Irresponsible Citizens, Media and Celebrities

If there was ever a time to learn a serious lesson about our culture and our media, it is now. The Arizona shooting showed us that there is a lot of dangerous, potentially violent provoking thought being expressed right now in America – and it’s not coming out of the Tea Party or conservatives like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It’s coming from the Left, which is ginning up ideological reasons that don’t exist for this shooting.

What they are doing should greatly damage the credibility of liberalism and progressivism in the minds of stable, mature and intelligently thinking Americas – both on the left and the right. To watch no name loons and rabidly liberal individuals take to Twitter to blame the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and other conservatives is one thing. To watch celebrities and well known people in well known media outlets do the same is another. These people have an obligation to react responsibly to events as professionals and should communicate in a responsible way. Watching them feeding into a satanic, rabid and irrational type of negativity perpetrated by amateurs is very disturbing to those of us who are concerned about the future of our republic.

"If you are blaming Sarah Palin and/or the Tea Parties for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, you are identifying yourself as a person who is so deranged with hate that you should not be taken seriously on any issue," Da Techguy wrote perfectly on his blog (h/t Texas For Sarah Palin).

Warner Todd Huston at Big Journalism writes "Whatever the final facts are that we find out about this crime, the early assumptions by the Old Media linking this incident to conservatives is irresponsible."

Nicole Coulter at Conservatives4Palin writes:

received a particularly maddening message on Facebook from my former boss. The essence of his strange wall post dart: See, Nicole, your Sarah Palin put Giffords in her rifle scope crosshairs. See what you Tea Baggers have wrought? What do you say now?

One of the reasons I left liberalism behind was because of what I perceived as its inherent juvenilism. Class envy is straight out of Adolescence 101. The tendency to blame America for all that is wrong in the world little more than a teenage railing against authority.

And so we see this immaturity again in the rush to blame Gov. Palin and Tea Party America for a terrible act of violence.

Except when 52-year-olds like my former boss behave like juveniles, it’s not cute. It’s symbolic of the rot and irresonsibility that I believe lies at the heart of modern liberalism. Somehow, in some way, someone else always is to blame. Not the individual who committed the atrocity.

For the last two years, the Left has been manufacturing a meme that Tea Partiers are violent and that Sarah Palin advocates violence despite all the clear incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. We must show everyone why their credibility has been destroyed. We need to show everyone why they are so infantile, irrepsonsible and hold no right to a serious place at the table in the national discourse when they demonstrate such a mentally feeble grasp on such a serious subject.

Progressives, liberals or whatever you want to call them who put forth the insane notions that somehow the Tea Party movement or Sarah Palin is responsible for the atrocious act we all witnessed yesterday provide a false psychological justification for people who may be predisposed to harming her or people like her. Harp all they want about Palin and the Tea Party, but by projecting their inner turmoil onto the right, they have released the real language of hatred and produced the real thoughts that could cause violence.

The shooter has posted rambling, sometimes incoherent tirades which demonstrate deep psychiatric issues and which are far out of touch with the truth. There is not much difference between his postings and the postings of people who blame Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. When people are that far out of touch with the truth, they are dangerous. They are capable of doing anything. And therefore, the rhetoric coming from these types of individuals is purely incendiary.

If you don't believe me, take this tweet for example from Adeyemi:

I can dream cant i RT @ReaganTMan RT @MelissaTweets: RT @ewerickson: The left and media, in perpetuating the lie that the shooter was a tea party activist, may incite violence against the right

While free speech is our right, stupid speech should be seen as our barometer as to who is stable and who is not. This isn’t strictly a liberal versus conservative thing. This is a positive versus negative thing. This is good versus evil. There are good hearted liberals who have chosen to not participate in the politicization of the event just as are there bad hearted conservatives.

Negative people tend to gravitate toward other negative people. Positive people tend to do the same. But it’s not always obvious who’s who. Yesterday’s event gives us a great moment in time where the snapshot is taken at roll call.

PatrickRuffini tweeted: "Thanks to Twitter, we now have a second-by-second view of how common sense descends into mind-blowing stupidity"

It’s as if Satan did roll call and all the hateful Palin / Tea Party bashers raised their hands and said “present.” Now we know who these people are.

Erick Erickson tweeted: "It becomes sadly easier on days like this to tell the saved from the damned."

We need to seriously separate ourselves from these people. Publications like the Daily Kos, columnists like Andrew Sullivan and celebrities like Jane Fonda need to be ostracized. These are the folks who need to be marginalized and set to the side when having our national dialogues.

The liberal media has gone beyond jumping the shark in its flushing of its credibility down the toilet by even buying into these memes. If the fear of political correctness stops those on the right from telling the truth, why is there no societal mechanism in place to motivate those on the left from telling lies?