Scott St. Clair: Dorner Worship Expected From the Left, Not the Right

The week-long manhunt for alleged cop-killer Christopher Dorner has come to a fiery end in the smoldering ruins of a vacation cabin east of Los Angeles. Good – none too soon. Dorner murdered four people in cold blood, and, if reports of his demise hold up, his death saves already tapped-out California taxpayers the cost of trying, convicting, incarcerating and eventually executing him.

So, what’s with all the Dorner hero worship and adulation – the making of him into a romantic character who was kind to children, small animals and the elderly?

Christopher Dorner isn’t Robin Hood or Zorro or even Rambo.  They were fictional characters in the movies. He’s the spawn of Maurice Clemmons, Timothy McVeigh and Nidal Hasan, all of whom were very real in their vicious and bloodthirsty killing of cops and innocent civilians for sick and perverted reasons.

Dorner’s “reasons” are contained in a bizarre, rambling and barely coherent 21-page “manifesto” in which he blames every bad thing in his life, including estrangement from his family, on a conspiracy by the Los Angeles Police Department. No mention is made of either a grassy knoll or a fake moon landing.

But plenty of mention is made – and made in excruciating detail – of his plans to murder more cops and their families, and he names them.

As an aside, if that isn’t an open-and-shut argument for the Second Amendment then one doesn’t exist.

He hearts the Obama’s -- “Off the record, I love your new bangs, Mrs. Obama” – and he implores Congress to adopt California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposed gun control legislation (after he inventories his massive personal arsenal).   

He bashes his high school assistant principal, then loves on MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Piers Morgan, Charlie Sheen, the Clintons and Chick-fil-A. Go figure.

What he doesn’t love is personal responsibility or the people whose lives he ruined when he killed their family members.   

Then why are so many worshipping him as a hero?

With his left-wing manifesto, you expect crazies on that end of the spectrum to do it, and they do – they really do. But they’re joined with equal vehemence  venom by some on the right, especially after mention was made of using Border Patrol drones to look for him. Like the conspiracy theories that sprang up overnight after last December’s Sandy Hook  mass shooting alleging it was staged to get our guns ,  Dorner’s case has them claiming he was a whistle blower exposing a vast government conspiracy and that using drones to look for him means you and I will be next.

Support for Dorner is all over Facebook and cockroach-like on Twitter. I know – I ran into a Dorner-loving leftie on Twitter and self-professed conservative on Facebook. What they had in common was an obvious loathing of police in general and an absolute conviction that evil machinations and conspiracies were behind all of his troubles, none of which were his fault.  First the defended him, then they rationalized him killing others (while claiming, “But it was wrong”) and then they blamed everything on unproven and shadowy “dirty cops.”  

But when these distorted perverts on the extreme ends of both sides of the political spectrum independently resorted to vile, sexually explicit comments about my wife, they were immediately cast  into the outer darkness of social-media hell.

That right there is enough to discredit them and their cause for all time and all eternity, not to  mention mark them in my book. To be safe, I did a print screen of their comments, and I’ll follow up.

Science-fiction author Robert Heinlein once wrote, “The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.” Maybe that’s because the people at the center of them are rotten themselves.

People buy into conspiracy theories to explain away unpleasant realities and disturbing truths, including the self-inflicted misery they’ve made of their own pathetic lives. A conspiracy-theory hero is the flipside of the scapegoat who’s really at fault. With Christopher Dorner,  theories abound and abound. Knighthood, sainthood or Robin Hood, but don’t dare call him a murderous hood.

Stupid machinations by people of like-kind who are described by something else Heinlein wrote: 

“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”