The lunatics and the media

Clarice Feldman:

This Saturday eleven people were killed by a shooter in a Pittsburgh synagogue during morning services. The shooter appears to someone who not only hates Jews, but hates President Trump as well.

Julia Ioffe, a GQ correspondent, finds a way to blame Trump for this mayhem:

Julia Ioffe‏Verified account @juliaioffe
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And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it.
9:22 AM - 27 Oct 2018

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the mainstream media handles the background of the man responsible and contrasts it with this week’s perfervid reportage of the man who mailed dud nonfunctioning “bombs” to prominent Democrats and some media.

Without a serious look at the background of the dud bomber, much of the press leaped to blame the president. TheOtherMcCain dug deeper into it.

While described as a “Seminole Indian” and a fervent Trump supporter, the suspect, Cesar Sayoc is the son of a Puerto Rican immigrant with a long arrest record for making bomb threats, petty theft, grand theft, battery, drug possession, and domestic violence. Some of these offenses would appear to be felonies and yet until 2016, after years of being registered as a Democrat, he changed his registration to Republican -- something peculiar in a state that bars felons from voting. He had worked as a male stripper and likely was misusing steroids as he had been charged in 2004 with “felony possession of testosterone-based steroids” in a case which was dismissed.

So over the top was the press coverage of these fizzled devices that it inspired Twitter users to create their own versions of the dud bombs, some of the best of which Power Line blog reproduced in its regular week in pictures feature.

At the same site, Paul Mirengoff departs from the press train emphasis on the political leanings of those who commit such crimes to endorse Daniel Horowitz’s contention that the real story is “the failure to put criminals behind bars and keep them there.”
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... I cannot help noticing, besides the general media avoidance of this issue (probably because they largely support this version of domestic “catch and release”), the shockingly disparate treatment in the coverage of this series of events with the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise by a man who hoped to take out the Republican House leadership. The header that day in the Washington Post was “Lawmaker Steve Scalise is Critically Injured in GOP Baseball Shooting; James T. Hodgkinson is killed by police”. (Contrast that with this header from the same paper: “Trump’s words have nothing to do with the mail bombs? Spare us.”) It’s true that if you read down seven graphs in the front page Scalise article, you would have learned that Hodgkinson was opposed to Trump, or if you had a local version of the paper, you could see in the “Public Safety" section an article reporting that Hodgkinson was a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter. But you could easily miss the connection.

The New York Times went one better on the Post, blaming Palin’s campaign mailer for the Scalise shooting.
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The Times later printed a correction.  The Post is so eaten up with Trump and GOP hatred that I have come to expect unfair treatment of all things Trump as well as attempt to make him a scapegoat for anything they do not like.

But there seems to be nothing like a mass murder to unleash the Trump derangement syndrome on the left.