The Left's Blame Game is Shameful and Revealing

It's taken me some time to get down to write a full post about this. I've really thought enough about this whole thing already and hope that if I post this it will be the point in which I gradually think less about it until it becomes little more than an unpleasant memory that I think "Oh yeah," about. But for this one I throw no "you're to blame too" nonsense, because the initial blame charge is nonsense and makes my blood boil. Here are a few examples of postings that came out shortly after. There are much more of these and a few of them are ridiculous ranting and ravings about capitalism and gasp...CORPORATIONS.

"But this country does have a problem with right wing hate speech and extremism. And PACs should not use gunsights to target their opponents even in printed graphics."

"Conservatives always get violent. Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, MLK Jr.

Conservatives are always trying to kill democrats."

"I guess that's what the Republicans mean when they say their going to take back the country. One murdered female democrat at a time. Thanks Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers for the inspiration."

"Looks like a mental patient influenced by the tea party rhetoric. Deeply distrubed obviously."

"All of those Tea Party officials can go to hell for encoraging freaks like this by whipping them up against people they dislike. I'm not saying that anyone encouraged people to shoot at their congress people, but the fact remains that their comments and (sometimes) lies have perpetuated the situation."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gabrielle-giffords-shot-2011-1

This garbage got posted before anyone even knew the killer's motives. They just made the knee-jerk assumption. I am just taking this one website as an example and I know there were many more similar reactions. There were a few rightists posting blame on the left (and a few of these I suspect were retaliatory), but not as many as the left postings blaming the right.

Thanks in part to Sheriff Dupnik engaging in grandstanding for the media, the lefties in the media reacted less crudely in language yet sought to point blame to the right for inspiring a violent environment that would lead a nutcase like Loughner to target members of Congress. The media here included economist and columnist Paul Krugman who immediately unleashed an article that placed blame on the right wing for creating an environment that inspired the shooting, and the leftists at Huffington Post reproduced a picture of cross-hairs on top of districts for targeted incumbents that Palin's PAC had released for the 2010 election season as evidence of why Palin and the Tea Party somehow bear moral responsibility. This is simply not evidence, especially given what we now know about Loughner. The leftists in the media's response provoked a response from Sarah Palin which used a very appropriate term for the reaction: blood libel. This is an effort to smear the right with the blood of the victims of this horrible tragedy, but the blood remains exclusively on Loughner, the only blame-worthy subject in this sick event. The truth that is coming out about Jared Loughner is that he holds a view of the world that only Jared Loughner holds, one of conspiracies and some mysterious vendetta against Congresswoman Giffords (possibly because she's Jewish?). A friend of his stated that Loughner wasn't political and didn't care about left or right. Although he was a registered voter, he never bothered to vote. But this really doesn't matter to the vitriolic radical leftists.

This whole reaction on the left to blame right wing rhetoric for contributing to this horrific act before even knowing the facts tells me a few things. Firstly, the radical left believes the right is not just stupid and misinformed, but evil too. Why direct such vitriol if you don't think that? This is not rhetoric employed against someone you think has good motives, this is rhetoric you employ against someone you believe has evil motives. I also believe that quite a number of them on the left take Rahm Emanuel's "never let a good crisis go to waste" to heart on this matter. Secondly, the left that plays the blame game here is uninterested in the facts. It is the accusation that matters more than anything, as after all, one accusation is usually remembered more than its rebuttal. Thirdly, this tells me that that the right is always on trial for their humanity by the left, and this is just another accusation for the prosecution to add to their case. This "evil" assumption of the right makes civil political discourse impossible.

In conclusion, shame on the radical left for this blame game they are playing. Shame on them.