Is owning a Hummer a crime???

Here's a horrible case of political correctness...

What is it with the media when it comes to sport-utility vehicles? Let me rephrase: What is it with the liberal media when it comes to SUVs? Why do they hate those vehicles with such thinly veiled vigor? And how to they reconcile that hatred, their undisguised bias against SUVs, with their putative mission to report the news fairly and objectively?

The short answer is that they don’t.

Anyone doubting that should review the coverage of a heinous assault on personal property last month in a District of Columbia residential area.

The target of the crime was a 2007 Hummer H2 SUT (Sport Utility Truck), which has a base price of $54,155. It is a niche-market truck, which means it is aimed at a relatively small buyer population — usually young, single men who have a penchant for things such as extreme sports and off-road driving.

The H2 is a four-wheel-drive vehicle available as a four-door SUV — its more popular format — or as a four-door pickup, such as the one that was viciously destroyed on what my paper, The Washington Post, called a “narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington where (Toyota) Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm.” The H2 SUT, with its 6.0-liter, 325-horsepower V-8, is the workhorse of the bunch.

General Motors, maker of all things Hummer, sold 17,107 H2 models in the United States last year, down from 23,213 in 2005, a precipitous 26.3 percent drop — a clear indication that the market is doing what it so efficiently does, which is to weed out products that are becoming too expensive because of externalities such as rising fuel prices.

But zealots on narrow, leafy streets have no patience for the workings of the market. They have no respect for freedom of consumer choice. They have no respect for personal-property rights — or for anything or anyone that gets in the way of their self-righteous ideology.

That is bad enough. That is dangerous enough. But what is worse is the tendency of the media to tacitly condone such attitudes and behavior, to chortle over it, make light of it when a violent expression of media-held biases — to wit: We don’t like SUVs — occurs.

That is what happened in the local coverage of the attack on Gareth Groves’ Hummer H2 SUT. (I repeat the model designation because of the general media’s disgusting habit, which is another indication of media bias, of incorrectly describing all Hummer vehicles as being one and the same, as was done in many of the stories about the destruction of the Hummer on Brandywine Street.) Consider The Post’s headline on the story: “Hummer Owner Gets Angry Message: Vandals Batter D.C. Man’s SUV, Slash Its Tires and Scratch In an Eco Note.”

Think about that. A crime against property was committed. It was a hate crime. But because it was a hate crime against a hated SUV, there’s a headline that equates the crime to nothing more than delivering an angry message.

What if that Hummer H2 SUT had been a church, synagogue or mosque? Headline: “Congregation Gets Angry Message: Vandals Break Windows, Slash Pews and Carve In an Anti-Religious Note.” That would have been sufficient? That would have been fair?