Sunday, January 23, 2011

Before Tucson...

Remember the media frenzy back in September when an angry man with a knife and history of mental problems tried to assassinate the governor of Missouri. No?

Maybe that's because in the realm of the mainstream media, it never happened:
In September 2010 Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to speak at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City.

At some point, wearing black clothes and a bullet-proof vest, 22 year-old Casey Brezik bolted out of a classroom, knife in hand, and slashed the throat of a dean. As he would later admit, he confused the dean with Nixon.

The story never left Kansas City.
To be precise, it DID leave Kansas City, it just didn't get very far. Here's coverage in the Huffington Post:
The suspect, 22-year-old Casey Brezik, did not know Nixon and had no particular beef with the governor, but he decided to attack him because he was a top government official, Kansas city police spokesman Darin Snapp said.
The Huffpo story lays out the facts without speculating about his political motives. No blame of Sarah Palin, rhetoric, incivility, nothing of the sort.

Googling for the story produces a bunch of nothing from the alphabet mainstreamers. One could say, well, that's because he was just a nut doing what nuts do, so it's a local story. Maybe, but his target wasn't some innocent bystander at the bus stop, it was the governor of Missouri--a political target. You'd think it at least worth a brief mention in America's 'paper of record'. But nope.

Meanwhile the parallels to Loughner are stunning. Read the rest of the Huffpo column and the guy comes off as a near carbon copy, right down to the premise of being an under-treated paranoid schizophrenic who caused disturbances. But there are big differences. Casey Brezik is not white. And there's no way he was influenced by right wing talk radio. He probably hated right wing talk radio, if he listened at all.

But just imagine how the Tucson story might have been handled with this story in the recent backdrop. Sheriff Diptet and his acolytes in the big media would have found it much harder to blame right wing rhetoric with the target commentators constantly reminding them of Brezik. And gosh, Andrew Sullivan's head may have exploded.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We do appear to have a double standard in this country. Why hasn’t this idiot been fired? Because he’s a leftist radio jock …

Sam Huntington said...

I read somewhere recently that most (homeless) people wandering aimlessly around are mentally impaired. I think it was Krauthammer who suggested that if there is going to be a dialogue in this country about these kinds of events it should include programs to institutionalize people who are harmful to themselves, and others. This topic belongs primarily to states, but I’m not hearing much discussion. Still, I can hear the NAACP screaming bloody murder when authorities confine a person of color for a mental evaluation. I think what this suggests is that most NAACP members are mentally impaired.

A.C. McCloud said...

Heck, Harry Reid should have been run out of Congress on a rail for saying "this war is lost" but he's still there. Chriss Mathews calling people 'crackers', mainstream media not apologizing en masse for blaming Tucson on Palin and friends, on and on. It's more like a double standard to the 8th power.