Sargent: "I hope Giffords shooting gets folks to stop rewarding incendiary rhetoric" [View All]

On the Gabrielle Giffords shooting
By Greg Sargent

It's crass and counterproductive to start asking whether any political parties or ideologies are to blame for the tragic and horrific shooting of Dem Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others at an event with constituents yesterday. That's especially true given that the shooter is looking more and more like a deranged loner and early chatter that he might have had an accomplice is turning out to be false.

But it's fair to ask lawmakers and commentators to use this tragedy as a jumping off point for some serious reflection about what has become of our political discourse. Even if there's no clear connection between the shooting and the incendiary political rhetoric that has now become perilously close to the norm in American politics, that doesn't mean the shooting can't serve as a reminder to those who are inclined towards over-the-top rhetoric that words matter and risk having consequences that are somewhat more important than whether they earn their purveyors cable and Internet play.

As a number of folks have argued persuasively today, even if we don't know whether the shooter's motives have anything to do with the tone of our politics, that doesn't mean we can't use the shooting to call for more introspection and self-restraint from those who flirt with violent rhetoric or paint their opponents as treasonous and anti-American.

I'd like to take this one step further, though. I hope the shooting is also a gut-check moment of sorts for lawmakers and commentators who wouldn't dream of trafficking in such rhetoric themselves but tend to just dismiss it as "part of the game." I'm talking about those who shower uncritical media and Internet attention on purveyors of hateful rhetoric because it gets "clicks" and "eyeballs"; those who look the other way when colleagues indulge in it; and those who scoff at criticism of such rhetoric as motivated by nothing but "partisanship."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/01/gabrielle_giffords_shooting.html