BCT Editorial – 4/8/09

This page was last updated on April 18, 2009.

Terrorists within; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 8, 2009.

The editorial subtitle is “Police officers were victims of far-right hatred and ideology.”

This is one of those op-ed pieces you read and wonder if the author is just writing something to be obnoxious. That said, I’ll proceed assuming the author is serious.

With names like Jim Jones, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, et al on its end of the political spectrum, does the Times really want to get into a debate of who’s more violent, the left or the right? Let’s not forget it was primarily southern Democrats that inflicted violence on blacks in the years following the Civil War all the way into the 1960s. What about the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999?

In a comment I posted on the Times website I wrote, “For the past 45 years I thought Lee Harvey Oswald was just a very disturbed person. He was a self-described Marxist but I didn’t consider Oswald to be representative of the left. The same was true for Sarah Jane Moore. Following the ‘thinking’ in this editorial, however, I must now conclude Oswald and Moore were really ‘attracted to violence and the hatred spewed by the far’ left. Thank you, Times, for opening my eyes.”

Face it, there are violent nuts everywhere along the political spectrum and no ideology has been spared. The idea they lie predominantly on the right is demonstrably false, and the Times knows it. It’s like promoting the idea that Hitler and his Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) were actually on the right and not the left. The Times figures if it repeats the lie enough, sooner or later people will begin to believe it.

Some people kill in the name of religion. Are we to accept that when these nuts kill it’s because of Christian, Jewish, et cetera “hatred and ideology?”

Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) kept a repeatedly read copy of Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance” with him. Does that mean Mr. Gore’s brand of environmentalism bears some responsibility for Mr. Kaczynski’s murders?

Finally, we have the third editorial in eight months in which the author got the name of the central figure wrong. The editorial referred to Richard Poplawski as Paul. In previous editorials, the Times couldn’t get the names of the governors of Louisiana and New Jersey correct.