Media Forget Leftwing Violence at 2008 GOP Convention

As so-called journalists across the fruited plain hyperventilate about alleged death threats and future acts of violence they claim are being stoked by "hate speech" from the Right, they are conveniently ignoring how the Left behaved in this country when George W. Bush was in the White House.

Case in point: the violent protests that occurred at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

John Hinderaker's marvelous piece on this subject published at Power Line Saturday should be must-reading for conveniently amnesiac media members who suddenly think civil disobedience is racist:

I attended the convention and remember the terrorist acts that were carried out by anti-Republican protesters very well. They threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below. Fortunately, no one was killed.

These were anti-Bush and anti-Republican protesters. Is it a stretch to think that some of them, at least, may have been inspired by over-the-top, hateful attacks on the Bush administration by Democratic Congressmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Michael Moore, who was a guest of honor at the Democrats' own convention, various show business personalities, and many other leading liberal figures? I don't think so. We haven't seen that sort of hate campaign since the Democrats went after Abraham Lincoln. It seems unlikely that none of the "protesters" who tried to commit murder were inspired by those liberal voices.

Yet, hardly anyone seems to be aware of the violence that took place in 2008. At most, the story was treated with a ho-hum attitude in the press. For some reason, political violence was not a concern less than two years ago. Yet today, we can hardly imagine what would happen if a group of tea partiers were to drop sandbags off a highway overpass, trying to kill motorists below. Liberal reporters' heads would explode. But this is exactly what anti-Republican Party protesters did in 2008, and no one cared. To my knowledge, not a single Democratic politician condemned this anti-Republican violence or attempted in any way to distance the Democratic Party from it.

For the record, I was also there, and remember full-well walking by protesters shouting truly disgusting epithets at delegates and attendees.

But this was okay then. Bush was in the White House, and the targets of all this hatred were conservatives.

Now, only 18 months later, the press view far more peaceful demonstrations as racist and inciting violence.

How can their position have changed so quickly?