We haven’t touched upon the Crazy Old Jew-Hater who shot Steven Johns. Nor will we, in the hope that he dies in obscurity rather than the notoriety he courted with his senseless, likely dementia-induced murder.

But the fact that they found the address of the Weekly Standard in his pocket brings up an old hobby-horse. In order to discredit President Bush, there was a frenzy of denunciation of “neo-cons,”* which libeled a lot of Jewish conservatives as dual-loyalist crypto-Mossadnik warmongers. While the worst of this was in the fever swamps of the left, it bled into the mainstream media as well.

The focus of a lot of this madness was the now-defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a tiny think tank associated with the Standard. (It was right across the hall.) Kooks painted it as the center of the Vast Hebrew-Wing Conspiracy.

Confucius would like to fish out of the memory hole a Nightline episode that reminded him of all the Osama Bin Laden Located in Waziristan headlines at the time:

Elders of Zion Located on Seventeenth Street, N.W.

Ok, the Œc. Vol. exaggerates slightly. But here’s the actual text—from the (once) most prestigious, flagship, long-form news-analysis program on television:

Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?
Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?

Which some doubtless read as: Have we found the smoking gun of the war-mongering Jew cabal?

Now, most observers would likely say, “Oh, that was just liberal media hardball against conservatives and that idiot Bush. They didn’t mean that.” Those observers might be right. But that’s not enough for a complete absolution of the people who wrote, edited, scripted, read, and broadcast the story.

Ordinarily, the Left is ostentatious to the point of theatrical in their hypersensitivity to stereotypes—pushing hate-crime laws, speech codes, and positioning themselves as the champions of “tolerance” and “diversity.” But apparently that’s just when they need to win moral-superiority points, because when push came to shove, they happily strewed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories around.

There’s a lot of nonsense on the left about “dog-whistle” appeals (always on the part of Republican politicians) making nefarious promises to groups of supporters in coded language. This Nightline report and its ilk weren’t “dog-whistle” appeals to insane conspiracists, they were giant, blinking-neon reinforcements of their delusions.

No one disputes that the tiny minority of extremist, John Brown-style pro-lifers who engage in violent rhetoric are morally complicit in George Tiller’s murder; but the same press that slandered PNAC, et al., as Israel’s cat’s-paws happily smears the unequivocally pacific majority of pro-lifers as potential murderers and somehow collectively guilty in Tiller’s killing.

This is irony.

The Crazy Old Jew Hater is first and last responsible for Mr. Johns’ murder, but one hopes that those who bandied around anti-Semitic insinuations are given pause to wonder if Mr. Johns is in some small way collateral damage in their saturation-bombing campaign against George W. Bush.

*Famously explained by David Brooks: “con is short for “‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish’”

The Gormogons are incidentally very relieved that our friends who work in the building, as well as the very pleasant security guards at the front desk, didn’t face the danger Mr. Johns and colleagues did. Was their address in his pocket a mere happenstance, or were they spared the lunatic’s wrath by an accident of the Metro system’s layout?)

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.