I really wanted to go to bed tonight, and it will probably take me a day or two to finish this rant – but, the events of the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona are still reverberating in my mind and the commentary is still coming from all directions (including here).  Tonight, what has motivated me to write AGAIN was reading a column in the New York Times by David Brooks (you can read it yourself by clicking here).  Brooks is the republican apologist who is at it again.  Now, I’m not claiming that I know anything about the motives of the “shooter” in the Arizona tragedy – but, I can tell you that it’s totally illogical to even attempt to place the blame totally on this guy’s mental health or lack thereof.  Yes, it may be true that he really is suffering from schizophrenia, but – no matter how Brooks wants to “spin” things – the vile republican (and “tea party”) rhetoric should be part of the “mainstream” media’s look at what happened.

Brooks writes his article in a way that attempts to place some kind of intellectual superiority on his knowledge of mental illness and what it’s doing to people in America.  He uses the fact (and, we don’t – and may never – know the true motives of the killer) that the evidence is still out when he makes the claim “We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them.”  This is beyond ABSURD to me!  This is the same CRAP that I’ve been witnessing and listening to for the past 30+ years.  David Brooks, a Fox type columnist claiming that the media – which is dominated by Fox – “has a strong distaste for Sarah Palin.”  Let me just be clear about this – if the media had a strong “distaste” for Palin, she wouldn’t be the rising star of the republican party and “tea party” movement.  She has little of the intellect that his readers would have us believe Brooks possesses.  In the entirety of his argument, Brooks fails to mention that this MADMAN, Jared Loughner, committed, by all accounts, a premeditated MURDER – that is, he targeted Ms. Giffords at the additional expense of the crowd which had turned out to hear her.

I’m just wondering where Brooks thinks someone as mentally ill as the shooter in this instance got the idea that he should attempt to kill this particular congressperson?  He, like EVERYONE else I’ve seen on the “right,” are doing everything they can to dismiss all the rhetoric they’ve been SPEWING as having nothing to do with this violence or any of the other violent attacks on “liberal” targets since the election of Barack Obama (or going back generations in America for that matter).  Is it going to take an actual attack on Obama himself before these people wake up?  Or would we be listening to the same rationalizations if that happened?  These people make me sick.

Brooks actually makes my point for me when he says, “We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.”  The problem with his assumptions, in my view, is that he’s dismissing the FACT that 90% of the “liberal” news media is controlled by right wing corporations and that Fox is the “kingpin” that we’re all forced to deal with (a company owned by a right wing Australian and whose number one shareholder is a Saudi Prince who supported bin Laden prior to 9/11 – which seems to avoid Brooks’ attention as with the rest of the “liberal” media).  What he’s claiming – “there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions” is EXACTLY what has allowed this vitriol to continue unabated since Barack Obama became president.  Actually, if you’re old enough to remember, this is the identical CRAP that we were inundated with in the Bill Clinton years – and, the response from the “right” including Brooks’ column – is like deja vu all over again regarding the bombing in Oklahoma City.

When Brooks states, “We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons” he’s doing the classic republican projectionist strategy – accusing the “other side” of exactly what his own brethren are doing.  Yes, that is EXACTLY what the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Wiener, Lars Larsen, and the host of other “right wing” talkers have been doing for as long as I can remember.  (well, at least back into the 80’s when Limbaugh was thrust onto the scene – and, I’m sure before that, I just wasn’t paying as close attention)  These guys have been “stroking the audience’s buttons” for years.  They play to the “dark side” of the people they are assaulting with their propaganda, turning unsuspecting schizophrenics – or people with other mental illnesses – into political assassins.  Brooks actually also makes the argument for a national single payer health plan in America, albeit inadvertently, when he says, “If the evidence continues as it has, the obvious questions are these: How can we more aggressively treat mentally ill people who are becoming increasingly disruptive? How can we prevent them from getting guns? Do we need to make involuntary treatment easier for authorities to invoke?”  Let me just remind you that it’s the very people who think like Brooks who have prevented this nation from considering health care a “right” instead of a “privilege” – a privilege becoming available to less and less of the public including people like Jared Loughner, the KILLER in this case.  And, Brooks himself in this article is pointing our there are 4 MILLION mentally ill people in America!  How many of them do you think are getting treatment with over 50 MILLION Americans lacking health insurance?

The “right wing” is agressively “covering their tracks” and people like Brooks, who in his column states, “I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible” are desperately attempting to keep the Palin candidacy on track – while trying to convince us, the unsuspecting public, otherwise.  Just as people like Mike Huckabee on the “right” have made comments that SHOULD disqualify them from being a national leader, Sarah Palin’s vile rhetoric and racist history should preclude her from consideration of any further public office by any person who believes in the public discourse that Brooks is apparently appealing for.  How can you “bash” political opportunism while defending the people who’ve taken political opportunism to new heights – when their words come back to haunt them.  David Brooks, stop making excuses for the expressions of violence and hate that have been coming from the republican party for the past several years.  Practice what you preach!  I’m still waiting for the first “conservative” to speak out against today’s republican agenda.

I’m going to end this with one final quote from Brooks’ article claiming, “In short, the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.”  For argument’s sake, let’s accept that premise.  I believe that the politics which most “pundits” are pointing to as they desperately try to understand such a senseless act are politics “far removed from politics as we normally understand it.”  That is precisely my point – we’ve ALL (well, now I have to backtrack a bit due to what happened and say most of us) filtered the absurd out of the speeches of people like Palin and the broadcasts of people like Limbaugh, Beck and the others.  But, as Brooks himself points out, the 1% of mentally ill people in the U.S. who are capable of violence totals 40,000!  That’s a pretty large audience for people like Palin and the others (and, believe me, when vitriol comes from the “left” it’s just as bad!) to be addressing.  And as Jared Loughner proved, it only takes one “crazy” to “hear” things the wrong way and we end up with another tragedy. 

 I’m not suggesting there wouldn’t be tragedies if this type of rhetoric didn’t happen, but we could then dispense with all this discussion and try to get to the real root of the problem – and, I believe, the occurences would be much less frequent.  I listened to a guy who has a radio program called “NorMan GoldMan” on the way home from work tonight and he made a valid point that I think is cause for thought – when condemning the reaction of the “left” as Brooks has done.  What would the reaction have been had it been a republican congressperson shot, or if the shooter had been a Muslim?  The bottom line here, in my view, is that people like David Brooks need to stop defending vile public rhetoric simply because it comes from conservatives!