After writing one article about Obama’s speech in Tucson, I wrote a second. I tried to be more specific why I thought it was such a disingenuous partisan piece of trash.
Here goes.
I’d like to present the sequence of events as I saw them played out after the Sat. Jan. 8, shooting at Tucson, Arizona where 6 were murdered and 12 wounded, including a congresswoman by a very mentally deranged man, Jarad, Loughner.
Just hours after the slaughter, Paul Krugman was preparing an article for the NY Times that blamed the event on Sarah Palin and conservative uncivility. Hours after that, Clarence Dupnic, Sheriff of Puma county who knew a mentally unstable man lived only blocks away from the shooting yet sent no one to at least make sure the political event went smoothly and safely, said, with nothing to back it up, that right wing virtriol probably caused the shooter to act.
With no evidence this was the case, the mainstream media, using the dead as a jump off point leapt to the Dupnic conclusion, naming Palin, Beck, O’reilly and other conservatives, blaming them for the actions of the murderer.
Reacting like they smelled conservative blood in the water, CBS TV, ABC TV and CBS news embraced this narrative like they had found the Holy Grail.
Hate speech of every kind directed at you and the other conservatives gushed out of msnbc like they’d struck oil.
Four days after the shooting, President Obama gave his Tucson speech.
After saying thoughtful, comforting words about the dead and injured, Obama, like a relay race runner, picked up the lack of civility theme in the news for the prior four days and, even though, by then it had been shown to have no connection with the shooting, ran with it.
Keep in mind this was the President who a week before had called conservatives hostage takers and had recently called conservatives enemies. Who talked about hand to hand combat with conservatives and referred to bringing a gun to a political knife fight. He’d been stoking the flames of hate and labeling conservatives racist cowards since being elected president, even let voter intimidating Black Panthers get off scot free. All of which suggests Obama acts like a classic do as I say not as I do hypocrite.
So Wednesday, I asked myself, why did Obama talk about incivility and sharply divided discourse when it was irrelevant to the memorial? Was he continuing the attack on conservatives without naming them?
If not, was he directing his words at the left who had adopted that theme as the cause of the deaths? I don’t think so.
To me, this was Obama’s clever way of telling the anti conservative bomb throwers that he sided with them.
To me, the subject of civility, unless Obama decided to chastise the left for jumping off the bodies of the dead to score political points, had no place in the speech. It was the case of a talented speechwriter from Northwestern University unloading on conservatives without naming names.
Continuing a theme (uncivility)that not only had no reason to be in the speech, but that had since the shooting been used to nail conservatives on a manufactured cross of hate and shame.
Like usual, it was a prime example of leftists accusing the right of doing the repugnant things they, themselves, were the ones guilty of.
Does the left have a shred of decency? Does the author of this article live in a world of total political naivete? I’m afraid so. The anwwer to the first question I’m afraid is, “no.”
