Academic

MORE ON TODAY?S CLIMATE OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE: Andrew Breitbart Describes Unhinged Harry Reid Supp?

By Glenn Reynolds

MORE ON TODAY’S CLIMATE OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE: Andrew Breitbart Describes Unhinged Harry Reid Supporters on the Attack. I hope that those Democratic politicians and media figures who have incited this sort of violence against the tea parties with their extremist rhetoric will try to rein in their violent followers before their violent rhetoric produces still more political violence.

UPDATE: John Hinderaker: More Thoughts On Liberal Violence.

We talked about this on our radio show today, and several callers reminded us of a particularly sorry episode of liberal violence that, for some reason, has not gotten much attention: the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul.

I attended the convention and remember the terrorist acts that were carried out by anti-Republican protesters very well. They threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below. Fortunately, no one was killed.

These were anti-Bush and anti-Republican protesters. Is it a stretch to think that some of them, at least, may have been inspired by over-the-top, hateful attacks on the Bush administration by Democratic Congressmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Michael Moore, who was a guest of honor at the Democrats’ own convention, various show business personalities, and many other leading liberal figures? I don’t think so. We haven’t seen that sort of hate campaign since the Democrats went after Abraham Lincoln. It seems unlikely that none of the “protesters” who tried to commit murder were inspired by those liberal voices.

Yet, hardly anyone seems to be aware of the violence that took place in 2008. At most, the story was treated with a ho-hum attitude in the press. For some reason, political violence was not a concern less than two years ago. Yet today, we can hardly imagine what would happen if a group of tea partiers were to drop sandbags off a highway overpass, trying to kill motorists below. Liberal reporters’ heads would explode. Yet this is exactly what anti-Republican Party protesters did in 2008, and no one cared. To my knowledge, not a single Democratic politician condemned this anti-Republican violence or attempted in any way to distance the Democratic Party from it.

Keep that in mind next time you hear a Democrat whining about the Republican effort to “fire Nancy Pelosi.”

Indeed.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on March 27, 2010 (boomark / email).