Dingell mute on Wisconsin hate speech (The Michigan View 03.09.11)

Posted by hpayne on March 10, 2011

Dingell

A little over a month ago, Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, warned of the need to turn down the volume on political speech lest it result in more violence like the Tucson massacre.

“I saw the district of Gabrielle Giffords has a crosshairs put on it,” Dingell said, taking to the House floor to blame Sarah Palin and Republicans for the shooting of Democratic Rep. Giffords by an apolitical, mentally-disturbed Jared Laughner. “As a lifetime rifleman and shooter, I know what crosshairs signify when you put them on somebody and I know what happened.'”

Now, as Democrats’ Big Labor allies flood the streets of Madison, Wisconsin with placards drawing crosshairs over Republican Governor Scott Walker and Democratic pols urging blood in the streets, Dingell has gone silent.

The stark refusal of Democrats to condemn the hate speech in Wisconsin lays bare their campaign for a “new civility” (as President Obama called it) as a fraud. The ugly truth is that Democrats used the shooting of Miss Giffords for political gain.

Big Labor’s Wisconsin stand has been charged with hate. “Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” said Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Massachusetts, in rallying a pro-labor crowd against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. As public employees have laid siege to the Madison capital, signs compared Walker to Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Other signs drew a cross-hairs over a picture of Governor Walker’s head, with the caption “Don’t Retreat, Reload; Repeal Walker”

Yet none of this has drawn the slightest rebuke from Democrats or their allies in the Mainstream Media. In a 180-degree pivot from the civility demanded in the wake of Tucson, the Left has lost its voice.

“Members of this body have a duty to speak up — as do members of the media — who have been saying these kinds of things,” Dingell thundered on the House floor January 12. “(They) will lead us into a time when we will create a threat not just to the lives and well-being of our members but also to the lives and well-being of this country and its debates.”

Yet he has not issued even a written statement condemning “these kind of things” in Wisconsin.

“What I’m hopeful for that if people involved in hate speech will think twice now,” added Dingell’s Michigan colleague, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, after the Tucson shooting. “It’s totally appropriate to have strong feelings on both sides of every issue, but words matter and when someone who is unstable hears those words, they risk inciting someone.”

She too has been struck mute in the wake of Wisconsin.

Indeed, Democrats and the MSM think civility only applies to the Tea Party. Unlike Wisconsin, not a sign or off-color word uttered by Republican supporters has gone unnoticed in a year-log campaign to smear Republican activists as a fringe element.

Last March, as thousands protested on Capitol Hill in the days before the passage of Obamacare, CBS’s Nancy Cordes slammed it as “a weekend filled with incivility,” reports the Media Research Center. World News anchor Diane Sawyer painted Tea Partiers as a violent gang, with “protesters roaming Washington, some of them increasingly emotional, yelling slurs and epithets.” ABC anchor Charles Gibson complained that “protesters brought pictures of President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache to a town hall meeting.” Their reaction to Wisconsin’s hate speech? Nothing.

The lesson of Tucson was that lone, isolated nuts like Laughner are capable of terrible violence. . . and that one of Congress’ most senior representatives, his party, and a partisan media see assassination attempts as opportunities to exploit for political gain.

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