The massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris, has launched a thousand right-wing, Islamophobic responses, as you might expect it would. As Cenk Uygur aptly put it, “It is a vat of ignorance, fear and hatred over at Fox News,” Uygur said. “There is no bottom to that barrel.”
Nope, there isn’t, although the vat is bubbling in other quarters as well. A sampling:
1. Eric Bolling at Fox seized the opportunity to urge an immediate ramping up of the police state, criticize New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and urge more racial profiling.
“In New York, one of the first things Mayor de Blasio did here is he said we’re going to pull stop and frisk. In deference to the Fourth Amendment — unreasonable searches and seizures — they said it was unreasonable to profile African-Americans or anyone for that matter… Point is, why are we pulling law enforcement tools out of their hands?”
More from this deep thinker: “There’s been a serious push from the left saying let’s not over-militarize our cops. That should put an end to that discussion right now. We should over-militarize, we should continue to do that.”
His point, in a soundbite: “It’s not a police state, it’s a safe state.”
2. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, sided with the shooters, and blamed the “narcissism" of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists. "Muslims are right to be angry," his statement the day of the shooting read. He went after the satirical publication's history of offending the world's religiously devout, including non-Muslims. The murdered Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier "didn’t understand the role he played in his [own] tragic death," Donohue said, setting up his perfect frame for blaming the victim. "Had [Charbonnier] not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive." He goes on to condemn the killings, but jeez! Does it really matter at that point?
3. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham used the occasion to fan the flames of a Crusades-like religious war. What a great idea! "It's not an attack on our homeland, but it's definitely an attack on our way of life," Graham toldconservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. "There’s a perfect storm brewing to have this country hit again."
He also urged President Obama to “take sides!” And, what exactly? Declare war on Islam? "We’re in a religious war," Graham bloviated. "These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted."
Graham has been sounding the alarmist bells about the Islamic State ever since he first heard about them, becoming convinced that they are “coming to kill us all.”
4. Fox News’ “military expert” Tom McInerney blamed political correctness and progressive thinking in general. "Political correctness is killing us, this is a prime example," he said on the air. "Look, our own president says that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is not Islamic. Please!" […] For extra measure, he also called Mayor de Blasio a “communist, who is trying to disarm the police."
5. Host Brian Kilmeade also found a way to blame Bill de Blasio. He alleged that many French cops don't carry firearms, and said at least that wasn’t the case in New York City. Unless that commie de Blasio gets his way, of course.
6. Matt Drudge just out and out lied about President Obama’s initial response to the attack, saying that the President refused to call it an act of terrorism, while linking to an article stating that the President denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism. Cognitive dissonance never seems to be much of a bother to Drudge.
7. Rush Limbaugh helpfully pointed out that Benghazi underlies the entire thing. Because Benghazi underlies absolutely everything.
8. Though not a right-winger, reliably Islamophobic Bill Maher naturally took the opportunity to blame the entire Muslim world for the attacks, and also to take American liberals to task for not agreeing with him completely in his blanket condemnation of the entire Muslim world.
9. Points for heinous creativity to RedState.com editor and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson, who took the opportunity to link LGBT activists to the terrorists in Paris on his radio show Wednesday.
“A publisher published something that offended,” Erickson wrote in anaccompanying blog post, “So the terrorists decided they needed to publicly destroy and ruin the publisher in a way that would not only make that destruction a public spectacle, but do it so spectacularly that others would think twice before publishing or saying anything similar.”
Surprise ending! He was talking about Atlanta, not France. “The terrorists did what had to be done to publicly destroy and ruin the offender… And the terrorists won in Atlanta.”
10. Fox's Gretchen Carlson, once again, wins the award for the most articulate take, saying, "It is what it is. It means terrorism. Terrorism is what it is.” For those who are not experts on decoding Fox News-speak, this is a comment on Obama's failings on the War on Terror.
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