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Yes, yes, I know there was that eye-catching "head stomping" to talk about yesterday...

... but that just highlights the lack of anything serious in the political news this week.

Yes, yes, I know that liberals would like to purvey the notion that tea partiers are violent and that incident fit their template, but:

1. One data point proves nothing about a large group (unless you follow the thinking style of bigotry).

2. The "violent Tea Party" meme has been pushed since the very beginning of the Tea Party movement, so it's nothing new. And the failure to pick up enough data points to look anything like a pattern is glaringly obvious.

3. The MoveOn.org woman came to the event to create an incident and caused the Ron Paul's supporters to worry about his safety, so that violent incident was prompted by the urge to defend, in which case even that one incident isn't a data point that fits the gapingly empty template.

4. "A person in a disguise, carrying a sign from a radical organization, tries to push through the crowd to hand a political opponent an unknown object.  What would the Secret Service have done to her?"
Indeed!

5. I bet some of you, reading #4, thought of saying: "Person"?! It was a woman. How threatening could a woman be? But:

A: That's sexist. You think women cannot be dangerous?

B: Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore. It happens.

6. Are we really going to elevate every prank and beating to a political event deserving analysis? That "stomping" had nothing do with anything worth thinking about in deciding who to vote for. If that counted as substance, it's evidence of the extreme dearth of substance this week.

7. And let me say one more thing to those who delighted in what they imagined was the political usefulness of the "stomping" incident. There is a big rally in Washington this weekend that will draw many thousands of persons. Within that throng of presumed liberals and lefties, there will be all sorts of characters, with their diverse problems and motivations. You don't know who will act up, what foolishly overstated signs they will carry, and what provocations will lead someone with clouded judgment or poor impulse control to do something that will look awful on video. That will happen 3 days before the election, leaving very little time to explain. If that happens, you will want to eat all the words you've been saying about the stomper.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 27, 2010 (boomark / email).