Politico.com
January 11, 2011
When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six other people — including a federal judge who was coming out of Mass — were killed at a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz., I was staying at a resort a few miles away. Among the guests, there were three immediate reactions: outrage, sadness and, if you’re headed to the airport, make sure to turn right at Tangerine instead of staying on Oracle to Ina, because traffic’s going to be a mess down there.
Life goes on incredibly quickly. No one is to blame for that — it’s inevitable. If you didn’t know the congresswoman or the federal judge personally, you still have a plane to catch. But it does seem that we absorb recurring episodes of political violence a bit more quickly than we used to because they’ve become more common. Indeed, they’re so common that everybody knows the script. First, we deplore the event and say we’re praying — and, in most cases, actually do pray — for the victims. Then we deplore the corrosive politics that may have contributed to the tragedy. Next, someone on the left will say that right wingers are more to blame, because they vilify people more than the other side. Then voices on the right will recoil in horror that someone is trying to politicize a national tragedy.
Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, wrote on his website in time for Sunday’s papers: “While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died” — there; was that about a moment? Good. Where was I? Oh yes — “we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing. Within the entire political spectrum, there are extremists, both on the left and the right. Violence of this nature should be decried by everyone and not used for political gain.”
The “extremists of the right and left” formula generally appeals to newspaper editorialists and the media because it is balanced. And maybe I’m too ideologically blinkered to see the situation clearly. But it seems — in fact, it seems obvious — that the situation is not balanced. Extremists on the right are more responsible for the poisonous ideological atmosphere than extremists on the left, whoever they may be. And extremists on the left have a lot less influence on nonextremists on the left than extremists on the right have on right-wing moderates. Sure, NPR, despite denials, tilts to the left. But not the way Fox News tilts toward the right. Rachel Maddow is no Glenn Beck.
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