Jazz Shaw, at the Moderate Voice, has apologized for his insinuations that conservatives were responsible for the death of Bill Sparkman: "The Census Worker Suicide":
At the time, I wrongly jumped to a conclusion in my column, The Ghouls Surrounding Bill Sparkman. I assumed at that time that the most likely cause of death was murder by some local moonshiners or pot farmers or other mountain folk up to no good. Obviously, I was incorrect, and I apologize. This was obviously an ill and deeply troubled man, dealing with an illness, a lack of a job and family problems, who decided to take this route out of his problems.
Of course, there were some other writers in Blogtopia and MSM who also jumped to their own conclusion about how Sparkman died... theories which have not panned out given the current evidence. I’m sure they will be along shortly with their own apologies to set the record straight.
That said, as a follow up from this afternoon, I'm reiterating my call for Larisa Alexandrovna -- who has smeared me personally as racist -- to issue an apology and retraction for her Bill Sparkman race-baiting. Ms. Alexandrovna's racist allegations against conservatives seek to delegitimized partisanship and shut down debate -- these smears are all the leftists have left, so don't expect much from these people, so intent to gain political capital from the cult of victimology.
That said, Mark Kleiman has offered a retraction, if not an apology:
It turns out that the death of a census worker in Kentucky was a suicide, not an act of domestic terrorism. Thus, contrary to my earlier speculation, the people who have been trying to whip up panic fear of the federal government in general and the Census in particular aren’t in fact responsible for the killing.That said, Charles Johnson continues to refuse an apology.
Readers are asked to drop additional retractions (or apologies) in the comments, and I'll update.
See also, Pirate's Cove, "Kentucky Census Worker Officially Comitted Suicide, the Left Completely Pwnd."
"I assumed at that time that the most likely cause of death was murder by some local moonshiners or pot farmers or other mountain folk up to no good."
ReplyDeleteTypical liberal smearin' the fly-over country folk. I'd write more but my sister's callin' me from the bedroom...
As the author of the piece you are headlining, thanks for the nod but I would like to clarify something. I didn't infer that "conservatives" had killed Bill Sparkman. In fact, in the original column, I cautioned people against jumping to such conclusions. Here's a graph from the original piece:
ReplyDelete"The fact remains that the facts are not known. Was Bill murdered by some politically motivated zealot? Was he killed by paranoid meth cookers or pot growers in a region historically rife with bootleggers? Or did he simply run into a serial killer roaming the back country in search of victims? Again, we don’t know."
But I did conclude that the most likely scenario was that he had run afoul of some sort of criminals, perhaps meth lab dealers, who killed him. When the report finally came out making it very clear that it was a suicide, I thought our site should clear the air, update the story, and apologize for assuming it was a murder of any sort.