I made the argument that the anti-gun control advocates were playing politics by stressing that anyone on the Left who brought up gun control was exploiting a tragedy for political gain.
I'm sure that they are. But the pundits on the right are more full of shit for politicizing the issue, then claiming that they're not.
The first example, by way of Glenn Greenwald's column in Salon.
Charles Krauthammer on Fox News on Wednesday night:
KRAUTHAMMER: What you can say, just -- not as a psychiatrist, but as somebody who's lived through the a past seven or eight years, is that if you look at that picture, it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half decade in Palestine, in Iraq and elsewhere.
That's what they end up leaving behind, either on al Jazeera or Palestinian TV. And he, it seems, as if his inspiration for leaving the message behind in that way, might have been this kind of suicide attack, which, of course, his was. And he did leave the return address return "Ismail Ax." "Ismail Ax." I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.
Not so fast. In Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post:
What can be said about the Virginia Tech massacre? Very little. What should be said? Even less. The lives of 32 innocents, chosen randomly and without purpose, are extinguished most brutally by a deeply disturbed gunman. With an event such as this, consisting of nothing but suffering and tragedy, the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice. Unfortunately, in today's supercharged political atmosphere, there is the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage.
...
Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.
I find Krauthammer, too often, to tie everything in his worldview to his consistently neo-con, hawkish, blindly pro-Israel views. It's unfortunate that his hard-line stance is consistent with perceptions of the Pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. Most jews, in both the U.S. and Israel, thend to be far more centrist than the U.S. lobby would suggest.
Or, how about this one, from Michael Medved:
The horrifying shootings at Virginia Tech have produced all the sad, shabby, predictable reactions from misguided commentators trying to make sense of mass murder. On TV and radio, we've already heard that the killing spree was the product of too many guns, or too few guns, or violent video games, or the breakdown of the family, or ill-considered immigration policies or, even, global warming. Glib, shallow explanations allow us to turn away from the one real lesson of these events: that evil exists, and that dark forces - forces believers would call demonic or diabolical - play a powerful role in our world. Regardless of the background or motivation of the killer, Virginia Tech reminds us of the most important truth of our time: that terrorist monsters can't be explained, or excused, or appeased, or ignored, or negotiated into civilized behavior. They must be confronted and destroyed - before they destroy more of the decent and the innocent.
Evil. Yeah. That's it.
What really makes my brain bleed is not the pundits. It's the news anchors who have lived under the cloud of this administration for so long that they think nothing of adopting the talking points, the party line, as the basis of their fact gathering. Whether it's the Speaker of the House visiting Syria or the NRA-centric view of guns, there's no time spent checking facts. They make statements as fact that are, at best, signs of journalistic sloth. At worst, they're perniciously advancing the "shut up, be scared, and respect your Elders" message of the Administration.
Again, via Greenwald, this is what we need.
Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won a Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on the Bush Administration's outrageous claims of expanded executive power. Boston Globe Editor Martin Baron had this to say about Savage:
What Charlie does and the reason he won this richly deserved Pulitzer is because he covered what the White House does, not just what it says,
Bravo.
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