Friday, May 01, 2009

Where's the (Fake) Conservative Outrage on This Threat Assessment?

By John Ridley and from Huffy Post: When the Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence assessment characterizing returning military vets as potential domestic terrorists, conservatives went ape...crap. Rep. John Boehner said the report was offensive and demanded that the DHS apologize to veterans. Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis said the DHS was "engaging in political and ideological profiling." Michelle Malkin said the report was "one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I'd ever read."

'Cause Tim McVeigh didn't exist, domestic militias are harmless and there's been no uptick in hate crimes across America.

Be that as it may...

If conservatives are so sensitive to "shoddy" threat assessments, where's the (fake) outrage over Virginia's Anti-terrorism Fusion Center's recently leaked report that the state's historically black colleges --- Virginia Union University, Virginia State University, Norfolk State University and Hampton University - form a "radicalization node" for extremists?

In addition to singling out historically black colleges and the Hampton Roads area as being "at risk" because of its "diverse military population" as well as being home to black colleges, the report from the Unit notes Richmond's history as the capital of the Confederacy and its sizable minority population make it a breeding ground for race-based extremist groups. You know. Scary dark-skinned people with guns!

The leaked report immediately set off a wave of anger with everybody in the state except conservatives. To be fair, the report painted with a pretty broad brush, and some 50 organizations to the left and the right of the political spectrum are mentioned in the assessment. But Virginia's HBCUs are specifically named, without explanation, as being ground zero for domestic terror activity.

Thankfully, Gov. Tim Kaine, at the urging of the ACLU, has launched an investigation into how the Fusion Center arrived at its conclusions.

No need to investigate why conservatives have been uniformly silent about the incident.

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