Gabrielle Giffords, Larry McDonald, Sarah Palin—And The Profound Instability Of American Politics

The Main Stream Media feeding frenzy around the                   shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, so                   extreme       that it even attracted the                   ridicule of Slate's       liberal press critic      Jack Shafer—who had also earlier been commendably                   sensible about calls to suppress (conservative) rhetoric—seems now to be dying down.

This means             VDARE.com finally be able to post                   Steve Sailer's latest on the                   Sailer Strategy this Sunday. (I wasn't going to throw it away). But it also means that, incredibly, this whole news cycle has gone by without any substantive attention to the obviously parallel case of Congressman                    Larry McDonald.

Who now remembers McDonald? Not Washington Post smart alec                   Ezra Klein, who                   blogged on Jan 9: "The last congressman killed while doing his job was Rep. Leo Ryan, who was slain in             Jonestown             in 1978".

A reader commented                   timorously: "Not that I was his biggest fan, but perhaps we should include Larry McDonald". Klein, however, did not feel obliged to correct his mistake, and Google reveals no other recent discussion of the Georgia Democrat who died when a Soviet interceptor shot down                   Korean Air Lines Flight 007       in 1983.

The plain and shocking truth:                   Larry McDonald has gone down the                   memory hole. The reason, as Klein's reader intuited, is all too clear. McDonald       ("the most principled man in Congress"—Rep.             Ron Paul, quoted on Wikipedia, 1-13-10) was a very conservative Democrat, the president of the             John Birch Society, a fierce anti-Communist and such a rising star on the Right that, ore than twenty years later, conservative movement icon Reed Irvine of Accuracy In Media was still                   demanding answers to                   rumors that McDonald had been the target of the attack, had survived and was imprisoned in the                   Lubyanka.

McDonald's fate was by any measure a more sensational story than that of Giffords (who also, of course, has mercifully survived).

But it simply did not fit in with the                   liberal agenda in 1983, when the Cold War was in its final convulsions and the                   Soviets had launched a desperate nuclear disarmament offensive, mysteriously abetted (in a way that I believe still deserves the attention of historians) by MSM artifacts like the                   novel Warday

and the                   defeatist             television movie The Day After

,       which the ABC network             crassly broadcast only weeks after McDonald's death.

The McDonald story faded, or was faded, much faster than the Giffords story. (I was there—I remember). And, manifestly, it has left no trace in popular culture or whatever it is that informs the worldview of the Ezra Kleins.

In contrast, the Giffords story did fit right into the                   liberal agenda of 2011. At the center of that agenda:                   repression. That is why, as I                   predicted after the last Presidential election, one of the first things the Obama Administration did was to             ram through the "Hate Crime" bill, even though Attorney General Eric Holder unguardedly                   admitted it unequally (and arguably                   unconstitutionally) did not protect whites, or Christians, and even though it was obvious that the legislation would be                   interpreted as restricting speech.

Why repression? The reason is equally plain: American politics now is  profoundly unstable. In effect, the Obama Administration is (to put it brutally) a                   Minority Occupation Government. At all costs, the Left must keep the historic American nation from                   uniting—which it nevertheless began to do (no thanks to the GOP leadership) in the             2010 election. This comes naturally, because the Politically Incorrect fact is that neither the Left's                   black,                   Hispanic or                   Jewish components have any real tradition of free speech. The question is whether they can cow the historic American nation into accepting its subjugation.

And this is the true significance of                   Sarah Palin. Here at VDARE.COM, we have been                   mildly skeptical of Palin because she shows essentially no                   awareness of the immigration issue. But she does have courage. With her "blood libel"                   posting, she threw the political class back on the defensive, and chose a phrase that was exquisitely calculated to focus attention on her text. (Our frenemy                   Larry Auster has                   posted the definitive defense of her language, citing examples of its use in                         Commentary magazine.)

            "We love him for the enemies he has made",       said Grover Cleveland's nominator at the Democratic convention in 1884.

Sarah Palin is making the right enemies.

Peter Brimelow (email him) is editor of                                                  VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster,                                                 (Random House - 1995) and                                                  The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)