justinspoliticalcorner:

(via Addicting Info: Debunking More Right-Wing Bulls**t: Liberal Shooters)

Conservatives always lie.

This “letter to the editor” has been making the rounds since January so I think it’s about time we debunked it. The letter is a hit job that originated with right-wing radio host Roger Hedgecock. The former mayor of San Diego has a radio show and podcast which he uses to spew his ugly messages. This one was picked up by viewers and redirected at local LTE pages nationwide. Let’s have a look, shall we?

The overall assertion is that progressive liberals are anti-gun and anti-second Amendment. Speaking as a progressive liberal gun-owner, um…. no. No we are not. What we are is anti-loophole and pro-sensible gun laws. The piece goes on to ask why we “… acquire guns, then kill movie goers and children in schools.” This charge is unsubstantiated and inflammatory, just like the rest of this piece of garbage. After setting up a nice, big straw man, the list begins…

Ft. Hood Shooter – registered Democrat and Muslim. Okay, that last one is correct, Nidal Hasan was a Muslim. However, he was not a registered Democrat. He lived in 2 states: Virginia and Texas. Neither state requires a partisan registration. Ergo, no registered Democrat here. Move along.

Columbine Shooters – Too young to vote – both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals. Harris and Klebold were, indeed, too young to vote. They lived in an affluent, conservative suburb of Denver, Littleton. Harris’ father was a retired Air Force pilot and Eric had expressed a desire to join the Marines. Both boys admired Tim McVeigh. So the idea that the boys were liberal is iffy while the claim that they were registered Democrats is demonstrably false.

Virginia Tech shooter – Wrote hate mail to President Bush and his staff, registered Democrat. Bzzzt! Wrong again! Seung-Hui Cho was, first of all, a resident alien and ineligible to vote in the U.S. Even if he could, Virginia is, as mentioned before, a non-partisan registrations state. He was not a registered Democrat. Whether or not he wrote letters, that’s not been shown to have merit.

Colorado theater shooter – registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, Occupy Wall Street participant, progressive liberal. This one is completely off-base. It’s based on shoddy research done by someone at (wait for it) Brietbart.com (I’m sure you’re shocked). That guy found A ”James Holmes” but it was not the one who opened fire in a Colorado theater. It is doubtful that the shooter was registered as anything. Some outlets that had taken Breitbart’s word for it (when will they learn?) retracted the allegations. Some, including Breitbart, did not.

Connecticut school shooter – registered Democrat, hated Christians. This one is based on the faulty reasoning that since Connecticut voted for Barack Obama at a 2-1 ratio, Adam Lanza must have been a Democrat. I don’t have to tell those of you who understand logic and statistics how dumb that premise is. In fact, Newtown voted for Romney. Lanza’s mother was a doomsday prepper and a home schooler who was, according to one source, a registered Republican. There is nothing to indicate that he hated Christians. But investigators did find an NRA membership certificate in his name. So we can call this one false as there is nothing to substantiate the claim that Lanza was a registered Democrat.

This is not to say that all mass shooters are Republican. Obviously, neither party sanctions this sort of behavior, at least, their leaders do not. The idea that a crazy person can actually act on behalf of any political party is a step too far. These are ideological crimes, when there is any motive at all – there often is not. That being said, a great many mass killings were committed by far right crazies. If you’ll recall the DHS report  – the one that Fox raised such a stink about – it stated that there had been an uptick in right-wing violence and warned of further incidents from the same quarter. What happened there? Fox likes to play the false equivalence card and, short of reaching back into the 1970s, they were unable to find similar incidents of violence from the left-wing. So they whined and bitched and the new administration knuckled under. That doesn’t change the fact that they were correct.

Below is just a sampling of incidents of right-wing violence. Of course, the biggest attack was the Oklahoma City bombing, a horrible attack driven by political ideology.

• Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber, killed one (and one indirectly) and wounded 111 others. His motive for the bombing, according to Rudolph’s own admission, was political.  He also had bombed an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb, killing 2 and injuring six. Extremist chatter on the Internet while he was evading capture praised him as “a hero.”
• In 1993 Michael Frederick Griffin murdered Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida. He waited outside Gunn’s clinic and shot him three times, yelling, “Don’t kill any more babies.” He is currently serving a term of life in prison.
• A little more than a year later, Paul Hill shot Dr. Bayard Britton in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Hill also killed Britton’s bodyguard, retired Air Force lieutenant James Barrett, 74, and wounded Barrett’s wife June, a retired nurse. Hill bragged that “…  no innocent babies are going to be killed in that clinic today.”
• Anti-abortion terrorist John Salvi carried out two fatal attacks on two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts in December 1994. Receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were killed in the attacks. He escaped but was captured after another clinic attack in which he killed 2 more receptionists on March 19, 1996.
• Anti-immigrant vigilantes murdered Raul Flores Jr and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia at point-blank range in their Tucson, Arizona home in 2009. A month earlier another young girl had died in a gun massacre in which anti-immigrant protestors were implicated.
• In 1998, James Kopp shot and killed Dr. Barnett Slepian. Kopp was affiliated with the militant Lambs Of Christ anti-abortion group.
• Militia wanna-be Bruce Turnidge went apeshit after Barack Obama was elected in 2008. He and his son, Joshua, succumbed to NRA hype and fear. They built and planted a bomb at a bank in Woodburn, Oregon on Dec. 12th, killing 2 police officers and wounding two others.
• George Richard Tiller, MD was murdered inside his church on May 21, 2009 by Scott Roeder, a militant anti-abortion protestor. Tiller had been shot and wounded 16 years earlier by another anti-abortion militant, Shelley Shannon.

We can see from this sampling that these crimes were driven by ideology, not party. Mostly, it’s anti-abortion militants who seem to think it’s okay to murder people to protect life. Now there’s an oxymoron for you.

As far as the bogus letter to the editor, it is simply not true.

Mitt Romney Campaign Says Candidate Had A Handkerchief, Not A Cheat Sheet, At The Debate

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The Huffington Post  |  By Sam Stein

The internet produced a theory on Friday that at Wednesday night’s debate, Mitt Romney snuck a cheat sheet filled with notes on stage. The evidence comes from the first few seconds of the debate, during which Romney takes something out of his pocket and casually tosses it on to the lectern. […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/mitt-romney-handkerchief-cheat-sheet-debate_n_1942790.html

Republican liars always carry handkerchiefs with them. When you lie as much as they do, you tend to sweat about the lies….even when you’re used to lying on a daily basis like Mitt Romney does. 

underthemountainbunker:

…

Steve Benen | The bogus ‘intelligence briefings’ talking point

In recent weeks, and especially over the last few days, the right has become fully invested in a strange line of attack against President Obama. As we discussed on Tuesday, Dick Cheney, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, and others are accusing Obama of “skipping” intelligence briefings related to national security. The closer one looks at the argument, the dumber it appears.

[…] But what about the meetings the president is allegedly “skipping”? There are no such meetings — as Dana Milbank explained today, “In reality, Obama didn’t ‘attend’ these meetings, because there were no meetings to attend: The oral briefings had been mostly replaced by daily exchanges in which Obama reads the materials and poses written questions and comments to intelligence officials. This is how it was done in the Clinton administration, before Bush decided he would prefer to read less. Bush’s results — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to find Osama bin Laden — suggest this was not an obvious improvement.”

[…] Update: I’ve since been informed by a Democratic source that the president didn’t even have any fundraisers in Nevada yesterday. The attack is wrong on every possible level.

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