Winnsboro Attack: First, Be Skeptical

Is someone attempting their own October surprise?

The news media is reporting that Sharmeka Moffitt, 20, was walking down a paved trail in a quiet and calm part of Winnsboro, Louisiana, when three men wearing “white hoodies” wrote KKK on her car in toothpaste and then somehow set her on fire. She has extensive burns down her back and on her legs.

She managed to recover from the fire—details on how aren’t clear—and caled police. A car happened to be in the area and was on the scene literally in seconds.

The Czar is a little skeptical. The KKK? White hoodies? How did they smear toothpaste on her car and manage to find her on a paved trail? A police car is on the scene in under a minute and saw no one but her. She cannot identify any of the attackers. Two weeks to go before the election.

Look, the Czar wasn’t there. But there are two possibilities to this story, neither of which are desirable.

First, and simplest, is that Ms. Moffitt set herself on fire for whatever reason, and is blaming imaginary attackers. This is not without precedent, as many of you can recall. There seems to be something about these types of botched suicides that encourage people to create a racial component to it.

Second, this could be almost real. Three guys—whom we can easily predict won’t be voting for Romney—decided to stir the pot and create an anti-Republican atmosphere by staging a racist attack. The whole theatrics of the KKK vandalism and the white hoodies seems to be the big clue there. Some readers may be startled to read our automatic assumption that these attackers wouldn’t be Republicans, but if we’ve been paying attention all these years, we know which party invented the KKK, armed them, looked the other way, and even joined their ranks for decades. Hint: not a lot of Republican voters on that side.

Even the mayor of Winnsboro said his first reaction to the news was disbelief. Yes: never underestimate the power of the initial reaction.

Either way, this is a terrible event, and certainly either way we wish the best for Ms. Moffit and hope that regardless of what happened, she gets the help she needs. But while the MSM goes on to explore and inflate the racial component to this story, Big G readers should know there almost certainly is no Republican candidate that can be tied into this story.