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LIBERALS SEEK BAN ON METAPHORS IN WAKE OF ARIZONA SHOOTING

by Ann Coulter
January 12, 2011

After the monstrous shooting in Arizona last week, surely we can all agree that we've got to pass Obama's agenda immediately and stop using metaphors.


At least I think that's what the mainstream media are trying to tell me.


Liberals instantly leapt on the sickening massacre at a Tucson political event over the weekend to accuse tea partiers, Sarah Palin and all conservatives who talk out loud of being complicit in murder by inspiring the shooter, Jared Loughner.


Of course, to make their case, they first must demonstrate:


(a) Right-wingers have called for violence against anyone, especially conservative, pro-Second Amendment Democratic congresswomen;
(b) Loughner was listening to them; and
(c) Loughner was influenced by them.


They've proved none of this. In fact, it's nearly the opposite.


Needless to say, no conservative has called for violence against anyone. Nor has any conservative engaged in any "rhetoric" that was likely to lead to violence. Every putative example of "violent rhetoric" these squeamish liberals produce keeps being matched by an identical example from the Democrats.


Sarah Palin, for example, had a chart of congressional districts being targeted by Republicans. So did the Democratic Leadership Committee. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel went on Fox News and said he invented the bull's-eye maps.


Similarly, every time liberals produce an example of military lingo from a Republican -- "we're going to target this district" -- Republicans produce five more from the Democrats.


President "whose asses to kick" Obama predicted "hand-to-hand combat" with his political opponents and has made such remarks as "if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun" -- making Obama the first American president to advocate gun fights since Andrew Jackson.


These are figures of speech known as "metaphors." (Do liberals know where we got the word "campaign"?)


It's not that both sides did something wrong; neither side did anything wrong. The drama queens need to settle down.


The winner of the most cretinous statement of 2011 -- and the list is now closed, so please hold your submissions -- is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who on Monday night recalled Palin's statement, "We're not retreating, we're reloading," and said, I quote, "THAT'S not a metaphor."


Really, Chris? If that's not a metaphor, who did she shoot?


By blaming a mass killing on figures of speech, liberals sound as crazy as Loughner with his complaints about people's grammar. Maybe in lieu of dropping all metaphors, liberals should demand we ban metonyms so that tragedies like this will never happen again.


As for Loughner being influenced by tea partiers, Fox News and talk radio -- oops, another dead-end. According to all available evidence, Loughner is a liberal.


Every friend of Loughner who has characterized his politics has described him as liberal. Not one called him a conservative.


One friend says Loughner never listened to talk radio or watched the TV news. Throw in "never read books" and you have the dictionary definition of a liberal. Being completely uninformed is precisely how most liberals stay liberal.


According to voluminous Twitter postings on Saturday by one of Loughner's friends since high school, Caitie Parker, he was "left wing," "a political radical" "quite liberal" and "a pot head."


If any public figure influenced this guy, my money's on Bill Maher.


But liberals have been so determined to exploit this tragedy to geld conservatives, they have told calculated lies about Loughner's politics.


In the most bald-faced lie I have ever read in The New York Times -- which is saying something -- that paper implied Loughner is a pro-life zealot. This is the precise opposite of the truth.


Only because numerous other news outlets, including ABC News and The Associated Press, reported the exact same shocking incident in much greater detail -- and with direct quotes -- do we know that the Times' rendition was complete bunk.


ABC News reported: "One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act 'wildly inappropriate.'


"'One day (Loughner) started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,' classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. 'The rest of us were looking at him in shock ... I thought this young man was troubled.'


"Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well.


"'A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,' Ali said."


Here's the Times' version: "After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a 'terrorist for killing the baby.'"


So that's how the Times transformed Loughner from a sicko laughing about a dead fetus to a deadly earnest pro-life fanatic. (Never believe a news story written by Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage or Scott Shane of The New York Times -- or for simplicity, anything in the Times.)


I wouldn't have mentioned Loughner's far-left world view immediately after a tragedy like this, but now that liberals have opened the door by blaming Loughner's politics, they better brace themselves.


And when I say "brace themselves," I don't mean they need to actually strap themselves into a brace. That's a metaphor, Chris.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER
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When I heard the first reports about a shooting of a congresswoman I knew that the left would try to twist the event into a political weapon - that is if she were a Democrat.  If she had been a Republican and had been shot by a left-wing activist or an Islamofascist then the media would have stood around scratching their heads and wondering loudly what on earth could have motivated the killer.

Sort of like they did with the Ft. Hood jihadist.

But the injured congresswoman had a "D" by her name so it was easy to overlook the fact that she was a pro-border security, pro-Second Amendment, anti-abortion conservative Democrat who voted against Nancy Pelosi in her recent run for minority leader.

And even though the killer turned out to be a "left-wing pothead" and 9/11 truther who believed that the government was using mind control through the manipulation of grammar and who listed the Communist Manifesto as of of his favorite books (automatically giving him more in common with Barack Obama than with Sarah Palin) the left just couldn't resist trying to link the nutjob murderer with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

The attempt not only failed but backfired thanks to the new media and only made the left-wing media, Hollywood celebrities and Democrat politicians look even more batshit crazy than they already looked (and believe me most sane people would have not thought that possible).

The reality is that Jared Loughner was insane.  He lived in a different reality than the rest of us and responded to motivations which are no more accessible to sane people than any events which might be transpiring on the far side of Pluto.  Mr. Loughner is a very sick man who lives, and unless medical science makes some astounding breakthrough, will die in his own world.

In the meanwhile lefties will continue destroying what microscopic bits of credibility they have left by continuing to advance the theory that the murders were somehow motivated by "right-wing hate speech" (which simply means people telling the truth about Democrats and their agenda).

Of course it's an ill wind that blows no good and we do have our 2011 winner for the Charles Moose Award for Magnificently Incompetent Law Enforcement.  Remember Chief Moose?  He was the Montgomery County (VA) police chief who was so fixated on the Beltway Sniper being a lone white man that he forced his investigators to ignore evidence that might have caught the two African-American Muslim men who were the actual snipers much earlier and saved lives.

This year the prize must go to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik who even though his department knew that Loughner was crazy, potentially violent and obsessed with Congresswoman Giffords did nothing to keep him away from the event in which he was able to approach her and shoot her in the head at near contact distance.  Then the good sheriff compounded his mistake by running to the nearest microphone to both aid the shooter's defense team in constructing an insanity defense and attempt to tar (without the slightest bit of evidence) innocent people with whom he happens to disagree with guilt for the crime.

Now Dupnik's department is in full CYA mode refusing requests by the media to release records of their encounters with Loughner in the time before the shooting.  What will those records show?  We can't know with certainty but I very much doubt that if they revealed that Sheriff Dupnik had been doing his duty that there would have been any hesitation to put them before the public as quickly as possible.  In fact given Dupnik's behavior to date if the records showed him in anything like a good light he would be handing out copies of them on street corners in Tucson.

I could go on and talk about Obama's "bring a gun to a knife fight" comment or Rahm Emanuel's reading a list of political opponents and punctuating each one by slamming his fist on the table and shouting the word "dead", but why bother.  It has been done elsewhere and it misses the point.

The point is that an insane man did an insane thing and people were killed an injured.  The only "lesson" to draw from the event is that our society made a serious error when we allowed liberal activist lawyers and judges to change the laws which used to allow us to lock people like Jared Loughner away in institutions where they could be cared for and prevented from doing harm to themselves and others.