November 24, 2009 Census Worker’s Death A Suicide—Not “Hate”. Where Are The MSM Apologies?By Robert de Brus [Previously by Robert de Brus: A Newsman’s Thoughts On The Buffalo Beheading And Other Atrocities] So it turns out that Bill Sparkman, the Census Bureau worker found hanged in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, committed suicide as part of an insurance scam to help his son. That’s the official judgment of the authorities. It raises the question of whether all the moonbats who blamed Sparkman’s “murder” on the “climate of fear” and “anti-government hate” spread by the “right-wing noise machine” will apologize for jumping to conclusions. Recall the scene: Sparkman’s naked corpse was found in Kentucky, hanging by the neck with his government ID badge pasted to his forehead and the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest. The Nutocrats quickly began their work. ABC News wondered, rather tamely, whether Sparkman was a “a victim of anti-government rage” or an “anti-government hate crime”. Some of us didn’t know the law recognized “anti-government hate crimes”, as Diane Sawyer termed it, but in any event, CBS chimed in with this headline: “Terror in Kentucky: Census Worker's Murder/Body Found Naked, Hanging From Tree in Cemetery; Had Been Gagged, Duct Taped, ‘Fed’ Scrawled on Chest.” [September 26, 2009] The story didn’t jump to any conclusions, but you got the idea from the headline, which was so unlike the headlines we saw when Major Nidal Hasan, a real terrorist, really killed people because of his hatred for this country, its government and soldiers. Andrew Cohen, the “legal analyst” for the network, contributed a story to Vanity Fair flatly declaring Sparkman’s demise “murder most foul”:
“Sparkman’s death may be the single most important murder in America
this year. A Census worker is murdered for being a
Census worker while some elected officials in Washington
are in open revolt of the census? A federal agent is
defiled for being a federal agent while the airwaves
simmer with talk of hatred for our current political
leaders?
“It’s
To Kill a
Mockingbird
meets Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington meets The Turner Diaries,
the anti-Semitic screed which begat the
Oklahoma City bombing. It
is easy to see how the dastardly crime against Sparkman
has the potential to explode into an enormously
important political and legal story about the documented
rise in extremism in America. And at the same time,
sadly, it’s not hard to understand why the relentless
media drumbeat which always seems to accompany
high-profile murders —
Annie Le,
Chandra Levy, and
JonBenet Ramsey— is
absent here. “In spite of the initial reports, let’s hope then that the Sparkman murder turns out to be a random act of violence, or at least one having nothing to do with rampant anti-government violence. Because the alternative would mean not only that dark forces indeed have been unleashed in America but that we cannot necessarily trust our best news organizations to tell us in a timely fashion that this is so.”[Kentucky Census Bureau Worker Death: Murder Most Foul, September 28, 2009] Not to be outdone, one of the usual suspects over at Daily Kos contributed this:
“The
real murderers of
this man
are the Glenn Beck’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s, and Michele
Bachmann’s [apostrophes in original] who have spread the deadly poison of hate and fear of our government
and the Obama administration across the land. And
Bachman should be front and center as the most culpable
because she is supposedly an elected member of Congress
who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws of
this land. But instead, she has rallied the gullible and
the ignorant in a war against the government and more to
the point against the census process as being symbolic
of the evil government's infringement on our ‘God-given’
rights.” And here is Andrew Sullivan, the professional homosexual who writes the “Daily Dish” blog for The Atlantic:
“But the most worrying possibility—that this is Southern populist
terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk
radio cohorts—remains real. We’ll see.”[No
Suicide] Over at The Huffington Post, someone you’ve never heard of named Allison Kilkenny was more measured than Cohen and the Daily Kos contributor, but the meme was the same—with the added bonus of her claiming that the murder was directed at The Messiah:
“Setting aside the fact that this would be the mother of all bizarre
suicides, [assistant director of the Census Bureau's
southern office Linda Scurry-Johnson]
seems oddly confident that this was not a political
killing, considering the word ‘Fed’— short for ‘Federal’
— is a loaded label that usually indicates
anti-government sentiment. ‘Federal’ means ‘Big
Government’, and the word has taken on a derogatory
meaning in right-wing circles where fear and paranoia
reign supreme. I agree with Johnson that this seems like
an apparent homicide, but it's not “nothing else”. By
utilizing the branding “Fed,” the killers were clearly
trying to make a political statement, namely ‘Obama:
Stay Out.’
“The word definitely packs an ideological punch, but not only is it
anti-government, it's
anti-Obama. Let's
remember that most of the fringe now screaming about the
dangers of Big Brother never made a peep
[Vdare.com note:
Ha!]
during eight years of
Bush's ballooning executive branch.
Suddenly, big government is a big problem, and the ‘Feds’ are to
blame.”[
Discussion Of Dead Census Worker Highlights Right-Wing
[!]Paranoia, September 24, 2009] Actually, big government is a big problem, and the Feds are to blame for this country’s woes, not least of which are two unwinnable wars, a collapsed dollar, deficits and debt zooming to the outer reaches of the cosmos, and a campaign to alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country against the will of the people who make most of the money and pay most of the taxes. So Sparkman’s death wasn’t “the most important murder in America this year” and was, indeed, “the mother of all suicides”. Apologies now being accepted. Robert de Brus [Email him] is a newspaper editor somewhere in America. |
