Posted by
Bert Chapman on Wednesday, January 12, 2011 7:46:09 PM
My first posting of the new year is about the sad tragedy in Tucson, AZ where Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and five other individuals were murdered by a crazed gunman. Additional bystanders were injured and Tucson and the country have been irrevocably scarred. Although Rep. Giffords is not of my partisan persuasion, I pray she recovers as do all other survivors of this attack. She seems like she is a conscientious public servant who was meeting directly with her constituents to hear their hopes and concerns about governmental policies. It would be particularly tragic if this horrific attack puts additional barriers between citizens and their elected officials.
A lot of inflammatory drivel has been spewed by the political left (including Pima County, AZ sheriff Clarence Dubnik) about how the Tea Party, vitriolic conservative rhetoric, and cultural barbarity caused this incident. Sarah Palin has come in for the usual denunciations from the left as have defenders of our Second Amendment constitutional rights. The fact of the matter is that this act was committed by a mentally ill individual from an apparently dysfunctional family who chose to surrender to evil and act on his darkest impulses. Obviously, steps could and should have been taken to have Jarrod Loughner institutionalized, but our society's increasing willingness to tolerate psychopathic individuals in the name of destigmatizing the seriously mentally ill has drastically increased the possibility of incidents like this due to what can be overly stringent medical privacy laws.
My most vivid experience of inflammatory political rhetoric was Ted Kennedy's libellous denunciation of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in the U.S. Senate on July 1, 1987. Fortunately, Kennedy has received his just desserts for this and other forms of political and moral perfidy he committed in his life. Liberals believe they can impugn those who disagree with their efforts to impose government controlled health care, increase national debt, impose abhorrent social practices on our military, and demonize those who disagree with them as racists, sexists, homophobes, and provincial rubes and yet are surprised when they encounter rhetorical and other forms of opposition. I will not believe the left is serious about controlling violent political rhetoric until they apologize for their attacks on Bork, Clarence Thomas, Miguel Estrada, and George W. Bush. Clean your own political mouths out with soap before you expect reciprocal action from conservatives.
Politics is about differences. Even if these differences are profound, they can still be expressed forcefully but civilly without resort to physical violence. In democratic countries targeting rival political candidates for electoral defeat in upcoming campaigns is as common as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. The hysteria of the left over the fact that Sarah Palin's political action committee had "targeted" Rep. Giffords district is reflective of their ignorance and intolerance of dissent. The fact of the matter is Democratic strategists target Republicans they feel are electorally vulnerable all the time. We must learn from this that life is a precious gift from God which can be taken from us at any minute. We should be grateful for the heroic individuals who are medically treating the injured, wrestled Loughner to the ground, and the congresswoman's intern who helped save her life at the store by holding her. We are inheriting the wind of a culture that is becoming increasingly secularized and which seeks to eliminate the sacred from the public square, political discourse, and from discussions of moral right and wrong as reflected in Saturday's Tucson Tragedy.