I'm starting to think these doctors ought to be given 24-hour, secret-service style bodyguards, though.
The thing is, he had a bodyguard (after being shot in both arms in 1993). Who wasn't there on that particular day, for whatever reason.
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so the mainstream media
just did not cover it that much.
Yes, yes, and as we all "know" all of the "mainstream" media is "liberal" (because Limbaugh and others like him tell us so, and they must be telling us the truth, right?) . . . despite all evidence to the contrary - of the three major 24 hour news networks FOX is decidedly conservative, CNN is conservative leaning (a bit less so since they ditched Glenn Beck), and MSNBC leans liberal but tries to be reasonably balanced on the whole; and with few exceptions most of the daily newspapers in the U.S. are decidedly conservative (simple poll, the vast majority of newspapers endorsed McCain in the last election and Bush in the previous two).
But that's an entirely different story for another thread, not this one.
On a related note, though, had this been one of O'Reilly's buddies shot down by a liberal, he'd be going off about left-wing terrorists trying to shut him up. Instead, just this evening, he was covering Tiller's murder as "vigilante justice."
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Now, for those claiming this is an isolated incident from a single deranged individual . . .
Dr. George Tiller - murdered 2009
Dr. Barnett Slepian - murdered 1998 (by a sniper)
Dr. David Gunn - murdered 1994
And these are just the three that made the news. The list doesn't include the thousands of doctors who are subjected to death threats, threats of physical violence, and other attacks on a daily basis. Nor the thousands of nurses who are similarly attacked. Nor the tens of thousands of counselors. Nor the list of young women similarly threatened on a daily basis. Every Saturday, I drive by a clinic that doesn't perform abortions but offers counseling that includes the option of abortion. Without exception there are always a handful of protesters shouting at anyone who even seems to be turning into the parking lot . . . and 90% of the time said protesters are male, aged 60+, although sometimes they bring a full age range from five year olds to 60+ year olds.
Let's please call it what it is: a semi-organized campaign of terror in the name of religion. This is not the work or random act of a single deranged person, this is the work of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people.
This is not to say that all pro-lifers are terrorist wackos, however there is a segment of the pro-life movement that cannot be truthfully characterized any other way. To characterize them as deranged loners is, I think, to shrug off the problem and leave the door open for similar acts to occur in the future.
(I suppose I should say, even though it should be obvious, that I'm pro-choice, although not pro-abortion . . . there is a major difference, not that many of the pro-lifers'll admit that.)