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TOPIC: The Giffords Shooting, The Instant Politicization of Everything, & Why Americans Increasingly Hate Dems & Reps.
VotedHillary


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The Giffords Shooting, The Instant Politicization of Everything, & Why Americans Increasingly Hate Dems & Reps.
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I found this best sums up my feelings regarding the handling by our politicians and media of the tragedy in Arizona.   Sorry, couldn't get the "quote" thing to work correct.


From Glenn Instapundit Reynolds, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

 

More:

How do you take one of the most shocking and revolting murder sprees in memory and make it even more disturbing? By immediately pouncing on its supposed root causes for the most transparently partisan of gains.

Readers of this site know I'm no Sarah Palin fan, but to accuse her of complicity in the murderous spree of a clearly insane person is one of the main reasons that partisan political parties are losing market share. I had myself tweeted that blaming Palin for Jared Loughner's mass killing would be like blaming J.D. Salinger for Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon (and as Jesse Walker pointed out, in Chapman's case, at least we could be sure Chapman had read Salinger). Given Loughner's fixation on grammar and the supposed lack of literacy evinced by most Americans, maybe William Safire and S.I. Hayakawa should be held responsible.More:

The problem isn't with the current moment's rhetoric, it's with the goddamn politicization of every goddamn thing not even for a higher purpose or broader fight but for the cheapest moment-by-moment partisan advantage. Whether on the left or on the right, there's a totalist mentality that everything can and should be explained first and foremost as to whether it helps or hurt the party of choice.

That sort of clearly calculated punditry helps explain one of last week's other big stories, which is how both the Dems and the GOP have really bad brand loyalty these days. In its most recent survey of political self-identification, Gallup found that the Dems were at their lowest point in 22 years and that the GOP remains stuck below the one-third mark. The affiliation that has the highest marks for the past couple of decades on average and is growing now is independent. Faced with the way that the major parties and their partisans try to bend every news story, trend, box office hit or bomb, you name it, whether truly horrific (as Saturday's shooting was) or totally banal, is it any wonder that fewer people want to be affiliated with the Dems and Reps? This is a long-term trend. Indeed, Harris Poll numbers that stretch back to the late '60s show the same trend: Fewer and few folks want to view themselves as Democrats and the GOP has never been popular (even though far more people consider themselves "conservative" than "liberal"). http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/10/the-instant-politicization-of





-- Edited by VotedHillary on Tuesday 11th of January 2011 12:53:52 AM

-- Edited by VotedHillary on Tuesday 11th of January 2011 12:57:03 AM

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Jen the Michigander


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Anyone who uses this tragedy to fill up their coffers or further their own political goals or boost their TV ratings is a rat bastard of the lowest common denominator.

I blame the AZ shooting on an untreated mental illness. If anybody wants to get political over what happened, then they should use their powers for good and promote better awareness of mental illness and how to deal with it. This disturbed young man had been sending out danger signals for years, yet nobody did anything. He should have been in a mental hospital. Why wasn't he?

Having said that, I'm not letting certain politicians and pundits off the hook entirely. While their rhetoric may not be responsible for this act of violence, I do blame the far right for the threatening phone calls made to Rep. Giffords during the election season as well as the vandalism that occurred at her office. As a PUMA, I know damn well what people are capable of when they're all stirred up and full of hate. We happened to be targeted by the lefty obots, but the far right can be equally nasty. So all the wingnuts who are currently whining "not me" aren't getting much sympathy here.

A case in point... I happened to catch some of Sean Hannity's program last night. After several minutes of "not me or anyone like me", he began to spew a bunch of paranoid bullcrap about how now the big, bad government is gonna use the AZ tragedy as an excuse to clamp down on free speech. And I'm thinking, "This guy hasn't learned a damn thing. He's already doing it again!"

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