Inflaming Vitriol?
By any objective measure the 'shooter' is flat nuts, pure loony tunes. Such folks are not serious ideologues or partisans, they are nuts. He sounds a lot like the flake who flew into the IRS building in Austin, a confused person who's probably an atheist, something not at all akin to Palin.
As I type this, Olbermann has Eugene Robinson on the air to focus the vitriol where they think it belongs--the right wing. Oh they're being coy about it--Robinson mentioned that the left held the domestic terrorist mantle during the past, even mentioning washed up terrorist Bill Ayers, but moved on to say it's now almost exclusively on the right. This despite absolutely no evidence of increasing violence from the right; actually the evidence shows that the most violent protesters of our day are socialist anarchists.
They're using the Pima County Sheriff's idiotic speculation during his news conference regards TV and radio personalities inflaming the loonies (apparently no speculation is allowed about the shooter but the Sheriff can speculate wildly about who motivated him) to move their political points. Olbermann is right now giving us a "special comment" about how everyone needs to shut the hell up, and that means Sarah Palin, who he says is responsible. Meanwhile Fox has been running basic news coverage with Shep Smith and Bret Baier and their other news team members and trying to paint a fair picture of the suspect.
Mad as hell, Sheriff Dupnik? You bet. As a person leaning right I'm mad that a nut took out his frustrations on a decent and honorable congresswoman and killed others in the process, including a little girl who in attendance to see the political process because she was serving in student council. Mad that said nut is still alive. Mad that said nut is apparently exercising his constitutional rights, using the same constitution he evidently derided in his online activity.
I'm also mad that the very thing that he so passionately interjected--stoking the vitriol--is being practiced at this very minute by opportunistic left wing ideologues on TV who are trying to frame this event as an image of the modern right wing to score cheap political points.
This is NOT to say that we shouldn't all take a step back and think before we post or speak and understand the meaning and impact of our words. We should. We live in turbulent times. I'm troubled about what seems to be a crumbling of our society and a loss of basic feelings for our fellow man; the crushing debt; illegal immigration leading to a breakdown in the rule of law; wars that don't seem winable and corrupt and mindless politicians forcing their will on the public.
But Olbermann's outrageous and shameless vitriolic attempt to blame this on Palin, or Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly--before all the facts are known--and even if he threw himself in the pot as well with a mock apology, is just as dangerous as anything the sheriff was talking about. MSNBC should be ashamed of itself and it's so-called news department.