On April 19, 1995, as soon as I heard about the Oklahoma City bombing, I turned on the radio and flipped between stations WBZ and WRKO in Boston. On ‘RKO I heard Howie Carr, a notorious reactionary hothead talk show host, spout with absolute certainty that Muslims were behind the explosion. The bomber was, of course, all-American boy Timothy McVey.
Today, we have news of a terrible crime in Tucson, Arizona…
(CNN) — Six people were killed and 12 others wounded — including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — in a shooting outside a Tucson, Arizona, grocery store where the congresswoman was holding a constituent meeting, police said.
The suspect in the shooting was in custody, according to U.S. Capitol Police, who did not identify the alleged gunman.
The shooting happened at a supermarket where Giffords was meeting with constituents. She is still in surgery as I write this. Unlike Carr, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions about the suspect.
Follow-up: The alleged shooter is 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, of Tucson. This YouTube video was supposedly made by him.
You mentioned health care, and that fits in with this whole issue of Gabby Giffords. Her glass office door was smashed right after she voted for the health care package. And she was not the only politician who experienced something like that immediately after the vote. Coincidental? Just a burglary attempt, maybe? Yeah, could be… and maybe not…
The health care debate of this year fanned the flames of political partisanship even higher. The hysteria, the screaming, got a lot worse as this issue was… uh, I was going to say “discussed.” But what actually happened in some cases between political leaders and their constituents back in their home states, is that hecklers badly disrupted respectful and meaningful dialogue from taking place.
I will tell you from recent and shocking personal experience, that denial of adult health insurance coverage is still going on, for conditions that are quite minimal. I had an application in for individual insurance with what I consider the most universally accepted and most widely known health carrier in the USA. I was turned down flat. I do not have, nor have I ever had any form of cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, nor any other debilitating condition or disease that falls into the serious or high risk category for health, nor things that are very expensive to treat. My internist calls me a basically healthy person; my most recent blood work he said was “perfect.”
What I am is simply middle-aged, and like any normal, average person my age, I have and have had some relatively minor things that were treated in my life, a number of which are resolved. The application demands to know everything about you, in every body system from head to toe, in detail for the last 10 years, and beyond that wants to know other things that you have ever had in your entire lifetime. Who isn’t going to have some things to list? Except for the very young, perhaps. The application warns you that if you omit anything, you can be denied coverage and terminated from your policy with the carrier, if they find out.
My point in telling this is, God help Americans who lose their jobs and GROUP health insurance. COBRA is a very expensive kind of temporary “bridge” insurance to tide you over to either: 1) getting another job THAT OFFERS YOU HEALTH BENEFITS (good luck with finding a new job, and with health benefits, too, my friends!), or 2) purchasing your own individual health insurance policy, as I tried to do unsucessfully very recently.
Your other option is to roll the dice without ANY health insurance at all for at least 6 months, in order to be eligible for a government health policy. Feel healthy, and thus lucky??? God help you if in those 6 months, you have a bad accident in your car or elsewhere that isn’t someone else’s fault you can sue them for, to pay your medical bills.
Now, I understand that there are a lot of things that Republicans don’t like about “Obamacare,” and those like Gabby Giffords who decided to vote for it, were hated for doing so. Since, very plainly, bipartisanship doesn’t work anymore in this country on much of anything of substance, – what is the wonderful Republican health care plan, that would provide compassionale care at a reasonable cost to average, middle-class Americans like me, struggling to buy my own coverage?
Nice analogy about the house, Lizzie. With the GOP determined to roll back Wall Street regulation and the health care insurance mandate, I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, talking to Boss Jim Taylor, who has a rigged an appropriations bill for his own financial gain:
And so, we have political gridlock of opinions, both in Washington, and around the country. Preserving the status quo doesn’t preserve anything, in the sense that if you “do nothing” to keep up or make improvements in your house, it will fall into more and more disrepair, bit by bit.
Wall Street loves political gridlock, however. The Street doesn’t like any wild cards of unpredictability. When nothing is being accomplished on Capitol Hill other than perhaps screaming, Wall Street feels much safer. Except, of course, when it gets itself in trouble… then change (in the form of bailouts) becomes a good thing.
I agree that “Worst Persons in the World” on “Countdown” needs to go away — again. Because it stoops to Bill O’Reilly’s level. I wasn’t pleased when Olbermann brought the segment back after a brief hiatus, following the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. I not only heard Olbermann’s criticism of Scott Brown, I wrote about it at the time:
http://www.dograt.com/2010/01/22/get-olber-it-mann/
Obama was wrong to use the knife-gun analogy during the 2008 campaign, but I’m pretty sure he backed off of that and apologized, although I recall he blamed it on a lack of sleep, etc., which was no excuse. But Obama apologized, and Olbermann apologized. Saying you don’t believe his apology is fine, but at least he did it.
In 2008 there was an instance of “targeting” in relation to Giffords and other Democrats on Daily Kos, a liberal site that I don’t follow.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/25/1204/74882/511/541568
Is this the same as actually putting crosshairs over a district? Maybe, but my point is that Giffords specifically complained about the use of the crosshairs in Palin’s materials. Either they didn’t know about Giffords’ concern or they dismissed it.
Olbermann succeeded where Phil Donahue didn’t, just as Jon Stewart succeeded where Craig Kilborn didn’t. Olbermann and Stewart have differences of opinion, more on style than substance, and despite Olbermann’s arrogance and bombast, I really don’t see him as being on the verge of any sort of breakdown. As far as I know, he was never a drug user like Glenn Beck was, who often seems to be overwrought to the point of being on the verge of a breakdown, but this could just be an act that he’s borrowed from televangelists.
Doug,
But did you and the liberal media get as upset when Obama said, “If they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun?” How about Olbermann’s ridiculous “Worst Person In The World” segments…did they inspire love or did they inspire hate? Olbermann seems to be a ranting-mental case on the verge of a breakdown every time I’ve watched him (admittedly, I do not watch him much because I think he’s a nut-job hate-spewer.) Did you ever hear his vitriolic tirade about Scott Brown? I know he “apologized” later…but I don’t believe for a second that he was being sincere in his apology. As for this crazy killer in Arizona, two people who knew him actually described him as “very liberal” in his politics…I assume more will be discovered over time but so far, there is NO evidence that he was ever influenced or even, ever heard Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. But the media immediately started pushing out the idea that he was right-wing Tea Partier. Anyone who believes in truth should be contacting ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC, and demand that they correct their erronious “reporting.” But…I’m not expecting that this will happen because the “left” is eager to pin this on the “right.” Truth isn’t that important to the radical left (or the radical right either)…It’s all about ideology. The ends justify the means. It’s war. Very sad….
Paul — Based on what is Loughner a left-wing radical? It isn’t clear to me that Loughner even acted out of a purely political motivation. All that’s certain to me is he’s crazy. John Lennon’s killer was, after all, an admirer of his victim. Until I hear more, I’m assuming it’s possible that Loughner had a romantic obsession with Giffords, and he acted on the impulse that, “if I can’t have her, nobody can.”
I was intrigued by the press conference with Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, when he pointed to poison politics as being at the root of the shooting. I wondered if he knew something about the alleged killer’s motives, but it seems he was speaking purely out of a sense of outrage and humanity.
You are right about the antiwar radicals in the 1960’s and 70’s being violent. My eldest sister was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, when radicals bombed a building there in August 1970, and I remember the panic we felt in our family. But most of the protesters weren’t in the SDS or Weather Underground, they were just college kids who, like Walter Cronkite, were opposed to the Vietnam War. Sit-ins were not violent acts.
You and I disagree about Olbermann. He gives Fox News some badly needed push-back, he does nothing to incite hatred in me, and he keeps religion out of his politics; which is where Glenn Beck, a convert to Mormonism, is so wrong, wrong, wrong. So is Sarah Palin. Whether or not Loughner listened to Beck and/or Olbermann is immaterial to Palin’s use of a graphic with “Democratic targets” in the crosshairs simply being wrong, wrong, wrong to do.
As you now know, many in the media immediately assumed the killer was a right-wing Tea Party guy when in fact, he was a deranged left-wing radical. Hate-spewing Keith Olbermann predominantly blames right-wing idealogues (with a small admission that he has also said things that were inflammatory) when in fact, his mental rantings probably cause more violent hate. It is highly unlikely that the killer listened to Glenn Beck…his postings and links indicate that he listened to, and watched, left-wing haters like Olbermann. Over the past 5 decades, most violent acts were committed by radical leftists (remember the 1960s?) The entire political process needs to tone everything down about 10 notches, but most of the media is looking in the wrong direction to find blame for most of the hate.
I think we need to rethink where our politicians hold their political meetings with constituents, in order to better protect them. Perhaps it needs to be indoors in order to have better crowd control, with options considered such as metal detectors. Inconvenient? Absolutely! But look what we’ve been doing for a long time now, regarding aircraft security. Various protective measures are often taken at court houses and in schools, for example. Unfortunately, these are the times we live in.