[Note: I confirmed earlier today that my interview with Anderson Cooper regarding "lone wolf" violence will air on AC360 tonight, so be sure to catch it on CNN.]
When that Homeland Security bulletin on right-wing extremism was issued two months, C&L was among the first to point out the report's complete factual accuracy. In retrospect, there are some methodological issues with the bulletin, which Leonard Zeskind ably limns; and the report's political framing unfortunately left it open to political attack.
Yet, as we've seen this week, it was clearly prescient in warning about the dangers posed by lone wolves and small-cell terrorists. Shepard Smith notwithstanding, everyone at Fox has been pushing hard to convince the public once again the DHS report was wrong. Next: Rupert Murdoch is the King of the Moon.
Among them: Neil Cavuto yesterday on his daily Fox News program. He invited a Gulf War vet named Matthew Burden on to talk about how wrong the report was. This produced some real howlers.
Burden: Well, first of all, this report was poorly written, and it was a completely unprovoked attack on our veterans.
Well, regardless of its literary qualities, the report in fact was not only perfectly accurate -- it was in fact issued largely in response to the shooting of three police officers in by a right-wing extremist Pittsburgh the week prior. Moreover, the warning raised regarding veterans was strictly about the effort by right-wing extremist groups, particularly neo-Nazi organizations, to recruit returning veterans -- a fact that had already been long established.
Finally, it must be pointed out that the DHS report in fact accurately predicted that the most significant domestic-terrorism threat Americans faced was going to come from "lone wolf" and small-cell terrorists motivated by right-wing extremism. Not that Neil or his guest ever bother to discuss this point.
Cavuto: I always wonder if -- the prior administration had said the exact same thing, you know, how differently that might have been treated.
Good question, Neil -- because, as Catherine Herridge and Shepard Smith reported on Fox they did say "the exact same thing" -- this report was in fact commissioned by the Bush administration.
So we wonder, indeed, how this would have been reported if any of the rest of Greater Wingnuttia had bothered to report that fact as well?
Most of all, Cavuto wants to emphasize the portion of the report that discussed veterans -- but ignores the fact that most right-wingers were outraged not just over that portion, but over what they saw as conflation of right-wing extremists with their own mainstream conservatism. Of course, what they mostly were intent on doing was futilely scrubbing to get that nasty right-wing extremist stain out.
Fortunately, all you had to do was switch the channel to MSNBC to get a reasonable and intelligent discussion of the DHS memo between Mark Potok of the SPLC and Keith Olbermann:
Transcript:
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