Some Reflections on the Arizona Shootings

Sunday, January 9, 2011
Some Reflections on the Arizona Shootings
William Anderson

By any stretch, the killing of six people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, along with the severe wounding of Rep. Gabby Giffords, is an outrage. Unfortunately, the pundits of the media, not to mention some irresponsible and opportunistic people in Congress, have no respect either for the dead or the living.

As I see it, we live in a society that is so hopelessly politicized that whenever something like this happens, intelligent discourse is almost impossible. For example, Paul Krugman, Jane Fonda, and Keith Olbermann have blamed Sarah Palin. Why? Because last year Palin had a blog which had target marks on states where she believed Democratic members of Congress were vulnerable.

Don't you get it? She had a "target," which then drove the shooter to do what he did. Well, given the fact that Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter, was known to be a person of the Left, and he tended to lean toward "luminaries" like Marx and Hitler, I find it a stretch to believe that all along with was Sarah Palin directing his murderous rampage.

Yet, a Nobel Prize winner like Paul Krugman has no problem. Is he engaging in logic that is shaped like a pretzel? Yes, but that's Krugman: always trying to get his hateful, incendiary rhetoric out there while accusing others of engaging in hateful, incendiary rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko tries to make sense of the whole thing, but he keeps running into people who seek political advantage. One member of Congress claims that the shootings are proof that he and other lawmakers should not have to go through the same TSA lines that regular travelers must endure.

Balko also notes that governments at all levels in this country kill and abuse innocent people on a regular basis. Those who followed Tonya Craft's trial on this blog know all about how governments abuse innocent people -- and no one in government is held to account for the abuse.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to endure the incendiary rhetoric for a while. That is the price one pays for living in a country that is hopelessly politicized.

http://williamlanderson.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-reflections-on-arizona-shootings.html