What could be worse than losing your daughter to a mad killer? Having media elites try to use your daughter for political gain, to viciously smear their political opponents has to be in the running.

Edging up on that, however, must be being on the receiving end of that viciousness when you had nothing remotely to do with the tragedy. By people who are obviously inciting hatred against you for political gain, and a media that is happy to help spread the hate.

These people know that they are being viciously dishonest. They are doing it to intimidate. And they’re being very clear that they are not going to stop. Their targets on the right and the bystanders in the middle are expressing surprise that even when it turns out the guy was just nuts, and that more of his crazyiness coincided with the extreme left than with the extreme right, the vicious left is doubling down on their accusations. But they’re not doubling down—they knew it was likely to turn out this way from the start. It doesn’t matter. Bill Ayers himself could take up nail bombs again, and they’d still blame it on the tea party movement and conservatives.

The goal of the vicious left is intimidation. They want everyone from Palin to the families attending rallies to decide that this viciousness isn’t worth taking a stand, and that it’s best to just stay home. That however horrible it is for the left to wave this bloody flag, they’re going to do it every time a tragedy happens, until the average person shuts up and goes back to the kitchen, back to the factory, back to the farm, back to their computer terminal, and lets the left have their way.

It’s about making sane politicians afraid to say that job-killing legislation kills jobs.¹

To them, politics is all-out war and anything goes. Capitalizing on tragedy is a game. Their behaviour now is a manifestation of that. My original title for this post was “The Amazing Projection of the American Left”, but I changed it, because the more I read, the more obvious it became that they’re not projecting. They knew and know exactly what they’re doing.

First they create a climate of hate. Then when tragedy strikes, even completely random tragedy, they blame people who had no part; after pushing lies for a day or so, they demand apologies for incitements that never occurred. They’re nasty, whining creeps. They lost in the last election and are trying to turn the narrative in whatever way works. Hey, it’s war—anything goes, as long as they can regain the narrative:

The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.

That’s the hateful rhetoric they’re talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts.

They want to control speech again, and the mainstream media is fully complicity. Jonah Goldbert put it well in A Point of Clarification:

Every journalistic outfit who thinks they’re being fair by covering the “debate” evenhandedly misses this basic point. You can’t cover a debate that shouldn’t exist in the first place “fairly.” It’s like covering the “debate” over whether the Jews secretly launched the 9/11 attacks. Once you’ve engaged a yes-v-no argument that takes both “sides” seriously, you’ve done more harm than good.

Or, as I commonly say, If you try to balance between truth and lies, you always end up with lies. Facts are not a compromise.