The Pep Rally Memorial

The Pep Rally Memorial was on last night.  Or was it the Memorial for Pep Rallies? After last night’s shocking and highly inappropriate Pep Rally Carnival in Tucson, starring President Obama, the Liberals should hang their heads in shame and never hold another political pep rally ever again.

Two minutes into the show, I shut it off. As Fox News segued from Shep Smith to the Memorial Service at the University of Arizona, the first appalling thing I noted was that it was being held in a stadium. I knew right away that this didn’t bode well. Dignity was sinking faster than the Titanic.

Then I seem to recall seeing people in group tee shirts, cheering and clapping. People on the podium were yukking it up, laughing and hee-hawing. Next some clown came up to the microphone and made some announcement that I couldn’t hear for all the screaming.

Then President Obama came up on to the dais. The stadium erupted in even more screaming and yelling. The people in the front rows stood up. I noticed that some of the people on the dais started looking a little uncomfortable. They carried on and carried on.

So I did what I did, the first time I saw Obama on television, at some televised town hall meeting – I shut off the television. That time, I vacuumed. This time, I surfed the dial. When I saw there was absolutely nothing worth watching, I picked up the latest edition of National Review and resumed reading it.

I read the speech later. Actually, it was reasonably dignified and solemn. I thought the part at the end about tempering our discourse (or whatever he said) was unnecessary, at least for Conservatives. It sounded for all the world like he was chiding his own followers.

There should no longer any doubt that the Liberals have no sense of respect, decorum, discipline, propriety, common sense or manners. That’s to be expected, however, from irresponsible, overgrown, foul-mouthed adolescents. One person who must have been pleased at this mockery of a memorial – if he had access to this spectacle – was Loughner himself.

I watched the little girl’s funeral procession on Fox News when I got home from work. Such a sad thing, seeing that little casket being rolled out to the hearse. A little girl born on a day of unspeakable violence and murdered on a day of unspeakable violence. She looked like she was a little charmer, with those big, brown eyes.

I imagine her funeral service was much more dignified than the Pep Rally Memorial. The Westboro Baptist Church bunch stayed away from the funeral, but only after blackmailing some radio station into playing their message. They’re a terrible bunch. I was reading some of the information about them to my colleagues.

Not only do they disrupt military funerals, but desecrate the American flag. The church was formed in 1955. But in 1991, seeing homosexual activity at a nearby community park, they launched out on their anti-homosexual – and anti-just-about-everyone-else crusade.

Homosexuals needn’t feel too singled-out, though. The Westboro Wackos also hate Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, and Catholics. But if you think their plans to picket Christiana’s funeral was awful, you should read the account of the murder of Canadian Tim McLean.

Now, keep in mind, this is a Wikipedia account, but I did confirm the story on The Digital Journal and the London Globe and Mail. McLean, a carnival worker was on his way home from Edmonton to Winnipeg on a Greyhound bus. He frequently texted his ex-girlfriend along the trip, who was the mother of his three year-old daughter. In Erickson, Manitoba, a man named Weiguang Li boarded the bus, sitting in front. After a rest stop, he took a seat next to McLean, at the back of the bus.

Witnesses say he produced a large, Rambo-type knife and stabbed McLean. The bus stopped and the horrified passengers fled, with the driver locking the killer inside the bus. He tried to drive away, but the bus was equipped with an emergency immobilizer.  What the killer did next is unprintable, at least on my blog, and you’ll have to go to one of the news sites for the horrifying details. But the passengers, huddled on the roadside, were sickened.

At the last minute, fearing recriminations, Westboro called off its protest.

Although Li had no previous psychiatric history, a court psychiatrist testified at his trial that he was schizophrenic. Li himself testified that he killed McLean because God told him to do it. Westboro claimed they wanted to protest McLean’s funeral to speak out against Canada’s laws on abortion and adultery. There is no evidence that McLean was gay, although some psycho-bloggers maintain that he was. McLean sported a number of tattoos on his chest and torso. The killer had followed him into the rest stop. Perhaps he disapproved.

Other witnesses say this psycho was acting peculiar before he ever boarded the bus. He sat at the bus stop for hours, staring fixedly out into space. He had a laptop with him which he sold to a young boy, who turned it over to the Canadian Mounted Police.

McLean never said a word to this man. He didn’t know him. No politics were involved, no “violent rhetoric.” McLean’s only “mistake” was boarding that particular bus. Li was simply a psycho. He acted so suddenly, McLean would never have had a chance to escape him and bus stations don’t have metal detectors (yet).

Tim McLean has certainly not been forgotten by his family and friends. But the larger world has probably forgotten all about the incident, which happened in 2008. That’s the real trouble – we tend to forget. We forgot about the first World Trade Center bombing. Liberals would like us to forget about 9/11, but never forget about the Iraq War. It’s part of human nature to eventually screen out such horrible incidents (if you read the Greyhound bus story, you’ll know why – it’s something those passengers will never forget).

We mourn Christiana Taylor now. But once Congresswoman Giffords recovers (and doctors are optimistic that she will) will we be urged to forget about Christiana’s murder because the killer was just your everyday, run-of-the-mill psychotic, who leaned more to the left than to the right, depriving the Liberal Media of a month’s worth of finger-wagging stories about Conservatives? Will we be urged to forget the day this little girl died the way we’re urged to forget the day she was born?

Is that why they turned a purported memorial for her and the other victims into a three-ring circus, complete with banners, tee shirts, and cheering crowds?  If this was the Liberals' idea of “civil discourse,” America is in more trouble than we thought.