Rex Murphy on the Arizona Shooting Rampage


h/t Matt from Mississauga
Update: A common tactic of Leftist trolls like this one is to say something like “there are extremists on both sides but I’ve never seen or heard any major pundits on the Left say anything outrageous”. How is it that this past week one could conveniently ignore Krugman, Moulitsas, Olbermann, Matthews, Dionne, Clinton, and the entire NY Times Editorial staff? This is the true “Climate of Hate” in our culture. But this tiny sampling of examples from this past week is but a mere drop in the bucket of what has happened in the past.
Dear Trolls of the Left, please continue to post your arguments on here but do stick to the facts. We insist upon it!

93 Replies to “Rex Murphy on the Arizona Shooting Rampage”

  1. Bravo Rex.
    and thanks Mississauga Matt, for watching The National, so we don’t have to.

  2. Well done….but they should have cut the video just before Mansbridge’s face came on. That was scary!

  3. I like Rex and he is right on the money. No shortage of nuts out there and every idiotic cause has it’s champions.

  4. Forbestroll
    You are a dunce, irrevocably, I might add.
    If anything, Rex’s rant was exceptionally balanced. The down side, is he did not state the obvious, that it was the left’s derangement and complete hatred of anything not of their ilk, that started and pushed this whole event off the cliff.
    It wasn’t the right, blaming the left, for the shooter. Not once. It was the left, suffering from PDS, that couldn’t help itself. The left knows their power is slipping, the 2009 elections proved, and they are looking for something, anything, to reverse course. They went ALL-IN on the Arizona shooting, and it didn’t work, if anything, it showed the utter hatred and bile just below the surface.
    If you don’t like big words, stick to four letter words, as usual, ok?

  5. Excellent rant by Rex, as usual.
    However, I agree with DanBC.
    Conspicuously absent from his or other commentary’s is the exposure of the exploitation by Obama at the ‘memorial’. The t-shirts and cheering were totally inappropriate.

  6. I criticized Peter Mansbridge on Tuesday and sent him the quotes from Jafer’s friend on Wednesday.
    I was pleased that he now had at least stopped talking about it.
    Rex was right on, except I agree with DanBC that he could have pointed out the left in this case.

  7. “If you don’t like big words, stick to four letter words, as usual, ok?”
    Nice slam DanBC. I’ll have to remember that one. πŸ™‚

  8. “but I’ve not seen any mainstream figures ‘libel’ or ‘slander’ as Murphy claims.””
    You are being willfully ignorant or you get your news via CBC. Check out Michelle Malkin’s site if you want to see the left spewing their hatred.

  9. Whens hes talking about politicizing the issue whats with the pictures of beck and Oreilly on the screen. Didn’t hear them saying it was caused by political rhetoric. Another subliminal by the corps.

  10. I’m not aware of any instance where the so called right was blaming the shootings on the left. I did witness an immediate nurturing of the herd on the left, with shallow, superficial, “interpretations” from the lefty media portraying speculation as fact. Blame Bush, blame Palin for everything. The lefty media whores are the worst offenders with regard to polarizing debate, and in fact were guilty of doing what they were accusing others of doing. The deranged left and their media agents transparently self serving and full of hateful bile trolling for some kind of political gain. Disgusting

  11. Jay Forbes: define Palin’s violent imagery and contrast with the violent imagery put forth by the left calling for the assassination of Bush during his tenure as President and the current vitriol calling for Palin’s death equally put out by leftists.
    The problem with folks like you is that you claim to espouse a balanced view, but we get ad hominem off the bat – see your first post in this thread – and you put forth an entirely one-sided argument unsupported by evidence while showering insults on those who dare call you on it. Progressive tactics all the way. Problem is, with the power of the internet, intelligent people are on to folks like you and each time one of you comments, you diminish the credibility of your ideology.
    Now, do explain yourself intelligently or be gone back under your bridge. You still have not learned to up your game…

  12. “The left knows their power is slipping”
    That is exactly what’s happening, and they are reacting like a cornered animal.

  13. jay Forbes @ 8:18 pm:
    “I made my point without throwing an insult at you. You might try it sometime. Civility goes a long way”
    Jay Forbes @ 7:49 pm:
    “… breast-beating blowhard.”
    “… self-aggrandizing jackass …”
    Physician, heal thyself.

  14. Where was the picture of Tarek Fatah in the video running behind Rex.
    And why were O’Reilly and beck there? I don’t recall them blaming anyone on the left for this freaks actions.

  15. jay forbes; as you say ‘the best defense is an offense’.
    Is that why, rather than dealing with the content of Murphy’s critique, you immediately moved into an ad hominem and malicious description of him?
    The fact that you, personally, are not used to a literary style of speaking, is – by the way – not a very good reason to reject the content of that critique.
    Now, consider his critique – which was clear and succinct. Don’t assign causality to a situation without direct evidence of such a link. Simple.
    That is exactly what the left media and pundits were doing and, as Murphy pointed out, it was disgraceful behaviour.
    Now, be careful with your words. You stated ‘Palin’s reckless use of violent imagery’. Please define ‘reckless use’ and that ‘violent imagery’. Then – provide us with the evidence for a causal link to Loughner’s actions. Can you do that?
    And, as Tanker so eloquently points out, are you aware of the vicious and violent images long used by the left – everything from posters and T-shirts exhorting people to Kill Bush, to Kill Palin, to attack any who disagree with their ideology. Are you aware? What do you think of such ‘violent imagery’?

  16. Touche, Karl. I wish I’d said that myself.
    Rex is the first one I have heard to make sense of this tragedy, considering the facts and not the raw emotion and desperate politicizing of the left. The DemonCraps took it on the chin in November when they were judged harshly by the American people, and they are trying to regain lost ground with groundless kneejerk accusations of anyone on the right.
    Blaming Sarah Palin for this brutal rampage is simply as ridiculous as it gets. When the facts were aired about this kid, it turned out that he had no interest in TV, talk radio OR politics. Was there a retraction by the leftwing media? Nope. Dear DemonCraps, your slippage is showing.
    The biggest surprise was Rex conceding that President Embalma got anything right in the speech that his team wrote for him to read on the teleprompter.

  17. Rex Murphy is a wordsmith with few equals, our east coast lexicon. Dennis Miller the vocabulist of the west coast is his peer in my opinion.
    I enjoy their rants, they are educational. That said, I wish Rex had walked his appeal a little further and stated the obvious. Barack Obama did not take the high road, he remained divisive, he could not bring himself to say………. this was not Sarah Palin’s, talk radio’s or Bush’s fault, this was a very sick individual who answers to his own demons, let us pray. Our Father……..Amen.

  18. Jim, thanks for that Michelle Malkin link. It inspired me to post an update on this posting, providing numerous links to PROMINENT LEFTIST PUNDITS promoting hate & blame JUST FROM THIS PAST WEEK.
    I then also posted another link for a more historical context that includes the link you provided.

  19. Excellent rant from my hero!!
    He was wrong about one thing, tho. The USA has not been “cutting itself up since Clinton……” Since I came of age in the 1960s there’s scarcely been a time when they weren’t “cutting themselves up”. First there was the anti-Viet Nam war movement, then Watergate, then, thankfully, a period of relative calm, then Slick Willy and the blue dress, then Bush II and the Iraq war, and now lefties versus the Tea Party.
    But they’ve survived. Their squabbles are very public, and, for the most part, are handled via the instruments of democracy: courts, free press, peaceful assembly and protest, free and fair elections, etc., etc. Their fixation with guns is a might perplexing, though. It seems too many of their nut cases seek their fifteen minutes of fame by pointing the barrel of a gun at some well known figure and squeezing the trigger.

  20. AtlanticJim at 9:10 PM, Beck and O’Reilly were among the figures pilloried by the media in their attempt to blame the right wing for the action of a crackpot.

  21. Maybe Jay doesn’t understand big words. We should help him. We must use short sentences. We must use short words.
    Look. See Jay run. Run, Jay, run. You’ve been exposed.

  22. Some hard hitting by seeming maverick Rex Murphy. Funny how the CBC moguls allow Rex to hit ’em as he pleases. Perhaps they realise how much power they have to feed Canadians with their slanted emmissaries of “news”. They can afford a Rex Murphy.

    I had to chuckle a few days ago with Wendy Mesley and Peter Mansbridge. They went into a theme of how a culture of violence pervades the United States.

    Not to deny that of course, but then Mansbridge put up a picture of Darcy McGee who was assassinated in 1868. Saying how Canada was so much superior in these matters. I thought that at least he could have waited, not while the memorial was fresh that day.

    I tuned it out and I remembered Pierre Laporte, the Quebec cabinet minister, kidnapped and murdered in the 1970’s. Also Corporal Lortie in the 1980’s, who killed three poor unsuspecting people in the Quebec legislature. The Air India tragedy, though not concerning the political main stream in Canada, was that of politics. Politics that exist even today in BC. Just happen to be those of minorities, so in the Mansbridge view, not counted. The Montreal University shooting of 14 women in 1982 was the work of a deranged individual who also was rejected by the armed forces previously.

    We are all the worse off for these kind of tragic events. Excepting the political charlatans and opportunists.

  23. Further to the “Denial of the Obvious” by Jay Forbes et al, here’s an interesting commentary by a recovered liberal. All the religious stuff didn’t resonate with me but the rest of it did.
    P.S. Matt, I was one of the ones who very politely tried to show Fatah the error of his ways when he went on a HATE RAMPAGE on his Facebook fan page last weekend. He would have none of it. I will try watching the Coren episode now but doubt I’ll be able to stomach all of it.

  24. This event was horrendous enough, but the aftermath as played out in the media and the beltway is simply tragic farce!
    Think about it, here you have the world’s superpower – which we expect to lead the way in every international crisis, a nation that is roughly 20% of the worlds entire economy, a nation that is facing economic uncertainty and a debt crisis that could bring it to its knees, and sadly this event gives us a clue as to how we can expect our power elite to respond; not exactly the reason and logic that I would hope for (but it’s all Sarah Palin’s fault! \sarc).
    The fate of the free world could easily rest in the hands of these idiots – is that scary or what?

  25. Good commentary, but the photo of Glenn Beck in the collage of photos in the beginning, shows that even Rex Murphy is jumping to conclusions re Beck. Beck has always stressed peaceful dissent. There is no hate involved. And any troll who claims Beck is a hateful bigot obviously has not been paying attention.

  26. Stop the video with one second to go – the look on Mansbridge’s face. OMG !!!
    Could have a caption contest with that one !!

  27. Well said Rex. I wonder why the CBC lets Rex Murphy stay on or does the CBC management figure that his vocabulary is incomprehensible to the average CBC listener?
    One of the reasons I think that those who self-identify themselves as “leftists” are so ready to blame those who disagree with them as the cause of this shooting is because for them nothing happens without a reason. The “left” which has uncritically internalized the concept of humans as “blank slates” denies that there is such a thing as human nature. There is only an empty vessel at birth which is to be filled with necessary information from society and the “left” is the source of all relevant information. If an individual, such as the AZ gunman, kills people then obviously he was downloaded with improper information; it couldn’t come from the “left” so it must ergo have come from the “right”. You know, those unsocialized primitives who cling to their guns and bibles and believe in such strange concepts as “human nature” and “truth”.
    For these deluded individuals who have drunk deeply of the post-modernist koolaid, the solution is more statist control to ensure that no improper information gets downloaded into human “blank slates”. That an individual could have acted alone, without some external trigger is anathema to them.
    Those of us who are on the proscribed list of the “leftists” believe in the existence of an external reality that we figure out through science, that there is such a thing as human nature, that shit happens and the way to deal with it is to be prepared. Thus, individuals of this persuasion carry firearms which, in 99% of cases they will never have to use, but should one come across a crazed gunman or mugger one will be ready. Phantom has given stats on the large fraction of individuals that engage in concealed carry in AZ and I guess this fraction is much lower in DemocRats which is why the shooter wasn’t taken out by a bystander after the first few shots.
    The frothing at the mouth “leftists” have made it even more clear to the majority of people why they shouldn’t be allowed to be in positions of political power. They may have seen this event as a Reichstag fire opportunity but all they’ve done is to further expose their statist plan for the US.

  28. Here’s what I don’t get:
    Most liberals I know (or met online) derisively laugh off the very notion that violent video games, or the music of someone like Marilyn Manson or Eminem, could influence people to act in dangerous and unlawful ways. They also denigrate, and attack with complete viciousness, anybody who suggests otherwise.
    While I don’t agree with their typical lack of civility here, I do tend to agree with the substantive points that they make on the topic. I agree because I believe in personal responsibility, period.
    And yet… many of these same video game-loving liberals are arguing that Sarah Palin, through heated political commentary alone, somehow helped caused this massacre.
    It’s such a breathtaking and obvious contradiction between their two positions here. It’s a logical inconsistency that would leave Mr. Spock truly bewildered.

  29. Don’t forget Antonia Zerbisias and her wish that Michelle Malkin be shot. Never forget that one.

  30. Ryan
    It’s doublethink in the Orwellian sense (see 1984)
    To quote:
    “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies β€” all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
    -Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    Orwell had the left tagged 60+ years ago.

  31. Soccermom, both beck and o’reilly were up front and centre in the collage. Maybe he was putting them up there as victims, but sadly, I think not. The imagery just didn’t come across that way.

  32. I’m with DanBC!
    Great wordsmith, great rant BUT, overly balanced, and therefore totally unsatisfactory to my ears.
    It had a “cycle of vitriol” about it, akin to the bogus “cycle of violence” meme vis-a-vis the Islamist-Israeli conflict in which both parties are falsely accused of being equally obstructionist by the bien pensant.
    As someone mentioned, the picture of Beck in the background was off-putting.
    Finally: there hasn’t been enough discussion about different kinds of vitriol: to my ears most conservative vitriol is policy-based [anti-marxist-coup] whereas on the left it’s almost all the politics of personal smear. FAR from Rex’s best. Delivered from too high a height.

  33. Good point Ryan
    The incongruity is baffling; yet they remain totally oblivious! Is there anything at all that will wake them up? Not what I can see.

  34. Tanker – I agree with you. That does seem to explain it. That quote from 1984 seems to sum up the left very well, sadly.

  35. Beck’s photo appears when Rex says some commentators were “prodigiously offensive and irresponsible”…..Beck was neither of those. He’s been stressing staying peaceful, being better than the left. In fact, Glenn warned that this “blame the Tea Party” stuff would happen if there was any type of violent event- the left has been waiting for it. Obviously Rex hasn’t done his research on what Glenn has been preaching about this past year. “Preaching” being the operative word. And what he’s said since the shooting happened. Come on Rex, you’re better than that. You fell for the MSM narrative…(well, maybe because you are part of the MSM) LOL

  36. I’m with everyone who noted the images in the background while Rex spoke. Olbermann equal to Beck and O’Reilly (not a favourite of mine)? Not.
    I don’t think that Murphy chose the images. But he should have insisted that they be edited.

  37. On Rex and his seeming moral equivalency…
    I think that he realizes that, in this particular instance at least, it’s the left that’s mostly (if not entirely) to blame for the vitriolic excesses in *the political reaction* to the Tucson Massacre.
    Note how he shows respect to the Tea Partiers by calling them a “Citizens Movement”, and defends Sarah Palin in particular. Also note that when he talks about where “politicos” have gone wrong here, it’s in them attacking that “Citizen’s Movement”, in slandering Sarah Palin, and in proposing bizarre theories for why this happened. Most of these are indictments of the left, of course, and Rex is too smart a man to not realize that.
    However… I think that Rex is actually hoping to get through to LEFTISTS with his presentation here. In other words, he’s not trying to comfort conservatives, he’s trying to persuades liberals to cool it down a bit.
    He’s basically saying to the left, “You folks are a bit out of control in your partisanship. You seriously think that Palin or the Tea Party Movement or negative reaction to Obamacare had something to do with this? Come on, get real! This was the act of a lone deranged gunman – no more, no less.”
    Now, Rex probably figures that to have *any* chance of getting through to the left, he’ll need to make it seem like he’s morally equivocating on it all, when in fact he’s really criticizing the left and trying to get them to cool it.
    So he speaks well of a genuinely good part of Obama’s speech. So you have the pictures of O’Reilly and Beck there that are intended to get leftist viewers to think “Well, at least he’s criticizing *them* too!” πŸ˜‰
    Alas, our good friend jay forbes shows that perhaps even this isn’t enough to get the left to reconsider things, so Rex’s efforts may have been in vain there…
    Still great to watch and listen to from a conservative point of view, of course.

  38. Thanks Matt for the video and Robert for the links. Obviously Jay did not read any of the links, especially the “happened in the past” link.
    I though Mansbridge was going to throw up. Now he knows how we feel when listening to him.
    Rex is great, but this was not one of his better discourses.
    Tanker, that was a fitting Orwell quote.

  39. andycanuck, Thanks for the photo. I wish and pray a complete recovery for Giffords.
    She’ll make a good replacement as Palin’s running mate from Arizona.

  40. Good try Jay. “She used them to target districts …”
    For myself targets or “bullseyes” have nothing to do with violence. Perhaps sighting a rifle in for work. Or another venue for sibling rivalry. Or a test of a new loading recipe.
    Google “target district” and you’ll be horrified with:
    “We have already met many HIV+ groups and have already heard many heart-breaking stories. Meaningful Volunteer will conduct a census of our targeted village to get a better understanding of the needs of the community.”
    And 2++ pages of posts relating to the Target retail chain.
    Look up metaphor and you’ll discover something really new.

  41. Jay, I took the time to collect & publish specific examples of hate spouted by prominent figures on the Left last week. Clearly this had zero effect on injecting even a tiny bit of humility into you.
    So, are you going to tell us whether you:
    1. Were simply mistaken and didn’t realize it?
    2. Are a serial liar and knew fully well what was said by those folks?
    I suspect the latter because you’re back here pushing more lies, once again insinuating wild & false theories about why the maniac did what he did. I truly do pity you.

  42. It was worth watching just for the look on Peter Mansbridge’s face. Rex hit the bulls eye.
    JMO

  43. I wish and pray a complete recovery for Giffords.
    She’ll make a good replacement as Palin’s running mate from Arizona.

    ~WalterF
    Now that would be too cool.
    Having a Blue Dog democrat and Sarah Palin on the same ticket./fantasy
    But a man has to dream sometimes.
    They could run on the slogan, “Together We Strive!” against Obama and whomever the beltway GOP legacy elite puts up as a “conservative”.

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