Re: Arizona Congressman Gabrielle Giffords Apparantly Survives Assassination Attempt
To sum up the issue about how media people reacted to this... here's an example of someone reacting like a normal human being would:
http://tv.gawker.com/5730178/watch-jon-stewarts-poignant-speech-on-the-arizona-shooting
Here's an example of someone who's just looking to sling crap around and point fingers, because he's a terrible person:
http://tv.gawker.com/5730170/
What's sad about the media isn't really who it is that falls into the second category, or what they say that puts them in that category, or even what their motives are. What's sad about it is that it seems like there are so many people who fall into that mode of thinking.
Stewart was great, Maher was typical. American politics has always been rough and tumble. Read some of the stuff written about Lincoln or the editorial cartoons of the time. Very rough. George Will once said: "Chicago politics, like Chicago baseball, is not for the sqeamish. And over the last couple of years with the governor peddling a Senate seat like a hot dog vendor, we've seen how bad it can get. Technology has only increased our ability to express ourselves in previously unacceptable ways, using language which one only used to hear in locker rooms or perhaps on the docks.
The comity we used to see from our leaders has been significantly diminished. The days when a couple of senators on opposite sides of an issue could go to a DC restaurant and work out those differences over a strip steak and a couple of glasses of scotch are largely over. I posted earlier about LBJ asking for and getting assistance from Republican leader Ev Direksen in getting the '64 civil rights act past the southern Democrats in the Senate.
Many (most?) of us have come to see political opponants as the enemy and it's one short step from that to criminalizing opposition. That's the flavor of some of the stuff we've been hearing the last couple of days. So while I agree that we should "tone down the rhetoric," my objection is the assertion that overheated rhetoric is only a problem on one side of the spectrum and (as Stewart indicated) that rhetoric was somehow causal in this event. Now we're hearing Loughner had some sort of half as*ed Palo Mayombe-like shrine in his backyard! Mein Gott. Is that "liberal" or "conservative" or just "crazy?" I've said before this guy reminds me of Seung-Hui Cho, the kid who shot up Virginia Tech. A guy with obvious, serious problems, noted repeatedly by people who had daily contact with him. And not much was done about it--being "strange" is not a crime, and we make it very tough for police and other authorities to intervene. Finally, both unspooled to the point they wound up gong on murder sprees. Not a shadow doubt in my mind that Loughner was planning to die.
So we'll have a federal trial where one hopes he'll be convicted and sentenced to death. Otherwise, we'll have a state trial, where he'll almost certainly be convicted and condemned (we take a dim view of murdering 9 year old girls) and 20 years from now he'll be juiced. That's about the best we can hope for on the legal side.
As to the quality of the political debate, I'm not as optimistic. When you have people who should be above such things, pushing an analysis of what happened in Tucson that they think profits them politically, I'm not sure we'll ever make any progress. To me it's a fairly simple proposition: either both sides need to "tone down the rhetoric" or neither side needs to.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
