A Conservative Bombshell

This photo released by the New York Police Dept. from a private security camera shows an explosion at the Times Square military recruiting station Thursday morning. (AP Photo/New York Police Dept.)

Early yesterday morning, someone set off an improvised explosive device that damaged a military recruiting station in Times Square. No one was injured and the damage was relatively minor, but the police investigation disrupted traffic in the neighborhood and put the country on edge.

The motives of the perpetrator, who was caught on film by a surveillance camera, are still murky. At first, it appeared as though his act may have stemmed from opposition to the war in Iraq. Some news reports yesterday said that suspicious packages containing anti-war material had been sent to Capitol Hill and seemed to be linked to the bombing. Now, however, it looks like those packages had nothing to do with the explosion. Other sources are noting that this blast bears strong similarities to the ones carried out at the Mexican Consulate in 2007 and the British Consulate in 2005. And other media outlets are reporting that Homeland Security agents are now looking into an incident at the Canadian boarder last month—apparently four “anarchist-types” carrying pictures of various New York City locations, including Times Square, fled when officers questioned them. So it’s fair to say that no one really knows anything yet. But this, of course, hasn’t stopped some from speculating about who is responsible.

In any situation where there are more questions than answers in the hours that immediately follow a troubling event, an observer’s subsequent response and predictions can serve as a handy on-the-fly Rorschach test. In this case, the early-morning blast opened a door into the psyches of countless far-right Americans. Thanks to the Internet, numerous conservative bloggers and commentators were able to immediately chime in, and their responses, steeped in knowing accusation, had more than a little excitement to them. If one didn’t know better, it almost seemed as though they were excited by the opportunity to pin the blame on liberals. There’s a reason for this: If the perpetrator of yesterday’s explosion does indeed turn out to have been motivated by opposition to the Iraq war, conservatives will finally, after years of fruitless searching, have a real-life example of one the most powerful, useful, durable canards in the conservative rhetorical arsenal: the myth of the Crazy Liberal.

The Crazy Liberal myth is as old as politics itself and has mutated into various subtypes, but breaks down roughly like this: Many liberals are nuts. They are so blinded by ideology and by hatred of America/white people/imperialism/the prosperous that they have long since transgressed the boundaries of the rational and exist in a bizarre, self-echoing world of politically correct nonsense and endless, unquenchable anger. Even if, hypothetically, the occasional sane liberal exists, liberal policies, to be sure, are dictated on high by foam-mouthed lunatics.

During the Bush administration, this tool has been deployed endlessly by conservatives seeking to undercut the left’s criticism of the president. Recent conservative media is a veritable smorgasbord of endless repetitions of various forms of the Crazy Liberal myth. In 2003, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer brought the concept fully mainstream, coining the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” which he defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to…the very existence of George W. Bush.” (The article should be here, but the page appears to be broken.)

But while many conservatives might enjoy bashing liberals and their ideas as inherent signs of irrationality, they save a special brand of slander for members of the anti-war movement. To a certain type of conservative, the average liberal may be a homeless man muttering to himself, but the average anti-war activist is locked up in an asylum, wearing a straightjacket as he or she rocks back and forth, drooling and attending a dinner party that only exists in his or her mind. Examples abound, but perhaps the most telling one occurred when Sean Hannity falsely accused anti-war groups of protesting a soldier’s funeral that was actually picketed by the extremist, homophobic Westboro Baptist Church. To Hannity and other Americans who buy into the anti-war protester version of the Crazy Liberal myth, anti-war activists are so deranged that they would happily disrupt a soldier’s funeral.

Given all this, and given how much stock some conservatives have put into the notion that the American left is in the hands of an unstable, America-hating cabal of insane extremists, the response to the Times Square bombing from some right-wingers hasn’t been that surprising. Some of the larger, most mainstream conservative publications (“mainstream” being very much a relative term here), like The National Review and The Weekly Standard, have, to their credit, so far passed on connecting the Times Square bombing to the myth of the Crazy Liberal. But as for the big conservative blogs, which serve as the greasy, ever-pumping engine of online right-wing ire—well, not so much.

At Power Line, one of the most popular conservative blogs, John H. Hinderaker entitled his post about the bombing “Islamic Extremists or Code Pinkers?” (Codepink is a popular, absurdist anti-war group.) He proceeded to explain why these groups appear to be “the most likely suspects”: “Given the increasing virulence of attacks on the military and on military recruiting facilities by antiwar groups like Code Pink, most notably the repeated confrontations in Berkeley, one could speculate that a liberal group is the most likely culprit.” In an excellent example of the language used by true believers in the Crazy Liberal idea, Hinderaker writes as though Code Pinkers have been shelling military institutions around the country. In reality, they have been hoisting signs, chalking sidewalks, and taping bright pink tape over recruitment signs. Hardly violent stuff. But Hinderaker’s logic, apparently, is that anti-war liberals are crazy, people who plant bombs are crazy, and therefore whoever planted this bomb is an anti-war liberal.

Over at Little Green Footballs, a people-powered septic tank of hard-right asininity, Charles Johnson opined that “the anti-war left has been headed in this direction for quite some time, and I’m sure no one will be surprised if they have now graduated to domestic terrorism.” The site’s commenters, who, unlike anti-war activists or liberals, are demonstrably insane, were in rare form as they responded to the post. “Ben Hur” argued that the perpetrator was probably a “[l]eftist moonbat living out his romantic jihadi fantasy.” And “Maximu§,” perhaps too excited to properly proofread his comment, wrote, “Ill tell you all what the next scene inthis playbook is….Soldiers will start to be assaulted at airports by gangs of leftist radicals, soldiers families will start getting death threats and it goes downhill from there.”

Conservatives who depend on the Crazy Liberal myth have long had to rely on their imaginations to sustain their strangely pleasurable nightmares about homegrown radical insurgents. Yes, there are a few crazy liberals, just like there are a few crazy conservatives: For every creepily stoic anti-abortion protester hoisting a giant placard of an aborted fetus there is an ex-hippy with a misspelled sign comparing Bush to Hitler. Such is life in the United States, a country blessed with the most lenient free-speech laws in the world and home to an ever-evolving political discourse that is both endlessly rich and endlessly predicated on shallow, emotional outbursts. But conservatives have lacked empirical evidence of genuinely dangerous liberals, because there just aren’t that many in the United States (nor are there that many genuinely dangerous conservatives).

But this Times Square bomber—he’s different from the bra-burners and the grating, bongo-pounding protesters. He takes conservative mythology to a new level. He brings the fear-mongering into the realm of the real. If it turns out his actions were influenced by Iraq, he will be hailed by the right as an honest reflection of the liberal id.

So expect to hear more about this from the most pathetic, intellectual sloppy conservatives in the blogosphere and on cable news. More about how violence is a natural outgrowth of the irrational anti-war left. More about how it’s a wonder it took so long for things to devolve to this point. The right, after much fruitless searching, has “evidence” to support a lie it has disseminated for five years, the exception that proves the rule, and it won’t let go of it any time soon.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor of Campus Progress.

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