First the breaking news: All members of the anti-government Hutaree group, who wanted to start a violent revolution against the government...have asked for public defenders! :-)
Now back to our main story: Who's a "terrorist"? Nobody who isn't a Muslim, at least according to the corporate media. First it was the Hutaree group, who you'll find described as "Christian warriors" (wouldn't that be "jihadis"?), "militia members", pretty much anything but "terrorists." Do a Google search for "Hutaree terrorism" and pretty much every link you'll see will be to a blog, or at most an op-ed like Eugene Robinson's in the Washington Post, but few if any to actual corporate media.
Then we have a story which wasn't even important enough to make my morning paper or the network or cable news as far as I saw - the guilty plea entered by this fellow:
Cowart and fellow skinhead Paul Schlesselman told police that they planned to kill 88 [black] people [or 102, numbers vary], beheading 14 of them, and then die in a blaze of glory as they drove towards Mr Obama dressed in white tuxedos and firing out the windows.
I searched multiple news stories, not one included the words "terrorism" or "terrorist", even though this pair, just like the Hutaree group, fit the classic definition of "terrorism" - "the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes."
Meanwhile, last night on the Keith Olbermann show, I actually had to listen to Melissa Harris-Lacewell bring up an attempt to perform a citizen's arrest on Karl Rove as an example of "left-wing extremism" (you know, the old "a plague on both sides" position), even though she admitted that the person doing that was wearing a pink fuzzy hat and not carrying a gun. As if such an example belongs in the same library, much less the same book, chapter, paragraph, or sentence, as the groups noted above.
Reprinted from Left I on the News