FRIDAY, APRIL 20: UPDATED BELOW ... SEE SECTION ON WAYNE CHAING (RUSH TO JUDGEMENT).


I basically took SoutCon black for a few days out of respect for those who died at Virginia Tech, but I've been following the story. I'm not really surprised, but I am disgusted by the number of people who want to turn this into a political issue and use it like some kind of trump card for this or that cause. That includes people on both sides of any given political issue, and includes people I'd otherwise agree with. Then there's the media and the politicians. As much as a crisis can bring out the best in people, it can also bring out the worst.

Out Of The Woodwork They Crawled

On the way home from work Monday night, I turned on AM radio in time to hear this brief quip, which was, as best as I can remember it:

"…not saying that the thirty-two people who died at Virginia Tech shouldn't be mourned, but when you compare it to the thousands and thousands of babies who have been aborted in this country…"

I immediately turned the radio back off and just sat there and seethed. Look, you're not going to find a stronger opponent of abortion on demand than me, but hearing some nut on the radio use this crisis as an excuse to trumpet the cause turned my stomach. It's disrespectful and trivialized both the murders at tech and the sad reality of abortion. I just wanted to reach through the radio and smack the guy.

The Media Virus

The broadcast media is an inexcusable, intolerable group of vultures and I'm disgusted with the way they've been trying to wring every drop of blood out of this story.

I can't think of a good reason for the airing of the now infamous cell phone video. It wasn't really news, in that it didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. Shots were being fired and the situation on campus was chaotic. We knew that. However, there is a huge contingent among the "reality TV" obsessed hordes out there who want to see things like this, just for the quick, dirty, temporal thrill of it. So everything that the news outlets can broadcast that will make us feel like we're "in the middle of the action" makes it to the airwaves.

And I'm just as disgusted with NBC's decision to broadcast so much of Cho Seung-Hui's "multimedia manifesto," as they called it. What did we learn from the rambling, disjointed video clips and creepy photographs that NBC aired? That Cho was a lunatic. After Monday morning, the whole world already knew that. NBC did not broadcast those clips because they were news. NBC broadcast those clips to appeal to the puerile sensibilities of today's "Reality-TV" viewers. NBC's decision was irresponsible and repugnant, and we can only hope that it wasn't an encouragement to some other Cho-like lunatic, just as the media's milking of the Columbine massacre was an encouragement to Cho himself.

Blame Games

Of course, the blame games were taken up before the victims had all even been identified.

It seems like every squawking moonbat with an agenda to pound has someone else to blame for one deranged man's actions. There's always someone else who's responsible; somebody besides the s*n*fab*tch who pulled the trigger.

Of course, the anti-gun lobby, who sit poised in front of the TV waiting for stories like this, couldn't wait to start blaming America's "gun culture." The Unseen Blogger soundly refutes the basics of the anti-gun stance on this tragedy, and I encourage you to read his post. But what it comes down to is this: Cho spent weeks planning to murder as many people as possible, and that can be done without guns. In fact, there are gun-free ways to kill even more people than Cho killed. Just ask Tim McVeigh. Somehow, the "Guns Are The Root Of Evil" crowd, and most of Europe's elites, manage to forget that.

Then there were those who blamed Tech's administration itself. Why was there such a delay in announcing that the first killings of the day had happened? Well, as it turns out, the authorities thought that the were following the correct lead off-campus. Ironically, the innocent man whom they thought might have been responsible for the first killings was targeted by the authorities partly because he is a law-abiding gun-owner.

Then there's Cho's supposed Islam connection, a connection made with the thinnest of threads. In my opinion, emphasizing the "Muslim name" he adopted on the day of the killings isn't appropriate. It trivializes both the war against Islamo-Fascism and the Virginia Tech massacre. Cho was a violent nutcase and he started using what he believed to be a Muslim name simply to be as inflammatory as possible. Simple as that.

Politicians

How about my current candidate for Democratic Party Scumbag Number One, Barack Obama: It's hard for me to believe that he actually had the gumption to say this in response to the Tech tragedy:

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways...

...the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."

He also referenced the "verbal violence" of Don Imus.

Word's can't begin to describe the disrespect and the detachment that the idiot Obama showed with those remarks. I can only hope that Virginia's Governor, Tim Kaine, had Obama in mind when he said this:

"Look, I think that people who want to take this within twenty-four hours of the event and make this their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them. This is not a political hobby horse or a crusade or something for a campaign or a fundraising mailing."

I didn't vote for Tim Kaine … but the ol' boy sure made me proud with that statement.

Screw College Sports

And speaking of "ol' boys," let me make this disclosure about Virginia Tech and my own experiences. If you've read this blog before, you know that I've never been a Tech fan. I'm embarrassed by the way that the Tech football team's spotlight players conduct themselves, and I believe that they make all Virginians look bad. I'm also embarrassed by the way the school coddles them and lets them get away with all kinds of stuff. Still, my interest in bashing Tech for those kinds of things has pretty much dissipated as a result of this tragedy.

I work with and know a number of very hard-core college sports fans; people who obsess about college football and basketball. I long ago accepted that college sports is to rednecks what religion and politics are to the rest of us. Fine. Whatever. Nonetheless, I've been surprised this week by the number of people I've talked to who're primarily concerned with how this tragedy will effect the football and basketball seasons and the ACC in general. What has to be wrong in somebody's mind to make them see college friggin' sports as the priority in an instance like this? I've had to quietly bite the inside of my lip several times this week in order to keep myself from shouting "---- you and your football, people have been MURDERED, you moron!".

Rush To Judgment

I also heard about the story of Wayne Chiang, a Virginia Tech student who fell under close scrutiny Monday night when his blog and facebook page were singled out by Media Whore Extraordinaire Geraldo Rivera. At that point, the killer's identity still wasn't known by the public, but Rivera was ready to convict Wayne Chaing because Wayne

• is a Chinese American.


• is an enthusiastic gun collector.


• recently broke up with his girlfriend.


• is a Virginia Tech student.

Geradildo and others on the net were sure that Wayne was the killer, but the were wrong. Wayne is yet another law-abiding and responsible gun collector who wouldn't dream of committing the crimes that Cho committed.

Now I want to know … where's the outcry against racial profiling in this case? Was Wayne labeled a killer simply because of his race? Or was it the continuous and aggressive liberal misunderstanding of the mindset of law-abiding gun collectors that got Wayne accused? Either way, where are the apologies? Why did Wayne have to go public himself to clear his name because of so many people who just couldn’t wait for the official word from the police?

FRIDAY, APRIL 20 UPDATE: The garbage Wayne Chaing has had to put up with continues: CTV News has broadcast not one, but TWO pictures of Wayne, identifying him as Cho. I thought I'd seen the media at it's most irresponsible this week, but this absolutely takes the friggin' cake.

By the way, watch this CTV Interview With Wayne, if you want to call it an interview. It really amounted to a reporter asking variations on the question "Don't you know guns are bad, you dummy?" ... and Wayne responding as intelligently as possible when confronted with such abject ignorance. The real point, though, is this: if this interview was taped (as I believe it was) PRIOR to the story that identified pictures of Wayne Chaing as Cho, how did his real identity slip through the cracks?

Bottom Line

Look, it comes down to this: Cho Seung-Hui's was an insane, creepy, death-obsessed nutcase who scared teachers and students alike, and ultimately lashed out with terrible violence and took many lives. He and he alone is accountable for his crimes. Cho's cowardly suicide robbed us of the cold satisfaction of holding him accountable ... but it isn't necessary to look around and find a living person to take to task. Rest assured, Cho Seung-hui will answer for his actions in a far Higher Court than any on Earth.

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Labels: Media, News, Personal, Politics