The shooting deaths of 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC is a horrific crime, one for which the perpetrator deserves the death penalty. But the crime features a depressingly familiar scenario: a ready-made motive for the killings before anyone knows anything about the genesis of the crime, or the murderer's state of mind. It hardly matters who or what is blamed.  Liberals automatically blame conservatives; the right blames the left; if a gay person is the target, it's homophobia; religious killings elicit cries of anti-Muslim bigotry.  And, in this case, the killings are called a "hate crime" despite no one having talked to the murderer or heard anything he said that would remotely connect this barbarity with "hate." The problem with this is that it creates unnecessary tensions – tensions to be exploited by politicians and racialists. At a 1 AM news conference, the chief...(Read Full Post)