Sarah Did It!

A madman shot 19 people and killed 6 and Gabrielle Giffords fights for her life today.  Rep. Giffords by all accounts was worthy of our respect and admiration.   That one man can wreak so much havoc is  at a place called “Safeway” is irony in its cruelest form.

Immediately following the initial reports the leftist pundits looked towards the right for blame.

Olberman blames Beck and Palin

Krugman blames Sara Palin, The Tea Party And Republicans in general

Charles Kuffner implies it might be the “violent rhetoric and imagry” that is involved in current day politics

This strikes me as kind of weird because Rep. Giffords isn’t from the hard left, and the leftist seem to have unleashed even stronger rhetoric against her. The link is now dead, but a screen capture can be found here

My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is dead to me now. I won’t lift a finger, make one phone call, nor will i EVER vote for her in the future. And why did she do this? Giffords never told me she was conservative Democrat. And her voting record is okay. Damn.

All these accusations from the left seems to suggest that the rhetoric is only coming from the conservatives. They don’t recall President Obama’s call to bring guns to a knife fight.

I don’t believe that the rhetoric is such a bad thing. Politics is somewhat warlike. After all the word campaign is military term, and a politicians attempt to get elected will require that politician to fire up the people, and get them emotionally involved.  Who is going to give money and time and work for a candidate if that candidate doesn’t emotionally inspire them.  Politics is war, and there are a lot more losers in every campaign than there are winners. Any references to fighting, battles, or even warfare seems appropriate. It is a fight of sorts over who gets to rule.



I noticed there was a flury of reports this morning of linking Jared Loughner to the  to “anti-Semitic race hate group American Renaissance”. Google found a magazine that that was similarly named, but its not clear there is any such organization.  After a quick flury the references have gone away, and I suspect that it was just an effort of the MSM to tie Loughner to some sort of right wing extremist group.

The quest to place blame is a leftist thing. They can’t accept that these are the soley the actions of a mad man, and that its possible he and not society that is completely to blame. Perhaps this is just one of things that happen in a free society.

But suppose that, instead of being hit by a bullet, Representative Giffords had been struck by a rock falling from space. It does happen occasionally, after all. And you know what? It happens about as often as an American politician is shot by a crazy person.

But that wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting, because anyone who proposed that politicians never again have public meetings outdoors, or that a crash project  be undertaken to sweep the sky clean of meteoroids to make sure that one was never again hit by one, wouldn’t be taken seriously, or have op-eds published, or bills introduced to implement their ideas. They would instead be treated as the lunatics they would be. People with any sense would understand that life carries risk and uncertainties, and that we have to accept them, and get on with it in the face of them.

This is no different. People get randomly struck by lightning, and sometimes there are storms and lightning strikes in human minds, setting off events that are impossible to either predict or prevent. Just as we have to accept that sometimes rocks fall from the sky, or that sometimes a politician can keel over without warning from a previously undiagnosed heart condition, we also have to accept that in a free society, occasionally someone will snap, pick up a weapon, and use it. Though it is still early, that is what appears to have happened in this case.

About Liberty

Blogging is something I do for myself. I've been blogging since Sept. 2003, mostly about politics, guns, and observations about the word around me.
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