Tuesday, August 07, 2012

HOW MANY THINGS CAN A FOX ANALYST GET WRONG IN LESS THAN A MINUTE?

Via Mediaite, David at Crooks and Liars flags this:
Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano is insisting that it was "not domestic terrorism" for a white supremacist to shoot seven people dead at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin....

"The legal definition of terrorism is two or more acts of violence intended to change the policy of the government, by scaring the population or by scaring the government," Napolitano told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Tuesday. "That does not appear to be what happened in this case."
Forget the legal definition for a second. Let's think about this logically. Is Napolitano saying that if the 9/11 plotters had sent one plane rather than four, and flown it into the Pentagon, or into just one of the Twin Towers (or the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge), and killed hundreds or maybe a thousand people -- is he saying he would not consider that terrorism? Seriously? Because it wasn't two or more acts? Is he willing to go on Fox and say that?

Besides, as David points out at C&L,
The FBI defines terrorism as "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives."
Nothing about "two acts" at all.

Back to Napolitano:
"Page appears to be -- appears, he's dead -- appears to have been a disgruntled nut job who hated Muslims, didn't know the difference between Sikhs and Muslims and thought by killing the Sikhs he was somehow going to eliminate the Muslim population. It is an absurd, tortured way of thinking but it is not an act of domestic terrorism."
At this point, do we have any evidence that Wade Page thought Sikhs were Muslims? The SOB hated everybody who wasn't of European descent. And whatever group he thought he was attacking, how is what he did not (to use Nspolitano's own words) "scaring the population" of that group? How is it not intimidation?
[Napolitano] continued: "On the other hand, the Ft. Hood shooter [Nidal Malik Hasan] who killed military in the place where they worked while damning and condemning the behavior of the government -- the employer of the people that he killed -- the government refuses to call that an act of domestic terrorism."
Except that that's not true:
The shooting rampage at a U.S. Army base in November was "an act of terrorism," an Obama administration official said on Friday....
That was a couple of months after the shooting -- but Napolitano uses the present tense. He says the administration "refuses" to use that designation. The administration does not refuse. (And, of course, it's apples and oranges, because the federal government hasn't officially designated the Wisconsin incident as terrorism.)

Napolitano starts the quoted spiel at 39 seconds into the clip posted below. The end of what's quoted comes at about 1:32.

A lot of lies, stupidity, and misinformation in less than a minute.