The Political Tragedy of the Tragedy

Glenn Reynolds expresses his outrage over the Arizona shootings in the Wall Street Journal today:

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concernfor America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

In other words, the far right is trying a jiu jitsu move to take their opponents' movement and use it against them.

The focus of the story on far right blogs now is not on the the actual shooting, it's that that the left is supposedly trying to use this tragedy as an excuse to take away our guns and freedom of speech. It is "The Progressive Climate of Hate" that has ruined political discourse they contend, and it was a crazy leftist who committed the murders. Michelle Malkin writes about the "Tuscon massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservativism." While her writing is as looney as always, Malkin does score a hit on her blog by reproducing numerous images from the left that are just as mean-spirited and violent as those on the right we liberals are complaining about.

So what will be the result of this tragedy? This quote from last year should be the final word:

I think it’s important for all leaders, not just leaders of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party … community leaders, figures in our community to say, ‘Look, we can’t stand for this.’ I mean, this is a situation where people really need to realize that the rhetoric, and firing people up, and even things … For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.

In the years that some of my colleagues have served, twenty, thirty years, they’ve never seen it like this. We have to work out our problems by negotiating, working together, hopefully Democrats and Republicans.

–Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, March 25, 2010.