"Republicans Pounce!" Department: The "Far Right" Sees "Opportunity in Tragedy" and Uses a Muslim Refugee's Murder of a 14-Year-Old Girl as "a Political Weapon"

In the “Republicans Pounce!” School of Journalism (conservatives pouncing, leaping, seizing, etc), we get this German gem from the New Yorker's Yascha Mounk:

How a Teen’s Death Has Become a Political Weapon
When a refugee killed a fourteen-year-old girl,
Germany’s far right saw opportunity in tragedy.

Offhand, before reading the story, one obviously doesn't know much about it, one way or another. For all I know, there may be some, if not a lot of, truth in Mounk's New Yorker piece. But: we still get the narrative that people on the right are hypocritical and treacherous, while their aims are nefarious and their (phony) positions are nothing more than political weapons. (Danke schön für the Instalink.)

Having said that, what are the chances in a piece like this that the murderer's name is Mohammed, Abdul, or Ali?

Incidentally, doesn't the description of towns like Mainz in Germany sounds a bit like the UK's Rotherham?

The eleven-year-old girl allegedly raped by Ali Basha [yes, there is another victim] … had repeatedly hung out with a group of much older refugees, many of them grown men. Far from being an aberration, [Wolfgang Werner of Wiesbaden's department of social affairs] casually acknowledged, the phenomenon of older refugees pursuing an attention-starved young local is part of a wider trend.

Furthermore, when you read about other similar crimes (and the murderers' equally light sentences) and about the ensuing outrage being used by liberals like Yascha Mounk to bewail rightists' propaganda and "fearmongering"(!), you can't help wondering what drugs they are on. Such as the murder of

fifteen-year-old Mia Valentin, from Kandel, a town of ten thousand inhabitants in southwestern Germany, close to the French border. [Mia had] begun a romantic relationship with an Afghan refugee, Abdul Mobin Dawodzai, who had been placed in her class at school. After they broke up, Dawodzai (who had claimed to be a minor but was at least twenty years old, according to authorities) allegedly began to stalk and threaten her. On December 27, 2017, he repeatedly stabbed her with a bread knife in front of a drugstore in the city’s center. She died a few hours later.

Dawodzai was tried for murder at the district court in nearby Landau, and, at the beginning of September, he was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. Far-right agitators used the shocking details of Mia’s death for full propagandistic effect, just as they did with Der Fall Susanna.

But back to the subject of this post, the “Republicans Pounce!” School of Journalism. Back in the United States, the (cough) impartial and (cough) unbiased Snopes website — given the content of the concluding paragraph, San Francisco's David Emery has never read a book by Jonah Goldberg or seen a video by Dinesh D'Souza — also chooses to depict Republicans as moody, childish, and impulsive (not to mention "leaping").

None of [the media attention garnered by dozens of white-clad women in the House chamber where Trump delivered his address] went down well with Trump’s base of supporters, who leapt to social media to share memes likening the white-clothed Democrats to reviled, oppressive movements such as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. 

Put another way, the “Republicans Pounce!” School of Journalism is symbolic of the leftists' basic worldview in a nutshell, which comes down to Republicans being despicable deplorables while Democrats being deserving dreamers.

Another example is the Washington Post's Republicans seize on liberal positions to paint Democrats as radical. Which leads Stephen Green to line his comment with a touch of irony:

Legalized infanticide, outlawing private insurance, a wealth tax, drastically increasing the income tax, taking control of the entire economy in order to micromanage the climate… nothing radical to see here, nope.

In that perspective, Ed Driscoll links to Charles C W Cooke story in National Review on how the mainstream media operates.

  … the “press” and “the First Amendment” are held to be synonymous when they are no such thing and cannot logically be so.

 … Sometimes consciously, but most often unwittingly, journalists treat Democrats as normal and Republicans as abnormal and proceed accordingly in their coverage. Once one understands the rules, the whole setup becomes rather amusing. When a headline reads “Lawmaker Involved in Scandal,” one can immediately deduce that the lawmaker is a Democrat. Why? Because if he were a Republican, the story would make that clear in the headline. Without fail, stories that begin with “Republicans pounce” are actually about bad things that Democrats have done or said, while stories about bad things that Republicans have done or said begin with “Republican does or says a bad thing” and proceed to a dry recitation of the facts. A variation on this rule is “Republicans say,” which is used when a Republican says something that is so self-evidently true that, had a Democrat said it, it would have been reported straight. For a neat illustration of how farcical things have become, take a look at the Washington Post’s most recent “fact check,” which helpfully informs its readers that the claimed “one thousand burgers” President Trump bought for the Clemson football team were not, in fact, “piled up a mile high” because, “at two inches each, a thousand burgers would not reach one mile high.”

Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.

Selective political interest is disastrous in its own right. But when combined with the catastrophic historical illiteracy that is rife among the journalistic class, its result is what might best be described as the everything-happening-now-is-new fallacy, which leads almost everybody on cable news and the opinion pages to deem every moment of national irritation unprecedented, to cast all political fights as novel crises, and, provided it is being run by Republicans, to determine that the present Congress is “the worst ever.” Turn on the television and you will learn that our language is the “least civil,” our politics is “the most divided,” and our environment is the “most dangerous.” When a Democrat is president, he is “facing opposition of the kind that no president has had to suffer”; when a Republican is president, he is held to be badly unlike the previous ones, who were, in turn, regarded as a departure from their predecessors. Continually, we are held to be on the verge of descending into anarchy or reinstituting Jim Crow or murdering the marginalized or, a particular favorite of mine, establishing the regime outlined in The Handmaid’s Tale. Past is prologue, context, and balm. Without it, all is panic.