Appearing during the "Roundtable" segment on Sunday's This Week on ABC, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington continued her campaign to portray conservatives as promoters of violence as she recounted what she referred to as the "violent imagery" of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's speech at CPAC in which he, alluding to Tiger Woods' troubles, suggested that a golf club should be used to "smash a window out of big government."
Huffington connected the Republican governor's remarks to Joe Stack's suicide attack on the IRS building in Austin, Texas, as she noted that Pawlenty's speech came "the day after the pilot had flown a plane into a federal government building," and contended that "that kind of rhetoric is disturbing."
On Thursday's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Huffington had appeared as a guest, and asserted that there were "displays of violence" [1] at the convention, even lumping in people stomping on the Media Research Center's doormats that display the likenesses of MSNBC hosts Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Huffington:
And the danger is that Republicans are playing with gasoline and matches, because they are taking the legitimate anger at double digit unemployment, foreclosures, et cetera, and fusing it with a very dark anger that we saw today at the convention, with all these displays of violence, with what you described about the stomping on you and others on the floor, with the pinatas of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and even a punching bag of John McCain.
Below is a transcript of Huffington's comments from the Sunday, February 21, This Week on ABC:
Well, let's first of all, mention that the straw poll was won by Ron Paul. Last year, it had been won by Mitt Romney. The violent imagery was fascinating, and even Tim Pawlenty, who is supposed to be a moderate, said that we need to take a page out of the playbook of Tiger Woods' wife and take a nine iron and smash a window out of big government. That was the day after the pilot had flown a plane into a federal government building.
So that kind of rhetoric is disturbing, and, of course, what must be troubling for the conservatives is that the big hit, the guy who got the rock star welcome was Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney left office with 13 percent approval rating, and there were shouts of, "Run, Dick, run," which I'm sure the White House is fully endorsing.
-Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.