There are few things the media loves more than blaming Republicans for anything bad that happens. The worse the event, the greater the glee. But the more the glee, the less likely it is to be true. When the shoe is on the other foot, however, they sing a different tune.

No one would mistake a gangbanger from Baltimore for a Tea Partier, so in the immediate aftermath Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s assassination of two New York City police officers there was no media speculation as to his political beliefs. And since it was discovered that he was a participant in the anti-police protests that have enveloped progressive activists and politicians the last few months, no mass speculation will occur.

It’s an amazing turn of events, especially considering how they’ve reacted in past events.

Brian Ross of ABC News had a bit of information too good to fact check after the Aurora, Colorado, theaters shooting – someone with the shooter’s name was a member of a Tea Party organization. He reported it, adding, “Now we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”

After it turned out to be a different man with the same name, something he didn’t bother to check before reporting it, he and ABC News were forced to apologize.

When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson, Arizona, the media couldn’t contain their wild speculation that, since Giffords was a Democrat, a Republican had to be responsible. Every mainstream media outlet and progressive leftist organization settled on one culprit on which to focus the blame – Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska Governor had a map of the United States with 20 congressional races highlighted with “crosshairs” on it marking districts held by Democrats she thought were winnable for Republicans. It was, and still is, a common practice.

The shooter, the story went, must’ve been inspired by that map and the “heated partisan rhetoric” of the Tea Party to try to kill Giffords. It simply had to be.

That became the story, even when it became clear the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had a long history of mental illness. Never let the facts get in the way of a good meme.

Every news outlet and progressive activist group ran with the unproven story – Palin might as well have pulled the trigger herself.

The feeding frenzy was on. CNN was all in; the Washington Post couldn’t contain itself; the New York Times swallowed the hook, and it went on from there. But that feeding frenzy was empty calories stuffed with the progressive’s insatiable desire to politicize tragedy for their own ends.

The truth of Loughner was one of mental illness tinged with left-wing sensibilities – a 9/11 truther who hated George W. Bush and listed the Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books. But no one took to the newspapers or airwaves to warn of progressive maniacs killing those they deemed not progressive enough. No, the “Tea Party did it” meme stuck, and sticks to this day with people lacking the brain power to accept facts.

Which brings us back to the assassination of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Their “crime” was being police officers at a time that police officers find themselves the latest foil progressives are using to advance their agenda.

While NBC News employee Al Sharpton led the marches in the street, President Barack Obama led the political action to nationalize supervision and administration of local police. The cover was the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The facts surrounding their deaths didn’t match the need – one attacked a cop and tried to take his gun, the other had massive health issues and resisted arrest for breaking one of thousands of senseless laws progressives have foisted on us – but with the media on their side, facts are malleable. Martyrs to the cause were born.

But in the birth of those martyrs, the afterbirth spawned what these progressive propaganda manipulations always spawn – hatred. Protesters chanted they wanted “Dead cops,” and these “leaders” were silent. They knew it was happening, but it was good for business – you never attack your truest believers. Brinsley was the personification of that, and he acted.

Brinsley’s mentality was on full display in one of his last social media posts where he wrote, “They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs.” The tribal mentality progressives foster was on full display – us against them, with the “us” and “them” being interchangeable depending on the need. Progressives don’t see Americans, they see groups of people they can separate and manipulate to motivate to support a cause of vote a specific way. Brinsley was the natural progression, if you will, of that type of manipulation.

I doubt those journalists who blamed Palin for the Giffords shooting believed it at the time they wrote it, but they wrote it hoping others would. They didn’t correct or retract those posts because they didn’t want to, they simply threw a grenade and moved on.

That’s what progressives do – throw grenades. They usually fizzle, as with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, but in the execution of Ramos and Liu, that grenade went off. Now they’re busy attempting to distance themselves from what they caused, pretending it was simply a “fringe” and not an obvious possibility they’d preached warnings of just a few years ago.

Brinsley was more than likely insane, to one degree or another, but his insanity was irradiated and mutated by the progressive rhetoric and lack of common sense on display from the likes of Sharpton, de Blasio, Holder and even Obama. A fuse, after all, is just a fuse until it meets a spark.