Please read the comments and feel free to join in...I do not agree with this, but found it an interesting, if not jaded, opinion.

Thank goodness the shooter wasn't Muslim

By Doug Lyons January 11, 2011 01:38 PMBy Rachel Patron

My first thought upon hearing about the murders in Tucson was "I hope it's not a Muslim." All we need now is to unleash more Muslim-terrorist hatred.

Thankfully, the killer, Jared Loughner, is not a Muslim, but a paranoid-schizophrenic younger version of Ted Kaczynski.

The problem for the right wing after the shooting was that the gravely wounded Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, is a Democrat, and Sarah Palin's 2010 "election map" -- still displayed on her Facebook -- puts the congresswoman and her district in a rifle's cross hairs. To preempt and respond to the Left's onslaught, the Right came up with ingenious talking points:

1. Why does President Obama call for a moment of silence for the Arizona shootings -- but not for the 13 innocents murdered at Ft. Hood? Aha! say the far Right because President Obama is a Muslim-lover and will excuse anything done by followers of the Prophet Muhammed.

2. Hollywood is to blame for this violence! How? Who cares, Hollywood can be blamed for everything from mass murder to the heartbreak of psoriasis. To substantiate this claim, Rush Limbaugh suggests that everyone watch the recent movie "Machete," in which an illegal immigrant from Mexico -- whose first name is literally Machete -- plunges the State of Texas into buckets, pools, oceans of blood. Clearly a must-see.

3.The true villain of the piece is Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, since in the recent past he had refused to enforce Arizona's new Immigration Law; and now, in response to the shooting, has been vocal in denouncing the climate of hatred in America.

The Democrats and the liberals have behaved only a little better than the rightists -- having the moral advantage that the victims were their congresswoman and her constituents. The gunfire in Arizona plunging the nation into an emotional whirlwind we should not be subjected to in these difficult times. It was therefore fitting for the Democrats to point out that the vitriolic rhetoric of the right and the ultra-right, accented with conspiracy theories and satanic verses -- might have contributed to the bloodbath.

Unfortunately, Democrats went over the edge of both sincerity and reason. For example, today MSNBC is stretching this story out into a fifth news cycle. Every Democrat already had a chance to be interviewed -- even the recently-censured Congressman Charles Rangel of New York. Again and again they connect the mental-case shooter to the loony minions of the Republican right.

In this fashion, both Democrats and Republicans blew an opportunity for national empathy, so tragically extended to them by the events in Tucson.

Rachel Patron is a writer based in Boca Raton, Fla. She writes a regular column for the Sun Sentinel, and her e-mail address is rachel_patron@yahoo.com.
http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/op ... r_was.html