Whenever a new cause or movement is born, and a large number of people feel passionate about it, there's always the danger that it will inspire someone -- perhaps just a lone nut, or perhaps a group of them -- to destroy human life in its name. This is true even of the most legitimate, mainstream movements, which can suffer unjustly by the actions of a rogue sympathizer.
Someday this may happen to the Tea Party movement. So far it hasn't, because there has been no Tea Party violence. The only victims of Tea Party "extremism" are politicians who lost their positions in peaceful elections. One could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the extreme bias with which some in the liberal media treat the Tea Party.
Moments after the suspect's name became known in Friday's theater massacre in Colorado, Brian Ross of ABC News reported to a national audience that someone by the same name had signed on to a Tea Party website in 2011. James Holmes -- the name of the alleged shooter -- is a very common name, shared by at least 2,900 Americans, according to the website HowManyofMe.com. And as it turns out, James Holmes of the Tea Party is a Hispanic man, not related to the suspect and more than twice his age…
All that has happened since the Tea Party began -- and all that hasn't happened -- undermines the credibility of Krugman, Ross, Capehart, and other pundits who carelessly associate it with violence. When we try to explain violence like last week's theater massacre, we look to irrationality as the first explanation. It takes a uniquely arrogant sort of journalist to use this same irrationality to explain anyone who disagrees with him politically.
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