Monday, January 10, 2011

After Arizona shootings the political vultures swoop

I've tried to make it a rule to confine political blogging to issues of health policy. Today I'm breaking that rule. I don't want to, I have to. I simply can't contain my outrage. So let's start with this piece from NRO:


Very few Americans are fans of both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kamp, as the Tucson killer, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, apparently was. Fewer still post on the Internet fears about “brain washing,” “mind control,” and “conscience dreaming”; have a long record of public disruption and aberrant behavior; were expelled from community college; or were summarily rejected for military service.
No matter. Almost immediately following Loughner’s cowardly murdering of six and wounding of 14 including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, pundits and some public figures rushed to locate his rampage, together with his paranoid rantings about government control, within the larger landscape of right-wing politics — especially the rhetoric of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.


And rush they did. Almost immediately after it happened Paul Krugman, admitting he didn't know if the shooting was political, blamed the Right anyway.


Upon first learning of this tragic shooting I suspected something like this would happen but I had no idea of the degree of political opportunism that would follow. Disgusting.

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