LITTLE ROCK — Some liberal media types and others showed their true colors in assessing false blame in that horrifying mass murder in Tucson last week.
Is there nothing they won’t try to politicize and exploit?
These bully boys clearly needed zero facts before immediately finding fault in the shootings. Facts, maturity or any sense of responsible restraint was irrelevant to their agenda. It’s so much easier to fling out piles of unfounded and partisan nonsense than to have to deal with pesky facts.
A week has passed since that terrible day. You’ve heard and read many of the inflammatory opinions from bloggers, the hip-shooting New Age weeklies, TV pundits and even in The New York Times. Even gung-ho Democratic strategists quickly jumped in, apparently advising the party to exploit the tragedy for personal benefit by demonizing conservatives. Truly despicable stuff.
Rather than seek truth, these folks immediately cast blame for the killings on talk radio, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and even the teaparty movement. None of those has ever advocated violence of any kind.
The actual facts, since reported by responsible journalists, show that suspect Jarod Loughneris a deeply troubled 22-year-old former college student and professed atheist who’s registered as a political independent.
It’s been reported that he didn’t even listen to TV news or radio. Those who know him say he’s an often delusional loner who even had a home altar with a skull as a centerpiece. His website reportedly listed his favorite books as Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” the opposite to what I’d call conservative or constitutional reading.
It’s been reported, too, that Loughner’s personal computer often connected with the radically left-wing Daily Kos website, perhaps as he listened to his favorite music, heavy metal.
For me, the tragedy in Arizona was solely about terrible actions that appear to be rooted in dark torments of psychosis. End of story. Yet some reckless types in the media and on the Internet immediately blamed the “tea party” for it.
Based on what I’ve read and heard about the angry delusions of this suspect, whose purported disruptive behavior is said to have frightened his professors and junior college classmates, they in no way represent the beliefs of responsible Americans. Did I even need to write that obvious point?
How ridiculous, even childlike, these knee-jerk accusers of everyone else appeared in trying to make the Tucson rampage about partisan politics. And not one I’ve seen has yet apologized for this massive irresponsibility and hypocrisy.
Lee Harvey Oswald spent time in Communist Russia and Cuba. He was a leftist Cuban sympathizer. Yet the media in 1963 immediately broadcast the malarkey that it was believed that President John F. Kennedy had been slain by a “right-wing sympathizer.” This intentional misdirection has been going on for a while now.
Thankfully, most Americans finally have awakened to the manipulative deceptions. Decent people have seen through their failed Arizonaploy, hopefully realizing in the process just how badly they’ve been misled for decades by much of the one-party-promoting national media.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik badly disgraced the professionalism of his office with his own partisan comments, blaming vitriolic politicalrhetoric for the Tucson shooting.
If the sheriff and his cronies so badly want to transfer blame for this horrible incident, some far more appropriate choices might be the bloody video games and the violent Hollywood films that glamorize the use of handguns to shoot people to death.
And there’s the savage brutality, especially against females, promoted in much of what passes for music today. Am I right or wrong here?
Finally, with all the politicized lip service about inflammatory rhetoric being connected with this shooting, even our own president needs to check his less-than-civil remarks. Remember how Barack Obama told us that his supporters would bring a gun if the opposition brought a knife? How about when he said he wanted to channel, rather than quell, the rising anger in America? Do you recall how he talked of rewarding friends and punishing his enemies?
Thankfully, millions of awakened Americans are no longer buying media-fueled, politicized falsehoods, and the spate of baseless Arizona propaganda aimed at demonizing many good Americans is a prime example of why.
Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 01/15/2011