The Real Victim Here

I know I haven't written much about Florida this week and have devoted a lot of space to the Giffords shooting, but I just wanted to make an observation here. Ever since the news first broke of the events in Arizona, the right-wing blogosphere and media have been focused far less with the tragedies of the day than they have been with the supposed attacks coming from the right. As the generator of some of those attacks, I just want to say hogwash.

Bill O'Reilly has gone ballistic over the coverage in the supposedly left-wing coverage from MSNBC and the New York Times.

Redstate was worrying about the blame game less than an hour after news broke of the shooting, and decided to come after Sheriff Clarence Dupnik politically for daring to suggest incivility was getting out of hand in this nation.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck had a digital pow-wow to fret for each other's safety and so Palin could complain about how the "politicos just capitalize on this."

So let us make sure everybody remembers the real victim in this terrible tragedy. It wasn't a Democratic Congresswoman who was meeting with her constituents. It wasn't a nine-year-old girl whose life was cut short for wanting to learn more about government. It wasn't a federal judge elevated to chief of his circuit by his peers. It wasn't a husband who gave his life so his wife wouldn't be killed by the gunman.

The real victim is the right's feelings.

They shouldn't have to suffer through all this talk of incivility. They shouldn't have to hear cries for gun control because that makes them angry. They shouldn't here complaints about being mean, because they have every right to be mean, even if they are more thin-skinned than most schoolchildren. They complain about political correctness when someone catches flack for shouting the N-word repeatedly on the radio, but nobody better suggest vitriol has consequences.

There has been so much more defensiveness on the right about this than there have been actual attacks on the right regarding this shooting. And when the defensiveness comes before the supposed onslaught of criticism even begins, I don't know if it can be called defensive at all.

The Mainstreaming of Extremism

It is so easy to hope that cooler heads will prevail. Things are so much more complex than that. What happened this weekend was beyond the pale of standard political discourse, but it was not an event that no one saw coming.

What will come of this? I don't know for sure. I hope we see someone examine if an individual turned away from the Army in wartime because he was unfit to serve deserves the right to buy a semi-automatic pistol, but then, I've never been crazy about excessive gun control and we shouldn't go off the deep end. Of note, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords never was a big proponent of gun control herself.

What is far more significant than any legislation passed a result of all this is the change in the sort of conversation we engage in on the national I have debated with friends for days now about whether Jared Laughner is the result of violent rhetoric from the right, and hear repeatedly that this man does not fit well in the idea of right and left politics. Fine, but in a world where it is perfectly acceptable for Sarah Palin to tell supporters "don't retreat, instead reload", and where Sharron Angle can defend a call for "second amendment remedies," it shouldn't be surprising when a nutjob shows up with a pistol in hand intent to do harm.

Of note, this shooting happened a day after a birther disrupted the reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The birthers are an easy group to laugh at because they spout utter nonsense, but it is stunning that so many people would argue so fiercely that a president elected in a landslide is ineligible to serve. Sadly, Sarah Palin has palled around with birthers herself. The terrible state of affairs is that any type of challenge to an elected officials integrity is considered today as an acceptable raising of issues.

I want to say I don't believe many members of Congress have been so entrenched in this type of nonsense as those pundits who play around with voters for sport. Perhaps that is because every member of the U.S. House knows their own town halls could have easily turned out this way.

But even the lamest of sources have ways to reach millions today, and I fear the mainstream outlets fearful of being marginalized by Internet competition are willing to offer a megaphone to more crazies just so they keep tuning in. Does anyone recall the Truthers, for example, getting as much press nine years ago as Orly Taitz receives today?

And while cable people are falling over themselves to say all sides are guilty of ramping up the rhetoric, I will go out on a limb here and say such insanity is far more acceptable from the right in the eyes on national media. G. Gordon Liddy has his own nationally syndicated radio show despite calling for Waco folks to shoot federal agents in the head a whopping 17 years ago (not to mention the whole Watergate thing). Glenn Beck's bizarre grudges launched an attempted attack on a philanthropic foundation just last year, but he still keeps his spot on radio and on Fox News.

Since the election of Barack Obama, outright bigotry, attacking everything from his birthplace to his parents to his childhood education, has become acceptable fodder for critics to lazy to study his policy. We had a Republican Party of Florida leader suggest just two years ago that a presidential address to school children was actually a taxpayer-funded attempt to indoctrinate children with a socialist agenda.

The problem isn't simply that extremism exists in America. Like terrorism, drugs and crime, it will never disappear entirely whatever we do.

But the mainstreaming of extremism can be stopped tomorrow. It can be stopped by the mass media outlets who today lend space on their edit pages and talk show panels for absolute sociopaths.

I Just Can't Say What I Want to Say

Not right now. It's too soon.

But I genuinely hope the motives for what has happened today get intense scrutiny, and that nobody shames the honest members of the media into getting off message. Those on the right who demand we hold all of Islam responsible for the actions of organized nuts need to pay very close attention to all that comes out of this.