The War Against Conservative Opinion (WACO) took an interesting turn on Saturday when liberal bloggers blamed right-leaning media members -- in particular, Fox News's Glenn Beck -- for the shooting deaths of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Since then, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and David Shuster have echoed this insanity on the air, as has CNN's Rick Sanchez who also pointed fingers at Fox News's Sean Hannity.

As my colleague Jeff Poor reported, this was Olbermann's rant during Tuesday's "Worst Person in the World" segment:

You, Glenn Beck, you personally are encouraging Americans to shoot other Americans. Maybe, especially if you're right about your religion, maybe not this psychotic in Pittsburgh. Maybe he is not your fault. I hope not. But what about the next one, Glenn? You want to cry about something on television. Cry about the next one. Beg him to ignore you. Beg the kids the next one orphans to forgive you.

How disgraceful.

The previous day his colleague, David Shuster, made similar absurd accusations:

Up next gun sales are up, violence is back on the front page and conservatives are calling for revolution. Is the red hot rhetoric of the right helping foment something dangerous in this country?

Violence is back on the front page? Where did it go?

Sadly, this astounding display of journalistic irresponsibility by these two liberal shills isn’t the slightest bit surprising, for the network they represent is quite selective about what violence it considers newsworthy.

According to a LexisNexis search, after four police officers were killed in Oakland, California, on March 21 by a crazed lone gunman, none of that cable network’s prime time programs mentioned the incident even when Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the funeral along with 30,000 grieving Bay Area residents.

I guess it didn’t fit MSNBC’s political template as the tragedy couldn’t be blamed on conservative talkers.

Yet, MSNBC wasn't alone in jumping on this blame Glenn Beck and Fox News for the Pittsburgh shootings bandwagon, for CNN's Rick Sanchez made such a claim Wednesday while also accusing Sean Hannity:

The failing economy; the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first minority -- minority president; and then there’s the garden-variety fear and hate mongering provided compliments of Fox News night in and night out. That’s where Glenn Beck is seen night after night, talking about doomsday, about the country coming apart, while his counterpart Sean Hannity calls the president a socialist, and worse, implying day in and night out that he’s trying to destroy America. Here’s an apparent result. Americans are scarfing up guns and ammunition at an alarming rate. Growing numbers of people appear to believe that the government wants their weapons.

Astonishing.

So what's the tragic logic on display here?

Brace yourselves: folks like Beck and other conservative talkers are inciting the lunatic fringe in the nation by having the nerve to suggest an anti-gun rights Democrat president along with an anti-gun rights Democrat Congress are going to enact anti-gun rights legislation.

What chutzpah!!!

In the end, what's important here is that a new strategy in the WACO has clearly begun, and people better sit up and take notice for the very folks attacking those defending the Second Amendment are disgracefully trying to restrict the First.

As the Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress have more pressing things on their minds like taking over banks, limiting executive pay, and destroying capitalism as we know it, the rush to restrict conservative opinion on the radio by reinstating the Fairness Doctrine has not been as expeditious as the far-left hoped.

Sensing their dream of all radio stations resembling Air America was fading away, the Left concocted a new scare tactic: conservative talkers are a security risk because they are inciting violence. People like Beck aren’t just opposing the new President’s ideas; they’re making America a more dangerous place for law-abiding citizens to walk the streets.

This idea was seriously discussed by Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann on the March 20 installment of HBO’s “Real Time.”

Less than 24 hours later, the aforementioned cop killings took place in Oakland, but they couldn’t act as an anti-conservative rallying point because the assailant was an African American that ended up being hailed as a hero by the Marxists in his community.

Neither could Robert Stewart's March 29 assault on a Carthage, North Carolina, nursing home leaving eight dead, nor Jiverly Wong’s slaughter of thirteen innocent people at an immigration services center in Binghamton, New York, on April 3.

Enter Poplawski stage right whose rampage the very next day by a man apparently clinging to his guns if not his religion perfectly fit the bill.

And the war was on.

As a result, for the foreseeable future, a conservative talker will likely be blamed for every criminal act that can be somehow connected to anything uttered by a right-leaning media member until such individual is fired.

Though the accusers innocently claim this is not their intention, this is EXACTLY what this new WACO strategy is about – getting rid of all the voices in America that don’t agree with the direction the far-left and the President they got elected are taking this nation.

And do yourself a favor by not bringing logic into the equation much as the Washington Post did Wednesday in a piece claiming the root cause of all these recent attacks is the current state of the economy: "Criminologists theorize that the epidemic of layoffs, the meltdown of storied American corporations and the uncertainty of recovery have stoked fear, anxiety and desperation across society and unnerved its most vulnerable and dangerous."

Nonsense. This is all Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Fox News's fault.

*****Update: This is pretty funny. The Huffington Post has a piece today titled "Glenn Beck and The Consequences of Crazy Talk." It began:

Right off the bat, allow me to be perfectly clear: I don't want Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or any of the other far-right talkers to be silenced or fired, that is unless their corporate bosses decide they ought to be silenced or fired.

When a telemarketer begins his pitch with "I'm not trying to sell you anything," do you believe him? :-)

 

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters. Follow him at Facebook and Twitter.