The Rush for Scapegoats in the Aftermath of the Awful Virginia Shooting
Dinesh D'Souza tweets, "I predict our mainstream media will be VERY SLOW to report that the #VirginiaShooter was reprimanded for wearing an Obama badge on the job." Yeah, probably. Still, take a look at the article that mentions it . . . Warped TV reporter Vester Lee Flanagan exasperated bosses with his 'stiff and nervous' delivery, his inability to use a teleprompter -- and by wearing a President Obama badge during an election report, Daily Mail Online can reveal. Management at WDBJ dubbed the failed newsman the 'human tape recorder' because he frequently parroted what interviewees had told him rather than doing his own journalism. Flanagan, 41, clashed repeatedly with photojournalists, belittling them in public and intimidating them with his violent temper, according to internal reports. He was also censured for wearing an Obama sticker while recording a segment at a polling booth during the 2012 US Presidential Election -- a clear breach of journalistic impartiality . . . The station filed the documents to rebut a wrongful termination claim which he had brought, claiming he was the victim of discrimination because he was black and gay. The station won the case. In a sometimes-rambling account of his time at WDBJ Flanagan accused co-workers of racially harassing him by placing a watermelon around the office. 'The watermelon would appear, then disappear, then appear and disappear, then appear and disappear again only to appear again,' he wrote in a May 2014 letter to presiding Judge Francis Burkart. 'This was not an innocent incident. The watermelon was placed in a strategic location.' He demanded a jury comprised entirely of African American women and independent investigations by the FBI and Justice Department. Is the fact that he's a partisan hack in his Election Day reporting relevant? Eh, maybe. But it seems less relevant than the fact that the guy was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. When there's an awful shooting, Democrats call for gun control yet again. Charlie Cooke observes: They want an "assault weapons" ban; they want a magazine-size limit; and they want background checks on private sales. And, clearly, they are quite happy to point to this incident in order to make their case. But, as we now know, this shooting has nothing to do with any of these things. The killer used a Glock 19 handgun, which is not an "assault weapon" in any universe. He fired eight shots in total. And he bought his gun legally from a dealer. In other words, he did nothing that even intersects with their coveted laws. When a gay black man murders his white colleagues out of a sense of racial grievance, a lot of folks on my side seem to want the same rush to find the true cause, i.e., "The black shooter was radicalized by the constant media race-baiting." We're now seeing the Right's version of "Sarah Palin's Facebook page map caused the Tucson shooting." Maybe the turnabout is fair play, but it's every bit as illogical. Conservative adoption of this argument probably further legitimizes the philosophy that when something horrific happens, we should look at controversial media sources as the real source of the problem. We've seen a rotating cast of media scapegoats -- violent video games, rap music, heavy metal music, even Dungeons and Dragons. It's never enough to blame the person who pulled the trigger or committed the crime; we want to apply the transitive property to point the finger at some other force we don't like. But whatever you define as media race-baiting -- let's take, for example, Al Sharpton's show -- we don't know if this guy watched Sharpton's show; even if he did, he's one of . . . 416,000 total viewers or so. What if, like the Tucson shooter, the Virginia shooter was a paranoid schitzophrenic? Allahpundit: He sued both news outlets for racial discrimination but the complaints went nowhere, said Marks, because no one could corroborate the anti-black and/or anti-gay comments allegedly made to him. Makes me wonder, per the tidbit in the excerpt above, if "Jehovah's" wasn't the only phantom voice Flanagan ever heard. 'Their Tie to Him Is Almost Mystical.' [Cue Ominous Music] Fred Barnes observes a group of Donald Trump fans in a focus group, and his first observation is a doozie: A focus group of Trumpies on Monday night in Alexandria, Virginia, was just that—quite revealing. It was organized by Frank Luntz, Mr. Focus Group himself. He's conducted more than a thousand of them. Yet he was at times surprised by how the gang of 29—17 women, 12 men—talked about Trump. They view Trump as different from all the other presidential candidates. He's not just their favorite candidate. Their tie to him is almost mystical. He's a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think. Luntz asked them for the one word that comes to mind when they think of Trump. The word cited most was "leader." Other words mentioned were "not a politician" and "not PC" and "decisive." I can't think of anything more unnerving than being told that a group of people believe they have an "almost mystical" tie to their leader. Next you'll be telling me people are seeing Donald Trump appear in -- oh, wait, you've got to be kidding me . . . 
Treating garden-variety political figures as quasi-messianic saviors is insufferable enough, but what's worse, we just went through this. Do we not remember Mark Morford writing in the San Francisco press . . . Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. Jesus isn't coming back just to run for president. Speaking of crazy, some people think I'm crazy for contending Joe Biden will be more difficult for the Republican nominee to beat than Hillary Clinton. But for starters, if Hillary's not the nominee, a whole bunch of major GOP arguments against her effectively disappear: Suddenly, the classified information Hillary Clinton stored on a private, insecure e-mail server is just grist for a juicy FBI investigation — not a defining issue in the presidential race. Suddenly, Clinton's problematic record at the State Department is downgraded to a minor sub-section of the Republican argument against President Obama's foreign-policy performance as a whole. Suddenly her pledge to Charles Woods, the father of a Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, that she'd "make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted" is a historical footnote, not a key revelation into the character of the Democratic nominee. With Biden as the nominee, the Clinton Foundation and its shady, favor-seeking foreign and domestic donors vanish as a campaign issue. So do the thorny questions of quid pro quo impropriety, real or apparent, created by those donors' favor-seeking while Clinton sat atop the State Department. But put most simply, Joe Biden is liked by a lot of people, and Hillary isn't. In Quinnipiac's hypothetical head-to-head matchups, Biden polls as well or slightly better than Clinton, although some may wonder about the value of such surveys this early in the cycle. Perhaps a better measuring stick is overall favorability, which makes Biden look much better than Clinton, at least for the moment. In late July, Quinnipiac found Biden at 49 percent favorable, 39 percent unfavorable. Clinton sat at 41 percent favorable, 50 percent unfavorable. Earlier this month, Gallup recorded the vice president's favorable/unfavorable split at 47 percent to 40 percent, his most positive ratings in their surveys since immediately after the 2012 election. Meanwhile, Gallup finds Clinton now underwater at 43 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable. Even people who think Biden is wrong about everything end up liking the guy. Washington reporters immediately latched on to [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates' portrayal of Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, he said, is a nice guy — "simply impossible not to like" — but "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." ADDENDA: I'm scheduled to appear in-studio on NRANews.com with Cam Edwards. Edits for the book are largely done. | 
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