Media blame America for Boston bombings, ignore ties to radical Islam

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Comedian George Carlin famously joked about the seven words you couldn’t say on air. Add two more – “Islam” and “Muslim” – but only if you use them in a negative context. 

In the week following the terror attack on the Boston Marathon, lefties and their media clones have been desperate to point out the attack had nothing to do with those two scary words.

After all, journalists and pundits have had time to reflect on the bombing – from the safety of their posh offices and not Boston’s crowded hospitals. The brothers were just poor and misunderstood. It can’t be their fault.

The Brothers Tsarnaev have set media tongues a-wagging looking for someone to blame other than Muslims – like Americans.  

Famed newsman Tom Brokaw took up the blame America crusade on Sunday's NBC “Meet the Press,” discussing “motivation” like he was in an entry-level acting class.

Today in American we have a media so obsessed with feeling good about themselves, that America can’t have a conversation about the dangers of radical Islam.

According to Brokaw, we’re to blame. “I think we also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved in and – and there are a lot of civilians who are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.” 

Why? American “presumptuousness,” a crime which now merits the death penalty in certain Islamic circles.

The Washington post claimed on Tuesday that “Boston Marathon bombing suspects elude labels.” Oh? How about radical Islamic terrorists? Radical Muslim terrorists? 

According to AP, “U.S. officials said Tuesday, adding another piece to the body of evidence they say suggests the two brothers were motivated by an anti-American, radical version of Islam.”

The media felt they knew better. 

At MSNBC, they must be hanging gymnastics medals after the contortions it put its staff through.

When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked a Georgetown professor about “some radicalized YouTube clips” on the older brother’s YouTube page, she received a classic response. 

Prof. Charles King told her: “Well, and keep in mind that on his, on the elder brother's, Tamerlan's YouTube channel, there are an equal number of rap videos.” When Georgetown professors start commenting on the content of rap videos, it’s fair to say they’re clueless. Or tragically unhip.

Another MSNBC host continued that smokescreen theme, comparing the bombers to famous murderers. 

On Tuesday, Alex Wagner said if the brothers had acted alone, “it ends debate regarding whether to try him as an enemy combatant,” wrote Mediaite. “With no ties to foreign terrorist networks, there would be little difference between him and so-called homegrown and lone wolf terrorists including Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski.” Only neither of those was motivated by a global belief system linked to hundreds or thousands of terror attacks.

Perhaps, instead of being PC, they might address the issue of radical Islam, especially since two Muslim men were just arrested for a Canadian terror plot. 

The media are doing law-abiding American Muslims no favors by refusing to acknowledge a problem – radical Islam – that threatens them as well. But note the term, “radical Islam.” 

It is not being overly PC to admit that millions of American Muslims don’t go blowing up their neighbors. Since I have Muslim neighbors, I appreciate that fact.

On Monday, Politico’s Josh Gerstein claimed that “the Boston Marathon bombing suspects’ geopolitical leanings are still largely a mystery.” 

He clearly didn’t watch a week filled with news where we learned the older of the Tsarnaev brothers had visited Russia’s terrorist-filled Dagestan. And that Russia had asked the U.S. to investigate his ties to radical Islam. Oopsie.

One of The Atlantic’s “reporters” even did her best to minimize the skill of the terrorists to downplay the attack. “The more we learn of Boston bombers the more they seem like bumblers. And there's the rub: any idiot can terrorize, doesn't require genius,” tweeted Garance Franke-Ruta Tuesday. 

Boston health authorities say 264 people were treated at local hospitals, along three killed. 

Evil? Yes! Bumblers? Hardly.

Then there were those who couldn’t let that old crisis go to waste. So they used a terror attack on Americans to promote...gun control. New Yorker editor David Remnick told the “Charlie Rose” show that guns were part of the problem. 

“We see yet another act which might have been a Hell of a lot more difficult to pull off with effective gun control.” Remnick is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get it in logic.

Even my friend, lefty radio host Thom Hartmann used the bombing to attack “all forms of religious fundamentalism that lead to violence.” Thom, like most liberals, isn’t especially tolerant of religion and said this was “a good opportunity for us to have a conversation about modernity versus Bronze Age gods.” Nothing says open-mindedness like calling Christianity “Bronze Age gods.”

What it all adds up to, is a media so obsessed with feeling good about themselves, that America can’t have a conversation about the dangers of radical Islam. It’s a world tailor made for people like nutty columnist David Sirota (OK, that’s like saying “wet ocean”). Sirota, you’ll recall, hoped that the bombers might be “a white American.”

As it turns out, it didn’t matter. The media just report what they want anyhow.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

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Tamerlan Tsarnaev reportedly on state welfare while delving into radical Islam

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One of the men behind last week's deadly attack on the Boston Marathon had received Massachusetts welfare benefits until recently -- during the same period that the alienation he apparently felt as a Chechen in America coincided with a growing embrace of radical Islam.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his family were living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits as recently as last year, the Boston Herald reports, though it remains unclear what kind of benefits they were receiving.

State officials confirmed to the newspaper late Tuesday that Tsarnaev, who was killed during a gun battle with police on Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter.

His younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was captured Friday night and charged with using a weapon of mass destruction. The 19-year-old could face the death penalty if convicted.

The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said Tamerlan Tsarnaev's welfare benefits ended in 2012 when the family stopped meeting income eligibility limits. His wife's attorney has claimed Katherine -- who had converted to Islam -- was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home, the newspaper reports.

“The brothers were not receiving transitional assistance benefits at the time of the incident and have not received any transitional assistance benefits this year," Massachusetts Health and Human Services communication director Alec Loftus told the newspaper in a statement. "The Tsarnaevs’ parents are former recipients of transitional assistance benefits, and both Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev received benefits through their parents when they were younger. Separately, Tamerlan and his family received benefits until 2012, when the family became ineligible based on their income.”

The Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance works "to assist low-income individuals and families to meet their basic needs, increase their incomes and improve their quality of life," the agency's website says.

The benefits offered include food assistance, job assistance, emergency shelter, help for victims of domestic violence, cash aid for families with children, emergency assistance for the elderly and disabled.

Loftus declined to specify to the Herald the type and amount of assistance Tsarnaev and his family were receiving.

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Democrats and Republicans must embrace radical moves to fix our fiscal mess

Federal deficits are too large and mounting national debt threatens future generations. Both Democrats and Republicans embrace demagoguery and refuse to address facts and acknowledge lessons of history.

Since 2007, federal spending is up $1 trillion dollars and deficits jumped from $161 billion to $1.2 trillion over five years.

Higher taxes on the wealthy and ObamaCare levies will pull down the gap in 2014 but then it will rise again. Health care, social security and slow growth, not low taxes, are the culprits.

Both sides need to be honest with Americans about working longer and accept a radically different role for government.

Tax rates and rules imposed in January will increase revenue’s share of GDP well above its average for the last forty years.

However, Americans spend 18 percent of GDP on health care, while the Germans and Dutch, with more government cost sharing and better care, spend about 12 percent.  

Even with ObamaCare, private insurance premiums and out-of pocket expenses are rocketing, while Medicare and Medicaid have suppressed provider reimbursements to levels that many physicians refuse to take publically-financed patients.

Benchmarked against Germany and Holland, U.S. private health care prices are too high, while government rates for the poor and elderly are too low to cover providers’ costs.

Republicans would rely more on markets and competition—scrapping most Obama Care mandates and giving elderly vouchers to buy private care—and hoisting the poor onto the states by replacing Medicaid with block grants.

Those would not bring down private health care prices—cash grants to the elderly and fragmenting Medicaid administration would raise those.

GOP strategies would leave many elderly and poor forgoing care, less healthy and dying too young—much the new reality for the former middle class and poor in Portugal, Spain and Greece.

The Germans do what Messrs Obama, Boehner and others are unwilling to conceive—directly reimbursing most health care costs, regulating most providers’ prices, slashing administrative burdens and executive salaries, and eliminating most malpractice suits.

The necessary taxes would be less expensive for U.S. businesses and individuals than the taxes, health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs they now bear.

Americans live longer and can work longer, and social security and government pension ages should be raised to 70. No system of social insurance or federal finance can work when folks can live another 20 or 30 years in retirement.

No tax increase can escape these realities—overtaxation caused nothing but slow growth, misery and decay in southern Europe.

Overregulation of the private sector does not mitigate, but rather exacerbates risks of financial crisis. The greatest threats come, not from private bank meltdowns and personal bankruptcies, but rather from a loss of confidence in government’s ability to promote adequate economic growth and hence raise revenues to finance its legitimate responsibilities.

President Obama inherited a mess—unemployment peaked at 10 percent in his first term—but since his recovery began, economic growth has averaged only 2.1 percent.

President Reagan inherited a mess too—unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent—but at the comparable point in his recovery, growth was averaging 5.3 percent. Fueled by continued strong growth, federal deficits dissolved in the 1990s.

Instead of campaigning that cutting federal spending one half of one percent will force food shortages, outbreaks of E. coli and streets without police, the President would do better to read more about Reagan and less about Lincoln—he faces a growth crisis not a civil war.

Republicans would do better to acknowledge that just as national defense can’t be left to private armies, markets and competition can’t solve health care inflation.

Both sides need to be honest with Americans about working longer and accept a radically different role for government if they want to leave the nation to their grandchildren as they inherited it—prosperous, secure and solvent.

Peter Morici is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and widely published columnist. Follow him on Twitter @PMorici1.

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