As the world learns more about Jarred Loughner, the unlikelihood that any “political rhetoric” had even the most oblique role in causing his atrocity over the weekend is becoming more and more clear to just about everyone.<\/p>\n
Everyone that hasn’t been waiting for something to come along to shut up the newly-uppity right, anyway.<\/p>\n
America’s village idiot Paul Krugman tipped his hand, comparing the episode to Oklahoma City<\/a> in his deeply depraved column over the weekend. \u00a0But he wasn’t entirely off base; there was at least one valid comparison to 1995.<\/p>\n Back then, Bill Clinton had just seen his agenda repudiated at the polls with the second-greatest mid-term drubbing in recent memory. \u00a0The left lost both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a generation. \u00a0Clinton needed something to get his message across; his administration didn’t “waste the crisis”; Hillary as much as blamed the horror on Rush Limbaugh and his “rhetoric”.<\/p>\n It was, of course, “rhetoric”, itself.<\/p>\n Today’s left isn’t wasting the Tuscon massacre. \u00a0Carolyn McCarthy (D[emigog], NY) is using the crisis to introduce gun control legislation<\/a> of the type that utterly failed to prevent her own husband from being murdered in New York, or to keep Chicago from being the most dangerous city in the Western Hemisphere north of Juarez – a place that suffers as many deaths as Tuscon once or more a week.<\/p>\n