Right Wing Tries To Paint Pentagon Shooter As Left-Wing Extremist

Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell was an anti-government extremist with more in common with the tea partiers than with peace and love flower children, but the right is working overtime to paint him as a left-wing extremist.  Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin makes sure to hammer home that he Bedell was a registered Democrat. Zombie at Pajamas Media goes so far as to claim that most 9/11 Truthers are leftists.

Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.

Painting Bedell as liberal seems to be based on his support for liberal former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel in the 2008 presidential race.  But that support seemed to be based on Gravel’s support for selling marijuana in liquor stores. Bedell was a fan of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a libertarian  think tank whose chairman and former president is Lew Rockwell. The Southern Poverty Law Center explains what te Von Mises Institute stands for, which seems compatible with what’s been revealed about Bedell’s beliefs.

It also promotes a type of Darwinian view of society in which elites are seen as natural and any intervention by the government on behalf of social justice is destructive. The institute seems nostalgic for the days when, “because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority [were] likely to be passed on within a few noble families.”

But the rule of these natural elites and intellectuals, writes institute scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is being ruined by statist meddling such as “affirmative action and forced integration,” which he said is “responsible for the almost complete destruction of private property rights, and the erosion of freedom of contract, association, and disassociation.”

To attempt to tie Bedell to the left is a disingenuous attempt by a desperate right wing already suffering fractious image problems and that can’t afford to be seen as instigating anti-government psychopaths. Unfortunately for them, Bedell’s legacy has more in common with the current right-wing populist movement than with what the left has historically stood for.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.