Many people have weighed in on the tragedy in Tucson. Pundits on the left have assigned blame to the inflammatory rhetoric of the right, specifically Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle. Pundits on the right have stepped in to defend the free speech rights of their own, and as a consequence, attempt to curtail the right of the left to excercise their right to free speech.
So the left blames the right, the right blames the left, and the beat goes on in Washington. But I haven't heard many people blame the guy with the gun.
Look, I realize that our political discourse has become somewhat uncivil in recent years, recent years meaning 230-something years. We have always had people pushing the envelope of good taste and decorum in order to get their point across, and I suspect we always will.
There is a market, albeit a small one, for the likes of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, just as there is a market for the Rush Limbaughs and the Ann Coulters of the world. Bill O'Reilly calls them bomb-throwers, and there is no shortage of them on either side of any issue. The reason for this is simple, we want this. If people stopped paying attention to WWE style political punditry, it would simply go away. Like a sit-com noone watches gets cancelled mid-season, the shows that traffic in this sort of rhetoric would disapear if people stopped watching or listening. The problem is that we love this stuff, so it's not going to go away.
The idea that talking heads blame a tragedy of this sort on other talking heads speaks only to the insane arrogance of talking heads. Do they really believe that normal people take them so seriously as to go on a shooting rampage because they use words that can be construed as violent or uncivil? Do they really believe they have that kind of power to incite? Who do they think they are?
Or even more to the point, who do they think we are as Americans? Are we just sheep, unthinking morons that can be swayed to violence by the mere suggestion of it on television or the radio?
Elites wonder why regular citizens don't seem to like them all that much. It makes me wonder how they can consider themselves intellectuals in the first place, when they don't realize that people don't like to be treated like idiots and mindless automatons.
Should we have more civility in our political discourse? I don't think so, most people don't, at least not according to the ratings for cable news.
Should we blame the tragedy on rhetoric from the right? I don't think so, but some would disagree. I just think it's a little disingenuous to say that Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle are resposible for the dead and wounded, when there's a nut-job with a gun standing in the middle of the street.