Readers who've been following matters for a couple of years will remember how the media sought to portray the tea party as a bunch of violent extremist kooks. Try as they might, however, every attempt to pin some act of violence on them fell flat because the violence was all in the fevered imaginations of the lefty press and their political allies.
I was reminded of this when I came across a report of an attempt recently to firebomb the office of a black congressman from Missouri named Emanuel Cleaver. The Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window of his office but failed to ignite and damage was minimal. News reports of this attack were even more minimal.
Why? I wondered. The perpetrator had been apprehended, and I knew, as everyone does, that had the guy been a tea party conservative, or any kind of conservative, or even a quasi-conservative Republican the episode would have displaced even Roger Goodell's handling of spouse abuse in the NFL on the news. It would've been "all hands on deck" for the media as they wrung every drop of anti-conservative propaganda out of their reporting on the attack. Allegations of violent racism on the right would've filled the airwaves.
But there was almost nothing. The episode flew like a stealth bomber right under the radar. No one said much of anything about it. So, again, why? Even Cleaver's office downplayed the incident and said it was no big deal, but surely, if the alleged spitting incident in which Cleaver claimed in 2010 that a tea party protestor spit on him was a big deal, and it was huge even though it never happened, then surely an attempted firebombing in which he or his staff could've been killed was a big deal, so why wasn't it?
Well, it turns out that the perp is a 28 year-old sympathizer of an organization called the "KC Fight Back Insurrectionist Collective," and a letter found in his belongings states in part that "The Missouri congress has been a willing partner in the US governments capitalist war hungry agenda." In other words, the reason not much was made of the bombing was that it was carried out, as so much political violence is, by a leftist, and leftist violence, though common, just doesn't advance the media myth that conservatives are the real villains in this country.
I don't know what punishment will be meted out to Mr. King, if any. After all, he's doubtless deranged, but maybe what courts sympathetic to the left will do is gently instruct him that Democratic congressmen are really his friends and nudge him instead in the direction of the offices of John Boehner as the proper target of his inept and futile lunacies.