Wyatt Earp

As most of you know, I posted about the Tucson shootings yesterday. After posting the details of the massacre, I jumped on my soapbox and decried the rhetoric that tried to explain the killer’s motivation. Liberal pundits (and most of the MSM) claimed Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party practically forced Jared Loughner to shoot these people. Conservative pundits fired back, claiming Loughner’s former classmates, YouTube postings, and MySpace account proved his Left-leaning ideology. My point yesterday continues to be my point today: I couldn’t care less about Loughner’s political affiliation.

Sadly, some people missed that point, and used the comments section to rip liberals, the MSM, and the like. It got to the point that I simply closed the comments. Why, you ask? The answer is below the fold.

The short answer is that I couldn’t (and still can’t) stomach the rhetoric anymore. Any time some lunatic commits a high-profile crime, someone, somewhere attempts to link the crime to a political ideology. And nowadays, far too many people in this country place ideology over everything.

Code Monkey sent me a text message on Saturday night saying, “I miss 9/12.” So do I, since it was the first time in a long time where the country was actually united. America is now more divided than ever, and let’s be honest: It is getting progressively worse, and it’s never going back to the way it was. In my opinion, America is dying a slow death. A death hastened by political correctness, the politics of personal destruction, and the inability of anyone to take responsibility for their actions.

When people offer reasons for this murderous bastard’s actions, they effectively let him off the hook. “Well, it’s not his fault. He was pushed to that because he read Sarah Palin’s tweets/read The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.” That’s bullshit. Jared Loughner shot and killed innocent people because he has some bad wiring. Stop blaming his political ideology – an ideology we don’t even fully know yet – and start blaming Jared Loughner.

But the MSM, the pundits, and a large majority of the American people won’t do that. Sure, they’ll expect Loughner to pay for his crimes, but that sentiment will be secondary to the real issue at hand; which political party can we make responsible for this madness? We are starting to see that already, with the labels being attached to Loughner’s name, whether it be “Tea Partier” or “Leftist.” Personally, I am sick of it, and I’m not going there anymore.

So, for the foreseeable future, I am shelving politics as a post topic. There are plenty of other websites and blogs that cover politics, and do it better than I. If that costs me readers, so be it, because I can’t deal with the rhetoric any longer.