The Replacements
18th May 2022
Steven Hayward at Power Line.
I’m so old I can remember Bill Clinton blaming the 1995 Oklahoma bombing on Rush Limbaugh. Heck, I’m so old I can recall MSNBC and the rest of the leftist hive mind blaming the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin, when 30 seconds of observation showed clearly the shooter was severely mentally ill. Oh, wait—you don’t need to be old for that: the New York Times repeated that outrageous slur in an editorial just four years ago—now the subject of a much-deserved libel suit from Palin.
Actually this is the left’s oldest playbook, and it hasn’t gotten any less stale than it was in the aftermath of that November 1963 day in Dallas, when the left blamed JFK’s assassin on a “climate of right-wing hate” in Texas, despite the obvious fact that Kennedy’s killer was a dedicated Communist. (See Camelot and the Cultural Revolution for the complete story.) Keep in mind that the left, including high government officials in the Kennedy administration, had been braying for several years that the principal threat to the nation was the “radical right,” and especially those little old ladies in tennis shoe bombs in the John Birch Society.