Thursday, June 11, 2009

FUNNY, I DON'T RECALL RIGHT-WINGERS CALLING CINDY SHEEHAN A CONSERVATIVE

The right's effort to spin the Holocaust Museum shooting by making the absurd argument that James von Brunn is a liberal has gone into overdrive. Limbaugh said today:

Well, who did [von Brunn] hate? He hated both Bushes. He hated neocons. He hated John McCain. He hated Republicans. He hated Jews, as well. He believed in an inside job conspiracy of 9-11. This guy is a leftist, if anything. This guy's beliefs, this guy's hate stems from influence that you find on the left, not on the right.

This follows an Examiner.com story that makes the same argument. (UPDATE: Oh, and I left out this, from Red Alerts: "James von Brunn a Radical Atheist who Hated Christians and William F. Buckley, Just like Daily Kos!") (UPDATE: And also, from Sister Toldjah, "James Von Brunn: Fringe LEFT winger" -- see, it's in ITALIC CAPITAL LETTERS, so it MUST be true!)

And now it's being reported (by Fox newspeople) that one of von Brunn's targets (in addition to the Capitol, the White House, and The Washington Post) was "a FOX News location," while a report from Politico's Ben Smith aids the spin effort:

FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they'd found the magazine's address

Smith adds, to Rupert Murdoch's delight,

The focus on the Standard, though, appears to be of a piece with his central motivation: Anti-Semitism. In one essay, Von Brunn attacked "JEWS-NEOCONS-BILL O’REILLY" ...

(Would Obama-hostile FBI agents make a visit like this unnecessarily, for political reasons? Is that a paranoid question on my part, or a reasonable one?)

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Obviously, once you're as far out on the fringe as von Brunn is, your ideas don't all line up neatly with ideas on a particular side that are within the pale.

But if anger at certain aspects of acceptable conservatism makes von Brunn a liberal, why isn't, say, Cindy Sheehan a conservative? After all, she renounced her membership in the Democratic Party when Democrats voted for war funding in 2007. She considered a challenge to Dianne Feinstein and mounted a campaign against Nancy Pelosi. She was strongly opposed to Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy when Clinton seemed like the most likely candidate to wrest the White House from Republicans.

Why doesn't that make Sheehan a right-winger? Why don't right-wingers embrace her? Wouldn't that follow from the right's arguments about von Brunn?

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