Politicizing tragedy

Why did Obama win an election that should have been a lock for the GOP? Because too many people have grown tired of conservative horseshit. Our wacky rightists simply do not provide a credible alternative, even when they face a very disappointing (if not infuriating) Democratic president and party.

The Connecticut school massacre provides a case in point. Immediately after the shootings occurred, the rightists warned: "Do not politicize this tragic event!" Yet in their own writings and tweets and public declarations, they have done nothing but politicize the tragedy.

The result is hypocrisy raised to the level of psychosis. Examples:

-- Even as the right tells the left to hold its collective tongue, conservatives feel free to pronounce that the children of Sandy Hook Elementary were killed by gun control laws.

-- Republican geniuses in Michigan decided that now is the time to push for legislation allowing guns in schools.

-- Mike Huckabee (as noted in the post below) and others have claimed that the massacre occurred because schools no longer lead children in public prayer. I'm not sure someone as psychotic as Adam Lanza would have cared one way or the other.

-- Alex Jones, whom Matt Drudge has been "mainstreaming" in recent years, used Sandy Hook for one of his characteristically insane rants. He claims that Obama plans to use this incident to "repeal" the Second Amendment. Not only that: Jones accuses MSNBC and Salon of being "state" media, supported by the government. (I'm old enough to recall when conspiracy theorists recognized at least some obligation to offer evidence.)

-- Here's Glenn Beck, by way of Salon:

Glenn Beck was a bit more contemplative. “It is not the gun. It is the soul,” he wrote. “Our society is broken. Our communities are suffering, and it is because of the ever expanding lack of self control & personal responsibility.” Apparently the shooter didn’t have enough personal responsibility.

That's right, folks: Glenn Beck -- the original lachymorose,  hyper-emotional Creature of the Id -- has seen fit to lecture the rest of us on the need for self-control.

-- The Breitbarters scored CNN's Piers Morgan for "exploiting" the tragedy, and uses that same word against Representative Jerrold Nadler. Yet the Breitbarters themselves have gone full P.T. Barnum in their coverage of the massacre. They blame the goth subculture. As I recall, the Breitbart crew was just as inane in their discussion of the previous massacre in Oregon, which they blamed on Occupy Wall Street.

(Actually, Adam Lanza was a computer geek. Maybe we should blame the tech-heads.)

Perhaps liberals should encourage our conservative brethren to persevere in this behavior. When the right-wingers heat up the hypocrisy and pile on the crazy, they help Dems get elected. Right-wingers spend so much time screaming paranoid nonsense at each other that they don't know how foolish they sound to normal people.

They would do their own cause a lot of good if they cut out the double talk about "politicizing" the tragedy. Of course people are going to discuss gun control legislation after a mass shooting. That conversation is inevitable. The people who initiate that conversation are not evil conspirators; they are normal human beings. So when that debate begins, opponents of gun control should not become angry or suspicious or accusatory. They should simply present their case in a calm, reasonable manner.

That's how you win people over.

If Republicans have lost the ability to speak in that fashion, they consign themselves to the fringe.