Ed Driscoll

Shhh—Nobody Tell MSNBC

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Risking being dubbed a “Stomping Denier,” by Andrew Sullivan’s imprimatur, at Legal Insurrection, Prof. William A. Jacobson writes, “New Video Exposes The False Narrative of the ‘Stomping’ Victim”, who first appears to lunge at Rand Paul’s car:

As I suspected, provocateur Lauren Valle was not so innocent.

In an amazing videotape obtained by Redstate, Valle is shown rushing Rand Paul’s car and shoving something into the window before it had come to a stop and again charging him as he exited the vehicle — clearly provocative and threatening actions which should have alerted bystanders that she posed a danger.

This completely debunks the left-blogosphere’s narrative that Valle was an innocent bystander who just happened to speak out against Paul when she was attacked by “Brownshirts.”

Valle’s deliberately provocative and hostile actions led to her being pulled away from Paul.  This does not excuse the foot to the shoulders after the fact, but it does explain how the scuffle developed, contrary to the over-the-top narrative.


Doug Ross has a Zapruder-style still photo sequence of the above clip.

Ann Althouse, who has been skeptical of the Official MSM Narrative of this incident since it first broke, rhetorically asks, “How threatening could a woman be?”

A: That’s sexist. You think women cannot be dangerous?

B: Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore. It happens.

6. Are we really going to elevate every prank and beating to a political event deserving analysis? That “stomping” had nothing do with anything worth thinking about in deciding who to vote for. If that counted as substance, it’s evidence of the extreme dearth of substance this week.

7. And let me say one more thing to those who delighted in what they imagined was the political usefulness of the “stomping” incident. There is a big rally in Washington this weekend that will draw many thousands of persons. Within that throng of presumed liberals and lefties, there will be all sorts of characters, with their diverse problems and motivations. You don’t know who will act up, what foolishly overstated signs they will carry, and what provocations will lead someone with clouded judgment or poor impulse control to do something that will look awful on video. That will happen 3 days before the election, leaving very little time to explain. If that happens, you will want to eat all the words you’ve been saying about the stomper.

As Geoffrey Dickens of Newsbusters writes, not surprisingly, MSNBC has red-lined the Godwin Meter since the story first broke:

Chris Matthews, on Wednesday’s Hardball, not so cryptically compared the actions of Republican volunteers to that of Nazi-style tactics from the 1930s as he claimed the restraining of a MoveOn.org activist by a Rand Paul supporter reminded him of what “we saw from hoodlums in the thirties in another country I will not mention” and added: “I mean it isn’t far from what we saw in the thirties, where all of a sudden, political parties started showing up in uniform.” Matthews who was joined by Salon’s Joan Walsh and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, even went on to claim physical attacks against political opponents was something that existed exclusively on one ideological side as he asserted that it was “right wing by its very nature.”

Shhh, nobody tell MSNBC about this far-right tea-bagging neocon, who told a shocked college audience during the politically charged year of 1968 at Kansas State U. (and what is the matter with them, anyhow?):


Incidentally, Matthews’ freakout today was a follow-up to his remarks yesterday, when he blurted

(As the cargo cult comes back down to earth, something tells me I’ll be getting lots of mileage out of that Photoshop over the next two years or so.)

Update: And again: “Violent Unhinged Leftist Wrestled to the Ground at Cantor Event (Video).”