But..But.. But there has to be someone to point fingers yet or else people won’t have their own self satisfying closure – PB/TK
Commentary: The Shooter Alone — Not Politics, Not Rhetoric — is Responsible – By Guy Benson / June 14 2017
When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and seriously wounded outside of a supermarket in her Arizona district six years ago, some on the Left raced to pin the blame on conservatives. It was our vitriolic rhetoric against President Obama and his party. It was Sarah Palin’s Congressional ‘targets’ map. And it was the right-wing’s “climate of hate,” fomented almost exclusively by one political movement, according to a prominent New York Times columnist
“When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? …there’s not much question what has changed…it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P. And there’s a huge contrast in the media…So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?”
This was, and is, nonsense. Ironically, the same column could be rewritten today, just with the party roles reversed. Counter-examples of phrases and exhortations that might be construed as “eliminationist,” or supportive of violent upheaval, abound. Indeed, by casting Republicans as willfully feeding into a dangerous climate, one could use Paul Krugman’s own standards to allege that his essay blew dogwhistles that helped lay the foundation for his more radical readers taking matters into their own hands to quell the ‘threat.’ See how this can work, professor? Of course, as it turned out, Krugman’s whole thesis was bogus. Giffords’ would-be assassin (she survived, unlike six other innocent bystanders) was actually a largely apolitical paranoid schizophrenic who rarely paid attention to the news. He and his mental illness were to blame for the atrocity, not politics.
Continue to townhall.com article: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2017/06/14/not-politics-not-rhetoric-the-shooter-alone-is-to-blame-n2341150
