To his credit, President Obama set the right tone in his speech in Tucson when he said, "At a time...when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it's important for us to make sure that we are talking to each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds."
It's too bad the President didn't say that before the Left blamed talk radio and the Tea Party for a lunatic's atrocities in Arizona. When it was proven shortly afterwards that there was absolutely no connection between Loughner and the Right, the accusations should have ended right there with the total embarrassment of the Left for its obscene show of political opportunism.
Conservatives fought back, of course, even when they didn't have to. Sarah Palin and Michael Savage went so far as to accuse the Left of "blood libel," which I thought was way over the top. But the vitriol didn't end there.
On the very day that President Obama spoke to the nation, Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald found yet another way to attack the Tea Parties. When Judson Phillips, a Tea Party activist, tried to preempt an attack on the Tea Parties, Pitts saw this as "a certain guilt of conscience, a tacit acknowledgement that political discourse in this country has become a national disgrace, hateful, poisonous and coarse. And...the tea party movement bears a lion's share of the onus for that...If the movement did not cause Saturday's tragedy, it did create the atmosphere that made such a tragedy feel...inevitable."
Pitts, who regularly sees every conflict through the prism of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, makes the case for what George Will calls McCarthyism of the Left, devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas.
Let us hope that this most recent tragedy will bring an end to liberalism's response to every tragedy as an indictment of its opponents.
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