Jonathan Alter Is Pretty Excited About How Obama Can Profit From AZ Shooting

Underlying subtext...Imagine how awesome it would have been for Obama if only Giffords had died!

President Obama is off to a good start in his handling of what the networks are now calling “The Tragedy in Tucson.” The moment of silence he asked for on Monday at 11 a.m.—resonant for older Americans of the exact hour on November 11 each year that the World War I Armistice was once observed—is an appropriate expression of what we need right now: Less Noise.

But silence will not be enough. This horrific event offers the president a chance to show leadership qualities that he’s inexplicably hidden away in some blind trust. The shootings and the resulting debate over the climate of incivility play to his strengths as a calm and rational leader. Just as Bill Clinton’s response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings helped him recover from his defeat in the 1994 midterms, so this episode may help Obama change—at least in the short term--the trajectory of American politics.

..Whether or not he attends the funerals for the Tucson victims, Obama’s big chance to lead will come in his State of the Union address on January 25. He can both to speak to the moment thematically and confront the substantive concerns raised by the tragedy.

Conservatives like to argue that these are isolated incidents carried out by lunatics and therefore carry no big lessons (unless the perpetrator is Muslim, in which case it’s terrorism); liberals view them as opportunities to address various social ills. Obama is in the latter category and should act accordingly. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008. The same goes for a shooting spree that gravely wounds a beloved congresswoman. Congress won’t enact gun control, as it did in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, but perhaps something positive can come from this.

Yeah, those stupid conservatives, trying to draw bigger lessons from the actions connected to and motivated by the world wide movement we are at war with. Apparently we need to learn from individual crackpots whose anger toward their target predates the emergence of the individual and groups liberals blame.

Don't forget, this is exactly the kind of thing some liberals were saying Obama was going to need to rebound politically.

It's all so ghoulish and dishonest.

Here's my modest proposal, if conservatives are responsible for the attack on Giffords then from this moment forward I am blaming liberals and every elected Democrat for every sexual attack in this country. When conservatives say we want to tone down the hyper-sexualization of society, especially children, we are called prudes who want to legislate what happens in people's bedrooms. Well, Democrats by your own logic you know own responsibility for every rape and sex crime in this country.

Added: Aside from the death and injuries, the worst part of this story is how the left is dragging the right into their swamp mentality. All over righty blogs on Saturday the first reactions I was were calls for prayer and support for the victims. On the left it was to blame the right.

Since Saturday the constant fact free frenzy has only gotten worse. In a better world, we'd recognize this attack for what it is but because the left immediate politicized it with a wanton disregard for the truth, here we are having to fight back in the nastiest ways imaginable.

In my defense I'll quote Sarah Palin Barack Obama on how to properly conduct a political fight, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,”

posted by DrewM. at 11:54 AM

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