The "Dark Knight" massacre: Right-wing pundits belong in Arkham Asylum

Suspected mass killer James Holmes, who shot up a movie theater during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, painted his hair red and claimed to be the Joker. Clearly, the man was out of his mind. (Everyone knows that the Joker has green hair.)

What intrigues me most right now is, of course, the political reaction. ABC broadcast a report which suggested, tentatively, that Holmes was a member of the Colorado Tea Party. Turns out ABC got it wrong. Had I known that the report came from Brian Ross, one of my least favorite journalists, I would have sounded an even louder note of caution in my first post about the tragedy. (I advised readers not to believe the Tea Party link without confirmation.) Naturally, the Breitbarters are screaming about the irresponsibility of the non-wingnut news media.

What hypocrisy!

At the same time, conservative pundits -- including radio personality Laura Ingraham -- have pushed a theory offered by a Florida "private investigator" named Bill Warner, who says that the massacre was perpetrated by those fiends at the Occupy Wall Street movement. Warner possesses no evidence whatsoever. His argument, if it can be called an argument, comes down to this:

the facts he is white and underground, the facts he is a drifter prone to over-the-top violence, it all fits.

Looks like Warner won't offer Batman much competition for the title of "world's greatest detective." James Holmes was a college student living in a dorm. He had been Phi Beta Kappa at UCR. He was not "underground," he was not a drifter, and he had no previous history of violence.

Will Ingraham apologize for filling the airwaves with this bullshit? Of course not. Neither will anyone else who promulgated it.

This contretemps forces us to confront the larger issue of double standards.

Conservatives are ever-so-quick to castigate lefties who indulge in conspiracy theorizing, yet our right-wing blogs overflow with nonstop paranoia of the lowest order. To conservatives, the rules are simple: Both liberals and the "mainstream media" (which is anything but liberal) must carefully weigh every word. Meanwhile, reactionaries are permitted to roar and stomp and wreak havoc like Forbidden Planet's Monster From the Id.

Texans went so far as to send one of their most idiotic Id Monsters to Congress. Commenting on the Dark Knight massacre, nutcase House member Louie Gohmert favored us with a theory that blames atheism. He also claims that Holmes' rampage was motivated by "ongoing attacks on Christian-Judeo beliefs." If I understand Gohmert correctly, those poor Christians in Colorado had secretly gathered in that movie theater at midnight because it was the only place where they could practice their faith without persecution. Call it the Church of Batman.

If you want to see the true face of madness, go to the right-wing blogs and pore through the comments. You'll encounter quite a few writers who seem to be thisclose to putting on a purple suit and telling us how they got the scars. Here are a couple of examples from Breitbartland:

YOU WANT TO GET OBAMA OUT OF OUR WHITE HOUSE, YOU PULL THIS LITTLE POS F OFF THE AIR ALONG WITH HIS POS Fs AT ABCCBSNBC AND OBAMA LOSES ALL 50 STATES.

DON'T AND AMERICA IS DEAD AND BURIED AFTER FOUR MORE YEARS OF OBAMA/ABCCBSNBC MARXISM.

PULL THE F'ING PLUG ON ABCCBSNBC.

Sure they do, they plant this disinformation intentionally and then retract it on some obscure blog post or 2 second apology and their wild dog blogs never retract it so their idiot readers run with the lie and never look back
VOILA, now  it's now laundered by idiocy into the alternate lib universal  truth & bounced around like a bullet in a rubber room..

And now, the Freepers:

Getting attention for the OWS crowd at all costs... maybe there will be more of this the closer we get to the ‘election’.

Ah yes. That's logical.

obama is in a meeting with a bunch of people about this shooting. I suspect the topic is “How Can We Use This As A Way To Ban All Guns”.

But always remember: It's the liberals who indulge in baseless conspiracy theories.

The Virginia Tech shooter back in 2007 seemed to have been brainwashed by the academic Left as well.

Newsmax:

What the mainstream media will not speculate about is that this shooter could have been stopped immediately if most law-abiding Colorado citizens in that movie theater had themselves been armed.

That's exactly what I'd want if I owned a movie theater -- an auditorium filled with young people packing heat.

What this incident should do is immunize all of us against being tricked by any future "October surprise."

This would simply play out the report Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano issued early in the Obama administration that smeared nearly everyone on the right, from critics of big government to abortion opponents to patriotic ex-soldiers, as potential terrorists.

Such dishonest demonization of conservatives is, itself, a kind of political terrorism, a longtime propaganda tactic of the partisan left.

I could cite many (many) more examples, but you get the picture. When it comes to conclusion-hopping, conservatives can leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Even though ABC News offered a rapid apology for Ross' mistake (I'd like to see them can his ass once and for all, frankly), conservatives will spend the next few days yowling like a wounded banshee. Yet conservatives never show any contrition for their own bizarre scenarios.

"Breitbart News" won't apologize for erroneously crowing that Holmes is a registered Democrat. Yet they still complain -- endlessly -- about ABC's Brian Ross. I'll say it again: What hypocrisy!

Them's the rules, folks: If you are on the right, you may say any wacky thing that pops into your noggin. Nobody else may do likewise.

If right-wingers can justify that double standard to themselves, then they must be...batty.

Whoops. When this post was originally published, I gave the suspect's first name as "John," not "James." Well, I can't be the only one to make that mistake...