I am not going to comment too much on the assassination attempt in Tuscon over the weekend, but the reaction to it has been predictably ugly. Suffice it to say that the blame placed on the Right--namely Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck--for this, directly or implicitly, is irresponsible and serves no purpose other than political point-scoring at the expense of free speech.
American politics is full of harsh rhetoric, as it has been and will continue to be. There are already calls to institute speech restrictions -- which will do no good whatsoever other than to quash dissent. It's already illegal to threaten the life of a congressman, or anyone for that matter, as well it should be--but saying "we're targeting this senator this election" is no more a threat than printing that senator's face on toilet paper. The time we live in certainly isn't the nadir of American political discourse--though the number of times this country has been goaded into pointless wars makes a singular nadir hard to pinpoint--but let's not pretend we've lost some sort of bygone civility from more genteel times.
The histrionics coming from the Left are unsubstantiated and unhelpful. It's just their most recent attempt at fear-mongering: the cheap and effective political technique used by pols of all stripes that requires little or no resemblance to reality whatsoever. And as Adam Serwer noted, the Republicans would, in all likelihood, engage in the same if Rep. Giffords were a Republican or the assailant was Muslim, Arab, or an immigrant. But that doesn't make the Left's behavior any less despicable--it just proves they are as boorish and loathsome as their counterparts.
Anyway, in the spirit of using media to create bogeymen and incite irrational fears of those whom you disagree, my MMM for this week is the man responsible for everything bad that happened to kids in the late 1990s:
It's the edited version, I still doubt it's "safe" for work. And yes, I just compared Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to Marilyn Manson.
bellum medicamenti delenda est
Update: OH FOR GOD'S SAKE: Some are actually blaming the music: "It's a sign of the shifting culture wars that little attention has been paid to Drowning Pool since the Arizona shooting on Saturday."
