The spectre of “welfare jihadists” have the right wing in a simultaneous orgasm. It’s not pretty.
by digby
Fueled by a report from the conservative Boston Herald, right wing media outlets such as Fox News, the New York Post, and the Washington Times, are demonizing government assistance programs by tying them to the heinous terror attacks committed at the Boston Marathon. Conservative blogs used sensationalized headlines and rhetoric to make their attacks, like RedState’s “Does The US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?” and Monica Crowley’s “Nice Return on Our Investment, Huh?”
On April 24, 2013, the Boston Herald published a report that claimed, “Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism.”
In addition to the Drudge Report, RedState, and Monica Crowley, the story was also picked up by Fox Nation, Breitbart.com, The Daily Caller, the New York Post, the Washington Times, and others.
Like Limbaugh:
LIMBAUGH: Now we hear that the entire Tsarnaev family was on welfare. How could he not be an Obama supporter?
[…]
So we have another great example of your tax dollars at work. Your tax money helped to pay for the explosives, as well as Tamerlan’s at least two trips back to Dagestan, his late model Mercedes, his $900 shoes. No wonder this guy hated America.
If liberals were as shameless as wingnuts, they’d be screaming about how the right wing is “politicizing” the attack for their own aims. Which they are.
It’s hard to understand what they think the meaning of this is. They are reporting it as a state program (obviously, since federal “welfare” has been drastically cut back.) Do they think that being on government assistance caused this guy to become a jihadist so we should get rid of all welfare programs because they make people terrorists? (At least that’s original — usually they are obsessing about “dependency.”) Or would they just they just like to prohibit all Muslims from collecting government benefits just in case they might be extremist or nuts with a grievance?
It’s hard to know exactly what they’ve extrapolated from this random fact and none of it makes much sense. So I think it’s safe to assume that it’s just their usual lizard brain bigotry has been activated and it’s making them scream incoherently. And as usual, all their pleasure receptors are going crazy as well — the orgasmic feeling of a wingnut being able to link “welfare” and “terrorism” is vividly on display. I’m buying brain bleach futures as we speak.
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