An ugly rush to blame
THE acts of horror were cowardly, anonymous and very scary. So who is the despicable maniac or group who tried to wreak havoc, fear and terror far and wide — sending pipe bombs and white powder via the mail to leading Democrats and their supporters, from the Clintons and Obamas to George Soros and to the New York City offices of CNN?
Whose demented hatred outflanks human decency?
You may not be surprised to learn that the chief bogeyman identified by many on the left as the culprit wears a Make America Great Again cap.
Campaigning in Florida ahead of the midterm elections, Hillary Clinton wasted no time politicizing the attacks in which, thankfully, there were no explosions and no one was hurt.
“It is a troubling time, isn’t it?’’ she said in Miami Wednesday. “And it’s a time of deep divisions, and we have to do everything we can to bring our country together.’’
How to do that? Vote Democratic, of course. “We have to elect candidates who . . . will set goals that will lift up every Floridian and American, who will look into the future.”
Even as President Trump condemned the acts of chaos and violence in no uncertain terms, Paul Waldman in The Washington Post laid blame squarely at the prez’s feet.
“Given what Trump has done and said, this was absolutely predictable,’’ he writes. “In fact, it’s a wonder that it took this long. It’s not just that Trump advocates violence against his political opponents — though he does. It’s that everything about his rhetoric pushes his supporters in that direction.”
The same media that tsk-tsks anyone who dares jump to any conclusions about perpetrators of other terrorist attacks knew exactly who was behind this. The disturbing tendency to scapegoat the right — and giddily turn the attacks into an election issue — was the theme of an unglued tweet issued by Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.’’
“The unrelenting hatred churned up by Donald Trump for the two years following 2016 is dangerous. A Washington Post columnist [Jamal Khashoggi] is dead and progressive icons are targets of bombs,’’ he wrote, connecting a violent act with the wave of terror without offering a shred of proof.
“If law enforcement wants to warn for future bomb targets, all they need to do is check Trump’s Twitter feed and play back tapes of his campaign rallies,’’ tweeted activist and writer Amy Siskind.
This is unfair, brutal and so very ugly. Few media outlets blamed the left for last year’s shootings of Republican members of Congress practicing for a charity baseball game in Alexandria, Va., but in this case, the same humanity does not apply.
Instead of looking for the political angle, we should be united around one thing: our revulsion against these awful acts.