Ghoulish exploitation of the deaths and injuries inflicted in Colorado Springs last Friday was always in the cards.  What else would you expect from a movement that specializes in death?  Even so, the speed and facility with which Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., a troubled man with many eccentricities (including listing himself as a female on his voter registration and living as a loner in Unabomber-like shacks), has been propagandized as a pro-life activist (a murderous pro-lifer makes sense only in leftist fever swamps) is startling.

The narrative was already written, so that only hours after the shooting, before anything at all was known about the shooter, the head of the industry’s trade association was blaming the videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress showing Planned Parenthood officials laughing and joking about all the money they make selling baby parts.  Subsequently, the words “no more baby parts” have been attributed to the alleged shooter, although the source of the quote is murky at best, and the public has been cautioned that Dear ranted about many subjects.  But the canned narrative blaming the exposure of Planned Parenthood behavior is irresistible to the abortion-loving mass media, so that is what the public is hearing endlessly today.

Leftist site Buzzfeed gives away the game:

This week, abortion rights activists are going to use tough language and modern political tactics to make the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Friday into a political moment they say will put abortion opponents on the defensive after a year that has seen them score a number of political victories against legal and accessible abortion.

That means abortion rights supporters using the word “terrorism” to describe what happened in Colorado Springs. That means confronting pro-life Republicans and asking them about what activists call “a culture of violence” directed toward abortion providers. And that means trying to engage Democratic allies in Washington to do the same — something that prominent Democrats like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have already done — in the hopes, particularly, of turning a byzantine Senate vote as early as this week into a political opportunity for Democrats on the abortion issue.

This is an argument that does not bear close scrutiny.  Does Al Gore bear responsibility for the lethal acts of the Unabomber, who studied his global warming texts and turned murderous?  John Hinderaker of Powerline offers a hypothetical:

… imagine that a nut tries to assassinate one of the Koch brothers–by no means a far-fetched hypothesis, given the insane hatred that has been stirred up against them by the Democratic Party. In that event, would the Democratic Party take responsibility for the acts of the crazed assassin and apologize for its attacks on Charles and David Koch? I doubt it.

No apology was ever forthcoming from the hate profiteers at the Southern Poverty Law Center when their targeting of opponents was used by a wannabe assassin, as Hinderaker’s colleage Paul Mirengoff reminds us:

A few years ago, a gay activist named Floyd Corkins attacked the headquarters of the Family Research Council. Corkins later said he hoped to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces.” Fortunately, Corkins was thrwarted but not before he shot and wounded a guard.

Corkins said he committed this crime after he found out that a left-wing outfit, the Southern Poverty Law Center, identified the Family Research Council as a “hate group.” He told investigators, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”

Call me a lookist if you wish, but Dear looks deranged in his mug shot:

He brings to mind another crazed shooter the left seized upon to blame their political opponents for violence, at least until it became clear he was a nutjob.  Remember Jared Loughner?

Dear will make his first court appearance today via video.  Since he is entitled to counsel, we are unlikely to learn much.  But his motivations don’t even really  matter, except to the ghouls on the left who are desperate to never let a crisis go to waste, and who will seize on anything – or nothing in particular – to score political points off the suffering of others.