Marathon Bombing and the Media

[B-Man]

Presidential Rhetoric

 

If only the president might show the same audacity to weigh in on the murderous Tsarnaev brothers as he did when he expressed his displeasure during the ongoing Henry Louis Gates or Trayvon Martin matters

 

— or perhaps at least an anguished cry of the heart that the two killers were part of something “shameful” or were habitually “lying” as in the case of his commentary about gun-control opponents.

 

Could we at least expect another presidential call to “punish our enemies” or an unguarded moment of furor from Eric Holder about the attack on ” my people” from these “cowards”?

[B-Man]

Patrick administration refuses to release Tsarnaev brothers' records

 

 

The Patrick administration clamped down the lid yesterday on Herald requests for details of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s government benefits, citing the dead terror mastermind’s right to privacy.

 

Across the board, state agencies flatly refused to provide information about the taxpayer-funded lifestyle for the 26-year-old man and his brother and accused accomplice Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

 

On EBT card status or spending, state welfare spokesman Alec Loftus would only say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and 3-year-old daughter received benefits that ended in 2012. He declined further comment.

 

On unemployment compensation, labor department spokesman Kevin Franck refused to say whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev ever collected, saying it was “confidential and not a matter of public record.”

 

On Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s college aid, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth spokesman Robert Connolly said, “It is our position — and I believe the accepted position in higher education — that student records including academic records and financial records (including financial aid) cannot under federal law be released without a student’s consent.”

 

On cellphones, the Federal Communications Commission would not say whether either brother had a government-paid cellphone, also citing privacy laws.

 

On housing, Cambridge officials and the family’s landlord ducked questions on whether the brothers were ever on Section 8 assistance.

 

The Herald reported yesterday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and 3-year-old daughter collected welfare until 2012 and that both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar received benefits through their parents “for a limited portion” of the time after they came to the U.S., which was around 2002.

 

However, the Department of Transitional Assistance wouldn’t release information about how long or how much they received.

 

It remains unclear how the accused bomber brothers financed their heartless attacks on the marathon.

 

The administration was slammed by a Democratic congressman who insisted the public has a right to know how taxpayers were underwriting the accused jihadist Tsarnaevs.

 

“It’s certainly relevant information that should be made public,” U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch told the Herald. “There’s a national security interest No. 1. Secondly, there’s also a public interest in finding out whether these individuals were able to exploit the system and get benefits they weren’t entitled to.”

 

 

 

http://bostonherald....arnaev_brothers

[BringBackFergy]

http://bostonherald....arnaev_brothers

This type of story will get play for another few hours and then will disappear shamefully into the archives never to be seen again....all because of the "right to privacy" for a disgruntled radical who now has Bridgestone tread marks on his forehead and several hundred holes in his torso.

 

Maybe they are approaching this wrong: They SHOULD (note the use of Bold and Caps) request this information as part of a Government study spearheaded by a Senate panel that will be convened for the next 20 months in a closed door session...they would give this information out alot quicker if they added a few layers of bureaucratic bull$%it to it.

[birdog1960]

and the best media analysis i've seen on the bombing is once again, ta dum...PBS. last nights newshour had 2 psychiatrists (one of whom previously worked for us intelligence) with special expertise in terrorists discussing how people like this can be radicalized. the likely precipitants, social situations, circumstances, motivations etc. then an interview with the adminstrator of a charitable fund that will be distibuting $20 mil to victims in boston. put away the axes yall like to grind and you'll find some very good reporting here.

[GG]

When you argued they fight for ideology.

 

 

 

"GOALS". It's right there in the definition you quoted. "GOALS." "Ideology" isn't a goal. "Jihad" isn't a goal. Jihad is part of an ideology. Declare jihad all you want, it's still not a goal.

 

 

 

Presumption on your part: these guys are Islamists? Are they actually part of some Islamist movement, or merely influenced by it. Again, you're confusing ideology with goals.

 

 

 

Refer back to my reducto ad absurdum argument again, how I used those examples not as examples of terrorism, but to demonstrate the fallacy in YOUR backwards idea of terrorism in defining the ideology by the nature of the violence.

 

 

 

You've got to remember that he was in lower Manhattan on 9/11. This is more personal to him, not an abstraction.

 

(Which is not a criticism, GG.)

 

And this is the crux of our disagreement. You think it's only the ideology, thus it's not terrorism, and I say that the ideology is driving the goal of attrition. And that's what makes it terrorism.

 

If they were only driven by ideology, then it makes no sense why they would lash out at the US and west. There are far greater reasons for them to strike at Russia considering the centuries' old battles between Chechens & Russians.

 

(And I hate to echo Biden) but why did they strike out against the US? It makes no sense unless you believe that they subscribed to a larger calling that specifically targets USA's interests. Their weapons of choice and methods were picked up in manuals that teach and urge a violent confrontation against the US. It's not just a strain of Muslim violence. It's specific and it's targeted, and there is an underlying goal. That's why it has zero resemblance to a bank robber or Sandy Hook, or any of the other wackjobs. One is a terrorist act, the others are not.

[B-Man]

Narrative Fail: Brendan O’Neill: Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It’s a figment of liberals’ imaginations. Kinda like those oft-imagined but seldom-seen Tea Party Terrorists.

 

 

.

[OCinBuffalo]

Narrative Fail: Brendan O’Neill: Where is the mob of Muslim-hating Americans going crazy after Boston? It’s a figment of liberals’ imaginations. Kinda like those oft-imagined but seldom-seen Tea Party Terrorists.

 

That's the "root cause" of the media's, and Obama et al's behavior here...since we are looking for "root causes".

 

It's liberal projection of behavior, on millions of people they don't know, and would never take the time to meet, that says if we call things what they so obviously are, these people will go hog wild and start lynching people.

 

It represents yet another example of liberals refusing to see the world as it is, and it's also yet another "short-cutting of reason". Why actually think through something, when you can just project your conclusion of how you think people, you don't know, will behave, declare it's absolute validity, and then start attacking anybody who asks you to show your work?

 

If the "scary white people who don't live in cities and will attack Muslim's on sight if we tell the truth" were black, then this behavior would be called: "bigotry".

Edited April 25, 2013 by OCinBuffalo

[B-Man]

The Collapsing of the American Skull ..............The parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about vital issues shrink remorselessly.

 

By Mark Steyn

 

One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly. Take the brothers Tsarnaev, the incendiary end of a Chechen family that in very short time has settled aunts, uncles, sisters, and more across the map of North America from Massachusetts to New Jersey to my own home town of Toronto. Maybe your town has a Tsarnaev, too: There seems to be no shortage of them, except, oddly, back in Chechnya. The Tsarnaevs’ mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: “I would prefer not to have lived in America,” she said.

 

 

Not, I’m sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

 

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.”

 

Maybe. Alternatively, the above opening sentence should “prompt Americans to reflect” on whether whoever’s editing America’s newspaper of record these days “does an adequate job” in choosing which pseudo-credentialed experts it farms out its principal analysis on terrorist atrocities to. But, if I follow correctly, these UCLA profs are arguing that, when some guys go all Allahu Akbar on you and blow up your marathon, that just shows that you lazy complacent Americans need to work even harder at “assimilating” “immigrants.” After all, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were raised in Cambridge, Mass., a notorious swamp of redneck bigotry where the two young Chechens no doubt felt “alienated” and “excluded” at being surrounded by NPR-listening liberals cooing, “Oh, your family’s from Chechnya? That’s the one next to Slovakia, right? Would you like to come round for a play date and help Jeremiah finish his diversity quilt?” ...........................Assimilation is hell.

 

How hard would it be for Americans to be less inadequate when it comes to assimilating otherwise well-adjusted immigrant children? Let us turn once again to Mrs. Tsarnaev:

 

“They are going to kill him. I don’t care,” she told reporters. “My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. . . . I don’t care if I am going to get killed, too . . . and I will say Allahu Akbar!”

 

You can say it all you want, madam, but everyone knows that “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.” So, once you’ve cleared the streets of body parts, you inadequate Americans need to redouble your efforts.

 

There is a stupidity to this, but also a kind of decadence. Until the 1960s, it was assumed by all sovereign states that they had the right to choose which non-nationals were admitted within their borders. Now, to suggest such a thing risks the charge of “nativism” and to propose that, say, Swedes are easier to assimilate than Chechens is to invite cries of “Racist!” So, when the morgues and emergency rooms are piled high, the only discussion acceptable in polite society is to wonder whether those legless Bostonians should have agitated more forcefully for federally mandated after-school assimilationist basketball programs.

 

As Ma Tsarnaev’s effusions suggest, at the sharp end of Islamic imperialism, there’s a certain glorying in sacrifice. We’re more fatalistic about it: After Major Hasan gunned down 13 of his comrades and an unborn baby, General Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, assured us that it could have been a whole lot worse:

 

“What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

 

What happened at Boston was a “tragedy,” but it would be an even greater tragedy if there were to be any honest discussion of immigration policy, or Islam, or anything else that matters.

 

{snip}......(discussion on Gosnell)

 

You can understand why American progressivism would rather avert its gaze. Out there among the abortion absolutists, they’re happy to chit-chat about the acceptable parameters of the “collapsing of the skull,” but the informed general-interest reader would rather it all stayed at the woozy, blurry “woman’s right to choose” level.

 

We’re collapsing our own skulls here — the parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about abortion, welfare, immigration, terrorism, Islam shrink remorselessly, not least at the congressional level. Maybe if we didn’t collapse the skulls of so many black babies in Philadelphia, we wouldn’t need to import so many excitable young Chechens. But that’s thinking outside the box, and the box is getting ever smaller, like a nice, cozy cocoon in which we’re always warm and safe....................................................... Like — what’s the word? — a womb.

.

[B-Man]

The Media Act as if We Are Murderous Thugs

 

It may be that the media dissembles concerning the impetus for these murderous acts because it knows no better. Certainly they give evidence everyday of their thin knowledge of the world outside their pressroom cloisters. But one cannot help but feel that from 9/11 on the media has treated Americans as if WE were the murderous thugs who must not learn of the Islamist nature of the slaughterers lest we grab our pikes and scimitars and start off to mosques to behead the innocent.

 

Brendon O'Neill at the Telegraph captured my puzzlement at this continued inexplicable treatment of the media's audience:

Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves. But where is this Islamophobic mob? Where are these marauding Muslim-haters undergoing a post-Boston freakout? They are a figment of liberal observers' imaginations. In the years since 9/11, the American public has been admirably tolerant towards Muslim communities. According to

federal crime stats

collected by the FBI, in 2009 there were 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes; in a country of 300 million people that is a very low number. In 2010, a year of great terrorism panic following the attempt by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in NYC, there were 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes. In 2011, there were 157. To see how imaginary the Islamophobic mob is, consider a state like Texas, fashionably mocked as a backward Hicksville full of Fox News-watching morons:

there are 420,000 Muslims in Texas

, yet in 2011 there were only six anti-Muslim hate crimes there. It simply isn't true that mad racist Yanks are biting at the bit to attack Muslims.

 

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/the_brothers_tzarnaev_and_the_danger_whose_name_we_dare_not_speak.html

 

 

Just a very small section of an article by Clarice Feldman...................as usual, she nails it.

 

 

 

.

Edited April 28, 2013 by B-Man

[OCinBuffalo]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/the_brothers_tzarnaev_and_the_danger_whose_name_we_dare_not_speak.html[/size]

 

 

Just a very small section of an article by Clarice Feldman...................as usual, she nails it.

A lot of this stuff is coming to a head. In your post above this one, Steyn talks about it being "effective". He is right. But, as I have been saying about lots of things, all of this has a shelf life. You can only shrink the skulls for so long, and then all it takes is one zinger that makes fun of that, and boom, it's over. You can only treat people as if they are murderous thugs for so long, until they and their neighbors ask "Specifically: to whom are you referring?"

 

I've been saying this pretty much since I've been here, the using Iraq for political gain, the Global Warming Hysteria, Gay Marriage....all of these things are merely temporary issues that the left exploits. They have jumped from one to the other and back, trying to gain the max benefit from each. But, none of it will last. It may get them power today, but, in the end, it doesn't replace sound judgement and sound policies that will work in the real world. The left has neither. That is also why the whole "demographics mean we win" argument is both racist and false. Americans don't vote for suck, and they won't start, just because they are Latino, or got their citizenship yesterday. They may vote arbitrarily or because they were told to one time...but that is also: temporary.

 

There are serious reasons for this behavior from the left:

1. Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, SSI, and the entire liberal agenda since the 60s...is in major trouble in very practical ways. This is a matter of fact, not opinion, or political wishful thinking. This is not due to Republicans. This is due to the fact that these programs were never, like most liberal programs, thought through. But, more work was done on them, than was done on Obamacare, that is why they have lasted a lot longer than Obamacare will. The smart and serious liberals know this. That is why they will try to avoid all discussion of them, and do the above jumping around instead.

 

2. Economic policy that comes from the far-left has been an unmitigated disaster. Barney Frank and his friend Chuck Todd have sealed the fate of leftist economics.This is also a matter of fact. Clinton's economics came from nowhere near the far left. Neither did Bush's. No, the last time we tried to monkey with the economy using far left "ideas" and failed this miserably? Richard Nixon/Jimmy Carter. Again, rather than allowing the focus to settle on economics, we have run the gamut of liberal issues, some nonsense, and some of minor import. But none as serious or important as the failure of the left, economically, yet again.

 

None of this jumping around can last.

 

None of this is a replacement for: results. Results aren't class-specific. Results aren't race-specific. All classes, and all races, know the difference between results...and what the Democrats have delivered since 2006.

[Just Jack]

The father of the NY Post identified bomber is going to sue them....

 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/bag-men-ny-post-lawsuit-143522063.html

 

The father of one of the young men the New York Post said were sought by the FBI in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings might sue the tabloid for tabbing his son as a suspect. El Houssein Barhoum, whose teenage son, Salah Barhoum, is pictured on the April 18 cover of the New York Post under the headline “Bag Men," told the Washington Post he's consulting a lawyer about a possible lawsuit.

[BillsFanM.D.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/officer-involved-in-shooting-of-man-tied-to-tsarnaev.html?_r=0

 

"BOSTON — A man in Orlando, Fla., who was being interviewed early Wednesday morning by an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement personnel about his ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was fatally shot after he violently attacked the agent, according to the F.B.I."

[Nanker]

Red herring? Cover up? Putin's playing prosecutors?

[GG]

Interesting development. There have been rumblings that tied Tsarnayev to an unsolved triple murder in Boston in 2011. Now the dead guy apparently confirmed it. It will be interesting if the reopening of the murders will restate the date of murders to Sept 11, 2011 from Sept 12, 2011 (when the bodies were actually discovered)