Last week at a Tea Party Express rally in Fenton, MO, Scott Boston made a comment that quickly became infamous on the Twitters... He said that we (conservatives) need to kill the "Claire Bear," in reference to the squeaky-clean, cuddly, nicey-nice image of the not-so-squeaky-clean senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill.
The reality is that this was a dumb thing to say - and Scott himself has said that the choice of words was not ideal. We conservatives who work in new media know that as a rule, the left does not engage in fair and unbiased reporting. We know that they are watching us, listening to us, and waiting for something that they can use to make us look like hateful, bigoted, mean-spirited or racist. And the fact is, though the intent of Scott's statement was not at all violent, he effectively handed the other side a loaded gun.
Since the left is only really opposed to violence when it's theoretical and coming from the other side, they immediately pulled the trigger, planning to ask (or ignore) questions later. At taxpayer expense, the Claire Bear bulked up her security team. (Ironically, she stacked it with large men who carry guns and are willing to violently subdue anyone who tries to get too close with a loaded...question.) Also at taxpayer expense, the FBI was quickly dispatched to Scott's home to disrupt his family life, investigating what they would later admit was a nonstart.
The aftermath is what has been truly telling. Left-wing bloggers have been repeatedly hounding Scott's friends and associates in the Tea Party and Gateway Grassroots Initiative to come out with a collective statement either condemning or backing Scott's words. What they can't seem to wrap their brains around (perhaps it's the ponytails?) is the fact that the Tea Party and Gateway Grassroots Initiative are groups that exist only because they are a loose association of like-minded INDIVIDUALS. Each of us speaks for ourselves, no one of us speaks for the group. There will be no "collective" statement, because we do not exist as a collective. We are individuals who sometimes share opinions and sometimes do not. We do not presume to put words in the mouths of our friends and associates because we believe them fully capable of their own thoughts and speech.
Several candidates, namely John Brunner in the MO Senate race, have come out against the statements made by Scott - not to say that they believe that Scott's intent was to incite violence, but to say that his choice of words was extremely poor. (And we all already knew that.) But in doing this, they may have been jumping the gun, if you will. Violent rhetoric is not new to politics. Nor is actual violence. Consider for a moment the fact that our Founding Fathers were ready to die for their political views. And I don't mean at the hands of the British, either. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr dueled to the death over politics, and they weren't the first or the last to do so.
The problem here is not that violent rhetoric is used. The problem is that when it's convenient, the left consistently obscures the difference between violent rhetoric (statements such as "kill the bill," "job-killing legislation," "kill the Claire Bear") and actually condoning violence in support of things like OWS. While the actual violence is coming from the pets of the organized left, it's the bullseye on a map that gets coverage.
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