Earlier today, I wrote a piece in which I noted that the leftymedia – specifically, the City Pages’ generic hypstr drone of the month Matt Hoffman, and DFL tabloidblogger Dusty Trice, had beaten the FBI to solving the Sparkman murder in Kentucky; Sparkman, the reports when, was found hanged from a tree with the word “Fed” supposedly scrawled across his chest.

Hoffman:

 Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does [conservative MN Representative Michele] Bachmann own some responsibility?

Trice:

I’m going to say it again because sadly I feel it bears repeating. I strongly believe that the inflammatory rhetoric Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks passes for policy debate is going to end in violence. 

As I noted in my piece – the biggest violence was against fact and journalism.  As of the time Trice and Hoffman wrote their pieces, investigators weren’t even sure it was a murder, much less politically motivated.

And six hours later, they still aren’t!:

A spokesman for the Kentucky police told TPMmuckraker last night that police were still looking into death, that an autopsy has been scheduled, and no cause of death has yet been listed.

And the commander of the state police post handling the case told the Lexington Herald-Leader today that the police hadn’t confirmed it was a homicide. “There are too many unanswered questions for us to lean one way or the other,” she said. “Every scenario is still on the table. We have not ruled this is a hate crime against a federal employee.”

And an ABC News report suggests there could be more in play than raw anti-government feeling:

[S]ome people wonder if his death in the remote part of southeastern Kentucky known for its meth labs and hidden marijuana fields had less to do with his job than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If that speculation were accurate, the “Fed” that may have been scrawled on Sparkman’s chest could be intended as a warning by criminals to law enforcement to stay away, rather than as a pure expression of opposition to government — though it may be hard to separate those two motivations entirely.

Still, it’d be ironic; if Sparkman were murdered by criminals, that’d make his death the responsibility of a key Democratic constituency. 

Was that unfair?  Oh, I’m sorry.  I just find myself driven to say unfair things from the endless stupidity of the left, trying to link violence to dissent from The One’s (pbuh) vision. 

Indeed:

It’s not even entirely clear what Sparkman was doing in the remote area.

The left’s current meme is that conservative dissent is provoking violence; the local leftymedia has all but indicted (in their own minds) Rep. Bachmann of complicity in Mr. Sparkman’s death. 

And yet it seems the only violence is against fact, and against any sort of ethics.  Trice and Hoffman – among many, many others – jumped to a conclusion that was not only unwarranted, but that slanders each and every conservative that voices any level of caution about big government.

To paraphrase Matt Hoffman:  do people who leap to slander dissent deserve to “own some responsibility?” 

Other than being regarded as factual laughingstocks, I mean?