Not to be outdone in carpetbag demagoguery, Newt Gingrich declared that 40 years of liberalism has caused society to get mean and nasty. Liberalism is responsible for young people losing their souls by playing violent video games. "We don't have any discussion about what's happened to our culture because while we're restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold,(The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that regulates campaign financing) we say it's impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech," proclaimed Gingrich.
Gingrich has a solid history of blaming liberals for the actions of deranged individuals. Back in 1994 there was white Susan Smith drowning her three young children in South Carolina and, in typical liberal fashion, blaming it on random crime by a black man. Gingrich quickly asserted that he thought “that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way to change is to vote Republican."
Then there was Columbine. Gingrich blamed that slaughter on a then mere 35 years of liberalism. Using Gingrich’s logic, the increased body count at Virginia Tech is therefore due to the additional years of predatory liberal culture since Columbine. The only problem is that somebody has failed to tell George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, the GOP and the religious right that they have been presiding over and promoting liberal culture since Columbine. The same holds true before Columbine for Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the Moral Majority, the Contract with America crowd, and the vast right wing conspiracy.
But, of course, Gingrich’s fellow conservatives have the courage to take an objective look. Take for example Tom Delay’s dandy reasoning about Columbine:
"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills."
Daycare, science and employed moms not wanting to get knocked-up kill people, not guns. Nor do video games kill people, according to Rush Limbaugh. Whereas Gingrich might blame liberals’ violent video games, Limbaugh said “If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it's the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this. You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act. But if you want to start blaming the video games, this guy was this or that, weeeeell, then you've gotta maybe talk about banning them because that's the same tack that's taken with guns.”
While Limbaugh may not think that there needs to be more laws regulating gun ownership or violent video games, he does think that future massacres could be prevented by “a law banning political correctness.” Limbaugh also asked if students, the campus police, faculty members and others were “so concerned with the trumped-up global warming scare they didn’t notice a real threat, for example?”
Then again, Limbaugh added that if anybody had noticed that “many people refused to do anything about it or even complain about it because they would be tagged as racists.”
Speaking of racist rants, Michael Weiner Savage said Cho “ was brainwashed” in South Korea. Savage added that “the only reason” Cho “was walking the streets was because liberal scum have for 30 years handcuffed the police and the people of this country and made us hostages in their drama.”
However, instead of being liberal, Savage suggested that Cho was a Muslim terrorist because he railed against “rich kids, debauchery and alcohol.”
Neal Boortz strongly suggested that Cho’s victims were responsible for “standing meekly waiting for this guy to execute them. Waiting for what? The government to come save them.” Soon after Boortz went to a commercial by playing a bit from Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”
“Hit me with your best shot!
Why don’t you hit me with your best shot!
Hit me with your best shot!
Fire away!”
What compassionate conservatism Boortz models.
Boortz attributed Cho’s victims’ behavior to the “wussification of America." (Liberals are responsible for making wussies as well as producing mindless zombies playing video games. We either turn you into a pinko passive p*ssy or a maniacal mass murderer.) Libertarian Boortz was truly puzzled why the students didn’t collectively “rush the killer and get his gun.”
Why, Neal, if they had done that they would have been acting collectively and any good individualist libertarian knows that it’s every man for himself with only the strong surviving. If people started helping each other it might lead to cooperation and collective interest and other liberal values as feared by the patron saint of greed and social Darwinism, Ayn Rand. And we wouldn’t want liberals values, now, would we, even if it was to prevent another massacre. No, it’s far easier to blame liberals, rant and vent than to offer anything of substance or assistance.
So I know it’s hard for you to pass up the opportunity to make political hay off another tragedy like you did with 9/11, but couldn’t you conservative commentators at least wait until all the dead are cold in the ground before you try to profit off them?
