Monica Showalter(American Thinker)
Much of the “Look, squirrel!” stuff going on in the aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi in his home by a drug-addled bum in San Francisco is focused on an erroneous tweet sent by Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter.
Yes, it was a bad tweet, all right, and he got rid of it, but that’s not the only problem in the media response to the attack.
Everyone from Joe Biden on down, and that’s quite a rat hole, is yelling about political violence now as a result — right-wing political violence, to be specific, which in itself is a false claim, given that the attacker, David DePape, was a bum who lived in a “hippie house” with a Black Lives Matter sign out front in Berkeley, California. DePape was a mentally deranged drug addict. He belonged in a mental health facility or some sort of jail. His internet trail is a string of inchoate gibberings. The failure of blue cities to deal with such problems is an issue in itself.
It’s not just that this isn’t being reported by the press as politicians preen about Trump being the intellectual author of the attack; it’s what the press and pols don’t report.
Michael Shellenberger, a centrist writer who investigated the attack himself because the press wouldn’t, called it a double-standard:
And if mainstream news journalists are so concerned that political extremism is resulting in more violence against public officials, why did they, en masse, downplay the assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June? Where The New York Times has put the alleged Pelosi assassination attempt on its front page for two days in a row, it buried the story of the Kavanaugh murder plot on page A20. Three days later, none of the Sunday morning political shows, such as NBC’s “Meet the Press,” even mentioned the assassination attempt.
Today, “Meet the Press,” focused on the Pelosi plot and framed it as overly political, making no mention whatsoever of DePape’s psychotic delusions. “The chilling and violent attack on Paul Pelosi — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband — is raising fears of more political violence,” said its host, Chuck Todd.
The double standard in news media coverage is brought into sharper relief when one considers that the suspect in the murder plot against Kavanaugh, Nicholas John Roske, 26, has, unlike DePape, shown no sign of psychosis. Rather, he appears to be motivated by the same kind of political fanaticism that has gripped climate activists around the world.
The attempt on Kavanaugh was just as real, but it was caught before the perfectly sane and ideologically motivated leftist could do any damage, so it lacks the emotional impact of the attack on Pelosi, whose skull was broken. But it was bona fide political violence, the kind the media clowns and Democrat pols are now raving about, except that it comes from the left.
Other recent cases of political violence were far more serious. They include the near murder of House leader Steve Scalise and others by a fanatical Bernie Sanders–supporter and two violent attacks on Sen. Rand Paul, who was hospitalized in the first with six broken ribs and ended up losing part of his lung after a brutal attack by another leftist, and then was targeted and attacked again by a mob of Black Lives Matter thugs, only to be rescued by police.
Those cases were swept under the rug, memory-holed, and, horrifically enough, barely punished, despite the huge damage done.
Paul was gracious in the wake of the attack on Pelosi but pointed in his remarks, noting that Pelosi’s daughter actually endorsed the political violence against himself:
No one deserves to be assaulted. Unlike Nancy Pelosi’s daughter who celebrated my assault, I condemn this attack and wish Mr. Pelosi a speedy recovery. https://t.co/2LxIlbIYQP
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 28, 2022
