How a murder fed conspiracy theories about the liberal media by Thomas Frank

[proud2BlibKansan]

Two weeks ago, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline sent out a fund-raising letter asking for help paying down legal bills he incurred during one of his fights with that state's abortion providers. After recounting his battles with Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller and others, Mr. Kline moaned that "They must silence the truth by silencing the messenger."

The depiction of the state's abortion providers as a malign power capable of "silencing" whoever opposes them might seem absurd, but it is unremarkable for Kansas conservatives, who once routinely accused Dr. Tiller and his colleagues of pulling the strings controlling the state's politics.

What makes this particular fund-raising missive supremely awkward is that it arrived in people's mailboxes after Tiller himself had been silenced forever, gunned down in a Wichita church, allegedly by a man from the fringes of the antiabortion movement.

An interesting situation this, when persecution fantasy collides with the real thing. But I suspect Mr. Kline will be back to fund raise again, once the culture war's inevitable cycles of accusation and counter-accusation have played themselves out.

more . . . http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124459106205300065.html#mod=rss_opinion_main

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Thomas Frank nails it ..

He's good. I've always liked what he writes, and this is no exception.

People like us have to keep on pounding the very thing the anti-choice people want us to overlook - that their defense in the Tiller and Holocaust shootings is bogus. They cannot claim that what they preach is just empty rhetoric, not meant to be taken seriously, and thereby try to absolve themselves of any association with the two shooters.

They just can't say it and make it so. We have to remember all this, and we have to stay with it, and when they start up in full voice - which should be tomorrow - they're going to take their "persecuted for exercising our free speech rights," and we have to remind them at every step that what they say has contributed to the climate that nurtured people to do violence upon people who were doing nothing except working their own, very legal, jobs.

We can't ever let them forget who the real victims are.....................

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. He knows Kansas and he knows the wingnuts too

All too well. LOL