Isn’t it time to be blunt? When the news hit that Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been critically wounded and 6 people were dead, it was news that many Americans had expected. The wounded were collateral damage.
It isn’t only supposedly wishy-washy moderates and independent voters who have long been alarmed that America’s poisonous political polemics had replaced professional wrestling as a mass culture sport with (some of the controversies as authentic as the outcomes of pro wrestling matches).
We haven’t been waiting for a shoe to drop. We’ve been dreading news that very soon a body or two would drop.
And now they have.
No proof exists that alleged murderer Jared Lee Loughner is linked to any political party or ideology.
But it became a big political issue. GOPers insisted their gun and military political-attack language could never have anything to do with it. Sarah Palin tried distancing herself from her website that put Gifford’s district in crosshairs. A staffer even laughingly claimed it was just a surveyors’ symbol – a fact undermined by an earlier Palin Tweet that suggested otherwise. Patrick Kennedy weighed in:” “When Sarah Palin puts targets on people’s districts? Or you have 10,000 signs on the mall during the healthcare battle saying ‘Bury Obamacare with Kennedy’? When the vitriol and the rhetoric is so violent, we have to connect consequences to that.”
The left blamed the right. The right said the press and left were politicizing it. And the media LOVED it all.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.