The Leftist Media and the Times Square Bomber

Andrew Thomas at the American Thinker blog asks a legitimate question: "Did "left-wing media" trigger the Times Square Bomber?" He writes:

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say. If it is legitimate for the MSM to speculate on whether conservative talk radio and Fox News could inflame an unstable right-wing "nut case" into a violent act, then the opposite question can be posed as well. Was would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad "radicalized" by the incessant drumbeat of hatred toward George W. Bush by CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and left-wing talk radio for the years during which Shahzad was a US resident?

In 2004, Shahzad bought a house through real estate agent Igor Djuric. Asked about Shahzad, Djuric recently told a New York CBS affiliate, "He didn't like the war and he didn't like the president (Bush)." Djuric went on to say, "I'm a stranger and just met him and he mentioned that. Normally we don't go like that and tell strangers our feelings like that." Apparently, Shahzad had developed some strong emotional opinions, hateful enough to attempt the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Americans. Did the virulent hatred spewed by leftist MSM commentators push him into becoming a radical Islamic terrorist?

Obviously, there is no proof of this. On the other hand, has the lack of proof prevented President Obama and former President Clinton from decrying the potential for conservative commentators to incite violence? If, as Clinton recently stated, he believes the "right-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for any future politically-fueled extremism, then he must now admit that the "left-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for Faisal Shahzad.

It seems pretty obvious that the left-wing media hates Western ideals, Western history and Western religion. So it has that in common with Islamofascist terrorists. But the question of cause and effect is tricky. What may be said with little doubt, however, is that there is a moral complicity of the media insofar as it hates exactly that which most ordinary Western people love: freedom, personal moral responsibility, limited government, free enterprise and democracy.

So even if the leftist media did not actually "cause" this act of terrorism, it certainly bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere in which more radical individuals would act as Shahzad did in this case. The atmosphere of hatred toward George Bush, Republicans, conservatives and all those who fail to endorse the leftist narrative of the West is palpable and irresponsible. It is as if the 1960s hippies took over major cultural institutions and imposed their drug-induced, logic-deprived, naive, utopian Marxism on those institutions. Come to think of it; that actually is what happened.