almost sotto voce. There's very little commentary on the threat such behavior poses to our polity. Nor is it easy to find liberal commentators expressing revulsion at the penchant by the left for employing violence as a political tool. Why is that?

Perhaps if our journalistic wise men spent less time scrutinizing every protest sign carried by the grannies at Tea Party protests, seeking evidence of the smoldering bigotry and potential terrorism that they just know infects the movement, and spent more time focusing on union thugs and radical leftists who are actually hurting people and property, we'd all be a bit safer.

Exit question: The Toronto Blue Jays out of fear of left-wing violence, actually moved a home series with the Philadelphia Phillies to Philadelphia this past weekend. Can you imagine the Blue Jays moving a set of games out of town for fear of a Tea-Party demonstration?

RLC