Stop blaming GOP for everything
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Over the course of the past week, we’ve learned that Republicans are to blame for the following things: Republicans being shot, Democrats being shot, nightclubs being shot, people dying in the streets for lack of healthcare, and men interrupting women.
Needless to say, it has come as a shock to those of us on the right that conservatives are culpable for literally every ill that befalls society. On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise was shot while practicing for this week’s congressional baseball game. Condolences were immediately followed by whispers of, “but Trump is worsening the political climate!” as if the victims’ death certificates would read, “killed by presidential tweet.” (Fortunately, all the victims are still alive.)
Never mind that the shooter had been an avowed liberal Bernie Sanders supporter that subscribed to such Facebook groups as, “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans.” Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – who otherwise has acted honorably after the baseball shooting — implied Republicans were partially to blame, as “Somewhere in the ‘90s, Republicans decided on a politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons.” Basically, Pelosi was implying that the GOP got what was coming to them — the “her skirt was too short” excuse for political shootings.
Not to be outdone, The New York Times decided to exhume the 2011 shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to argue Republicans were responsible for that tragedy. “In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot … the link to political incitement was clear” wrote the Times. The editorial went on to blame Loughner’s vio(R-La.) lence on a map distributed by a Sarah Palin-supporting political action committee that featured crosshairs superimposed on congressional districts.
Yet Loughner was mentally ill and no political motive was ever found. This was a fever dream concocted by the left in the wake of the Giffords shooting and should serve as a warning for snap judgments in the wake of any tragedy. Perhaps after the next shooting, the Times will retroactively claim John Wilkes Booth was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball hat.
On Friday, the Times corrected its
editorial to eliminate the Palin calumny — but it still persists in claiming the shooting is “probably” evidence of “how vicious American politics has become.” Evidently the Times has no staff irony monitor to point out the viciousness in blaming Republicans for a sixyear-old shooting in the same editorial they decry political viciousness.
Of course, the jobs held by Wednesday’s victims makes the shooting “political,” but it is by no means representative of the political culture at large. Last year, 73,684,412 people voted against Donald Trump for president. So far one of them has attempted to shoot Republicans. Most people who voted against Trump — me among them — handled news of his election the way any non-disturbed person would: by overeating and unfollowing obnoxious people on Twitter with as dramatic a mouse-click as possible.
There is no doubt Trump has degraded political discourse in this nation. Through sub-sentient insults, he flaunts his ignorance as if it were Electoral College votes.
But never before have we blamed the victims of political shootings for creating a “culture” leading to violence against them. When Progressive presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt was shot by a saloonkeeper on the streets of Milwaukee in 1912, nobody ascribed the attack to Roosevelt’s bombastic, aggressive personality. (In fact, the bullet was partially stopped by a copy of a speech Roosevelt was holding in his breast pocket, leading one observer to claim he was “half shot” — had Roosevelt not been such a blowhard, his speech would have been shorter and thinner, and he may have been killed.)
The difference now, obviously, is that we have thousands of organizations whose sole existence depends on politicizing every tragedy to stoke enmity against the other side. Anger begets clicks which begets revenue.
But now maybe it’s time to focus our anger on those desperately trying to make us angry — whether it’s a Facebook page from a fringe extremist group or the editorial board of one of the nation’s most influential newspapers.