The left is not about to waste this 'crisis'

Obama to seek unity in Arizona address (AFP)
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama faces a moment fraught with risk but shrouded in political opportunity when he leads a national memorial service for the dead of the Arizona shooting tragedy. Obama will Wednesday eulogize the Victims and chart a path ahead for a political community convulsed by shock, after a gunman's failed Assassination bid on an Arizona lawmaker killed six and wounded 14. Presidents, in their symbolic roles as head of state and commander-in-chief are peri...

Right Wing Hopping Mad Over Culture of Violence They Have Wrought
Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing Rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particul...

Ed Schultz denies existence of extreme rhetoric from Democrats
Now this elected official from Idaho, I believe, that was on "Meet the Press" (GOP Rep. Raul Labrador) yesterday says it's both sides. I challenge any right-wing talker, correspondent, Talk Show host, cable dude, whatever! If you can find anybody in the Democratic Party that would match the sound bites of the last two sound bites that we just played for you, I sure would like to give commentary on it. But you see, they don't exist. You can't find a Democrat in the last two years that's talked li...

The Shameless Attempts Of The Left To Capitalize On The Arizona Tragedy
Most Americans learning of Saturday’s tragic events in Arizona were shocked and saddened by the violence and senseless murders.  Anyone witnessing the political left’s predictable finger pointing and hypocrisy toward the Tea Party since then became accustomed to these shameless tactics long ago.  Yet liberals, with their accomplices in the mainstream Propaganda media, are using the tragedy in Tucson to begin a new national dialogue about the dangers of Tea Party “heated politic

Humanity lost: a post in two parts
After Jared Loughner acted out the fantasy that Limbaugh, Palin, Beck, Savage, Angle and so many others had laid out for him, suddenly they utterly disowned him: "He's not one of us! He's a crazy person!" they said, meaning to erase him totally. In so doing, there was, I felt, a certain weird symmetry: disowning him, they disowned everything they had worked so hard to create. As is often the case, calling him a crazy person was meant to deny his humanity, put him entirely outside the calculus ...

The right-wing narrative about Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, and Obama
President Obama is heading to Arizona to commemorate the Victims of Saturday's events in Tucson, and Conservatives are already expressing concern about a replay of Bill Clinton's 1995 Speech denouncing "purveyors of hatred and division" on the airwaves in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. In a preemptive strike, Conservatives are already misrepresenting the history of that event, arguing that Clinton politicized the bombing for his own gain. At National Review, John J. Miller writes...

What President Obama should say in Tucson (and how he should say it)
Modern presidential history is dotted with moments just like this one --

How Obama can talk about tolerance without trivializing a tragedy.
For the second time in his tenure, President Obama will eulogize the Victims of a shooting. In November 2009—it now seems another era—he gave a small masterpiece of a Speech in honor of the 13 people killed when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas. When Obama speaks Wednesday night in Tucson, he will of course memorialize those killed and wounded when Jared Lee Loughner allegedly opened fire. He is at his best telling stories. But Obama will also have to...

Obama Speech to Focus on Serving Country
President Obama will focus his Speech at a memorial service in Tucson on Wednesday evening on the Victims of the attack and on the idea of service to the country, avoiding any overt commentary on the debate over violence and the nation’s political culture. Instead, Mr. Obama, who was still working with his Speechwriters on his remarks on Tuesday, will call for unity among Americans, while trying to honor the victims, including their service to government, as an example to all Americans. He wi...

Top 10 Examples Of Liberal Hate
Even before details were clear about the Arizona shooting, Left-wingers tried to assess blame for the tragedy to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Second Amendment. When it became clear that the gunman was a deranged lunatic whose political philosophy was more in tune with the loony Left than the Tea Party, liberals continued to cry out against a so-called climate of hate perpetuated by Right-wingers. Perhaps those making that charge have forgotten the hatefulness an...

INDEED: The mainstream media sunk to new lows in its collective coverage of the Jan. 8 Tucson sho
INDEED: The Mainstream Media sunk to new lows in its collective coverage of the Jan. 8 Tucson shooting tragedy. Selective media members may start backpedaling on their outrageous claims that a heady mix of Talk Radio and that rootin’ tootin’ Sarah Palin were to blame for the tragedy. That doesn’t dismiss their dereliction of duty. The media’s ghastly performance may also be a window into how it will cover the 2012 presidential Elections. Any attempt at criticizing President Barack

Bloodshed in Arizona turns spotlight on political landscape of anger and hate
As Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona battles for her life after an Assassination attempt, the nation is trying to grapple with the violent tragedy that took the lives of 6 and wounded 14 people on Saturday morning, casting a dark shadow on the start of this year. On the morning of January 8th, while U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was meeting with constituents at a ‘Congress on Your Corner’ event at a local shopping center in Tuscon, a gunman opened fire on the gat...

The Giffords Blood Libel Will Fail
The big push to blame Conservatives for the murderous rampage of Jared Loughner won’t work. In fact, it will backfire. The Left is riding across quicksand on a horse that is dying beneath them. Here are some reasons why. The Right can fight back: The paramount reason this strategy will fail is that liberal media dominance is gone forever. The Politico offers a disgusting quote from a nameless Democrat operati...

School Talk
President Obama will speak at the University of Arizona on Wednesday. As he should. I hope (and expect) that he’ll do a better job with this appearance than Bill Clinton did when he gave the commencement address at Michigan State University in 1995, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton saw an opportunity to link his conservative political opponents to bomber Timothy Mcveigh. He seized it. Here are a few excerpts. A hectoring, nauseating performance-one of the real low li...

Bill Clinton: I could see this level of anger rising
Bill Clinton, currently at a Refugee Camp in Haiti, gave his thoughts on the Tucson shooting to BBC’s Matthew Price, making the same Oklahoma City bombing comparison that so many others have made. On the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City incident, in April, I wrote an essay in which I said I could see this level of anger rising as it did once before when I was elected, and that no one intends to do anything that encourages this sort of behaviour - and I think it's wrong for anyone to...

Clinton: Differences should not degenerate into demonization
Former president Bill Clinton is asking fellow politicians to tone it down a little after the Arizona shooting, saying political Rhetoric "falls on the unhinged and the hinged alike." "This is an occasion for us to reaffirm that our political differences shouldn't degenerate into demonization, in the sense that if you don't agree with me you're not a good American," Clinton told the BBC during a trip to Haiti. Clinton has been down this road before, after the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City fe...

Was Jared Loughner's Act Political?
Was Jared Loughner's act in shooting Rep. Giffords political? Apparently this is what's being debated with a straight face now. Is this a joke? He shot a politician in the head. He called it an "Assassination." What part of that was unclear? He didn't shoot Gabrielle Giffords randomly and it turned out she just happened to be a politician. He sought her out, targeted her and then tried to kill her based on the fact that she was a politician. He thought the government was the problem and it was u...

Was Jared Loughner's Act Political?
I thought Conservatives said liberals love Big Government. But now some have the audacity to claim Loughner was a liberal. But if one thing is obvious from Loughner's political writings, it was that he hated the government. So, which one is it -- do liberals love or hate the government? Come on, this is all a smoke screen to make sure people don't see what's going on here. In the last two years, there have been dozens of attacks and shootings aimed at government officials and political organiz...

Tucson Shooting Reveals Return to 1990s Mindset in America
The public discussion again and again harkens back to the mid-1990s when the Oklahoma City bombing spurred the American elite to a lengthy discussion about the rise of radicals on the right. Reporters and analysts this week have endlessly reprised the arguments of 15 years ago. Will President Obama's memorial Speech at the University of Arizona evoke Bill Clinton's mix of sympathy and political accusation in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing? Is a toxic political climate to blame for se...

Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are dangerous
   It only took a couple of hours for the left  to blame Conservatives for the Tucson shootings.   Some blame it outright while others don't go that far but the Palins, Becks and Limbaughs at least create the "atmosphere" for it to happen.   It ought to be noted that there are some on the left that do see the incident for what it is and dismiss all of the above.      For the opportunists in their ranks the motives are clear.  The incide...

Bill Clinton Says Political Climate Must Change
(BBC News) — Former President Bill Clinton has told the BBC the US political climate must change after the shooting of a US Congresswoman and others in Arizona. “No one intends to do anything that encourages this sort of behaviour,” he said. But political Rhetoric “falls on the unhinged and the hinged alike”....

Jealous Liberal Radio Hosts Join Chris Matthews in Blaming Conservative Talk Radio for Giffords Shooting
Chris Matthews, joined by two liberal Talk Radio hosts on Tuesday's Hardball, essentially blamed the likes of conservative hosts like Mark Levin for creating the climate of hate that led to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords as the envious MSNBC host proclaimed: "People like Mark Levin, Michael Savage...every time you listen to them are furious, furious at the left with anger that's just builds and builds in their voice and by the time they go to commercial, they're just in some...

Rahm Emanuel: Actually, its entirely appropriate to let this crisis go to waste
Via the Standard, I’m happy to assume that this is heartfelt, although of course no other answer is possible politically. We’ll see tomorrow how well his former boss does in taking his advice. If you’re expecting the sort of trainwreck that happened at the Wellstone memorial, you’re kidding yourself. Obama and his team are way too smart to descend to that level of grotesque political hackery, especially given how they cherish his “above the fray” image. Here...

In Arizona, Obama to honor memories, speak of hope
WASHINGTON (AP) — Under high expectations to provide healing, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will try to convert the horror of the Arizona shootings into a moment of national unity centering his memorial Speech in Tucson on the lives of the Victims and the heroism of those who rushed to stop the madness. The president was crafting his Speech on Tuesday, and his aides were reluctant to discuss it even broadly in its unfinished form, other than to say it will emphasize the memories of t...

In Arizona, Obama to honor memories, speak of hope
Speaking in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Jan. 10, 2011, alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy, President Barack Obama said the nation is still in shock over the shooting rampage in Arizona that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, but he commended the courage of the people on the scene who rushed to help, saying their actions reflect the "best of America." Under high expectations to provide healing, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will try to...