Late Friday afternoon the Washington Post headlined this front page story about the shooter in the Louisiana: "Reports: Shooter was mentally ill, anti-tax activist."
The story then reports that John Russell Houser “was a onetime entrepreneur who inveighed against women’s rights, liberals and minorities and had been involuntarily committed for mental illness.” Yes, Rusty Houser “was fiercely anti-tax,” “ anti-abortion,” and….wait for it… “pretty much a radical Republican.”
And oh, by the way? “Rusty had an issue with feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything ..."
So there you have it. This latest murderer was mentally unstable and now the search is on. Was he reading too much of Jack Kemp on taxes? Mark Levin on liberty? Did he listen regularly to Rush or Sean or Glenn? Did he ever vote for Reagan?
What’s missing in that Washington Post story? In fact, what’s missing in general in the discussion of not only this incident but several others as well?
John Russell Houser was, and everyone else in America is living in a society that has stopped valuing human life. All lives do in fact not matter. In San Francisco, when Bill O’Reilly sent Jesse Watters to a Board of Supervisors meeting to discuss the murder of Kate Steinle by an illegal immigrant, Watters literally couldn’t even get the board members to look him in the eye so indifferent were they.
The other week, Donald Trump held a meeting in Los Angeles with families of those murdered by illegal immigrants. One of the participants was Jamiel Shaw, Sr., whose namesake 17-year old African-American son was murdered by an illegal. Breitbart reported on Mr. Shaw this way:
“Later, Shaw stated, “the president is not immune. He watches TV, he watches the news. He has friends, black friends, white friends. He knows what’s going on, and he’s just ignoring it, and it’s not fair to ignore this kind of death. This kind of death has to be addressed. You cause anarchy, you cause people to lose hope, and try to do it [themselves]…it gets out of hand. Right now, it’s out of hand, you have people committing crimes. Nobody is going to jail for it.And you hear the president, almost justifying it by not doing nothing. By not doing nothing it’s just as bad as doing it himself.”
Shaw concluded that’s he “bitter” at the system that allows incidents like his son’s murder to keep happening, and “it’s not right, because if they envisioned their son or daughter laying in the street, dead, or going to the pier to have some fun, and they come up dead, man, that’s not acceptable. Why would you be in charge of a country, or politicians you’re in charge of communities, and you know this is going on, and just because you want votes, or you want cheap labor, you allow people to be murdered in the streets. Then when they complain, they’re a racist.”
What was Mr. Shaw saying here when you get right down to it? He was saying, of course, that his son’s life mattered. And that yes, the apology from O’Malley for saying it not withstanding, all lives really do matter.
What ties the killing of Jamiel Shaw, Jr., by an illegal immigrant -- and the other similar murders brought to light by Donald Trump -- to the other events and people mentioned above is or should be. That would be basic respect for human life.
Then consider the release of videos showing Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing how to crush a baby’s head or perform other horrors so that various baby parts can be sold for profit - over salad and wine, with one official joking about the price being sought that she wanted to buy a Lamborghini - is but one gruesome illustration of the problem at hand. And it has zero to do with gun control.
Typical of the response from the left to the release of the gruesome Planned Parenthood videos was this from Hillary Clinton. The New York Times headlined: "Hillary Clinton Strongly Defends Planned Parenthood and Cites Nuance on Glass-Steagall".
Or in other words, all lives not only do not matter, let’s quickly move on and discuss a financial regulation from the 1930’s instead. The paper reported Clinton’s remarks this way:
“At a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, Clinton defended Planned Parenthood, which has faced recent criticism for a video made by anti-abortion activists that alleges the group’s clinics are illegally selling tissue from aborted fetuses for profit, a charge the group denies. Mrs. Clinton condemned the recent backlash as another effort to chip away at a woman’s right to a legal abortion.
…For the first time, Mrs. Clinton weighed in on the controversy that has in recent weeks embroiled Planned Parenthood and roiled both sides of the abortion debate.
She called the video footage, which shows an official from the group discussing the price of providing fetal parts, the latest effort of a years-long “concerted attack” against “a woman’s right to choose.”
“Planned Parenthood has apologized for the insensitivity of the employee who was taped,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And they will continue to answer questions for Congress and others.”
Got that? Crushing a baby’s head so its body parts can be sold is really not a big deal, and those who say so are just against a woman’s right to choose. Ah yes. The return of the “war on women.”
Notice, however, that when Kate Steinle was murdered in cold blood by seven-times-convicted and five-time-deported felon Francisco Sanchez there wasn’t a peep about an actual war on a woman that resulted in her death. Nah. They can’t go there, can they? No.
But when it came to the possibility that Sandra Bland, the black woman arrested in a traffic stop who later died in her jail cell? Before it was determined that Bland had committed suicide by hanging herself, the move was on to make Bland’s life matter because she was black and stopped by a white cop.
And, of course, the lives snuffed out in the Lafayette movie theater mattered more because they were shot by a crazed, anti-tax, anti-abortion, anti-woman radical Republican.
What’s wrong here is obvious, although obviously not to the Washington Post or the New York Times or Planned Parenthood’s defenders in and out of the media.
What’s wrong is that the cancer of identity politics has metastasized to the point that there is a politically correct scale for whose lives matter. If you are a baby in the womb, no. If you are the victim of an illegal immigrant, no. If you are a black woman stopped by a white cop? Yes. And, as noted, certainly if you are shot by an anti-taxer radical Republican, your life really counts.
Will the reality that all lives really should matter become a focus of media and national discussion in the coming days and weeks? That whether one is shot by an illegal or is a black woman arrested by a white cop or is a baby in the womb - all these lives matter? Every one of them?
Don’t hold your breath. For media outlets like the Washington Post, life only matters if the right person -- the politically correct villain of the moment - takes a life.
And right there is America’s real problem.
