Yet More on The Left's Mission To Tie The Arizona Mass Murder To Sarah Palin & The Tea Partiers

Prof. Glen Reynolds, writing at the WSJ, asks "where is the decency in blood libel?"

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?

This from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO:

For every apparently right-wing Timothy McVeigh there is a left-wing Ted Kaczynski; both exhibited a sort of mental derangement in their braggadocio about extreme politics. The Sixties culture of drugs, permissiveness, national liberation, radical politics, and environmentalism no more made the Palestinian extremist Sirhan Sihran assassinate Bobby Kennedy, or Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme try to kill President Ford, or pop socialist and cult preacher the Rev. Jim Jones order the execution of Rep. Leo Ryan, or Arthur Bremmer shoot the “segregationist dinosaur” George Wallace, than right-wing politics drove on the equally deranged Jared Lee Loughner.

At PJM, for the apparent benefit of Paul Krugman, Roger Kimball has amassed a short history of left-wing "hate speech," including the use bull's eyes to target Republicans. And I would be remiss indeed if I did not mention this post from Dr. Sanity, discussing the sickness in the mind of Jared Loughner as well as the sickness in the soul of a leftwing nutjob who, in the wake of Loughner's mass murder, e-mailed Dr. Sanity to say "This is what comes of spewing hate, you fascist pig!." Talk about irony.