In a weird way, I actually gained a little respect for Megyn Kelly of Fox News after watching this interview she conducted yesterday with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the man in charge of local law enforcement in the handling of Saturday's shooting in Tucson.
I intensely dislike her, and her point of view, but I respect her because watching this I can see she's really invested in her point of view, for whatever reason, and there is a basic, real logic in what she's saying. It really isn't a sheriff's place, in a situation like this, to insert politics. Even if Loughner really was incited by right wing rhetoric (and I suspect he was to at least some extent) to commit murder, it's not the sheriff's place to assert this without hard evidence. You're on treacherous ground when you allow law enforcement to be partisan. The sheriff looks even shakier as he's evidently not a great speaker and failed to bring up concrete examples like the now quite infamous Sarah Palin website which put crosshairs over a picture of Giffords, among other politicians, with the caption "Don't Retreat; Reload."
But if prominent politicians and commentators, like this one;
are using unambiguously threatening speech, they ought to at least be on the radar of law enforcement. If a sheriff isn't going to say this sort of rhetoric is irresponsible, who will? Keith Olbermann? Certainly, and he put it wonderfully, but very few people on the right are going to be swayed by him.
Howard Stern made an interesting point this morning about how Sarah Palin's insistence that any apparent fault in her rhetoric is absolved by her intentions is funny when considering she was quite eager to cause a scandal about a pretty harmless joke told by David Letterman.
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