Back in June, Times liberal columnists lined up to link conservative talkers Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh to James von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, and the murder by Scott Roeder of abortionist George Tiller.
Columnists Paul Krugman [1] and Judith Warner [2] both weighed in on June 12. Krugman's "The Big Hate" blamed Fox host Bill O'Reilly's rhetoric ("Tiller the baby killer") for the Tiller murder, as well as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh for contributing to the dangerously toxic atmosphere.
Warner's online entry, "The Wages of Hate," said: "You can't accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence. But they almost certainly do stoke the flames."
Frank Rich also blamed O'Reilly for the Tiller murder in his Sunday column, "The Obama Hater's Silent Enablers [3]," two days later.
Bob Herbert came in late, on June 20, referring to the killings as "right-wing, hate-driven attacks" and also blaming "over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle Association."
So how did these professional hand-wringers treat another incident of violence, this one even more tragic: A mass killing of 13 people, many of them soldiers, at Fort Hood in Texas by a Muslim Army major shouting "God is great" in Arabic?
They've ignored it.
As of November 13, eight days after the Fort Hood murders, neither Rich, Krugman, or Warner have mentioned the massacre, much less Hasan's radical Islamic beliefs. Only Bob Herbert devoted two sentences to Hasan on Saturday, a leaping-off point to talk about post-traumatic stress suffered by veterans home from Iraq and Afghanistan (even though Hasan hasn't even seen combat).
