Vitriol

I hope the Arizona shooting provides us with the opportunity to take it all down a notch and begin agreeably disagreeing.  I’m not super hopeful, because it depends partly on a lot of political pundits changing their rhetoric.  And when one can make big dolla dolla billz talking out of your hat and calling people tyrants and evil and a threat to our way of life, riling up the masses, crazy people’s potential literal interpretations be damned, it would take a surfeit of character to change tack.

And oh – what a surprise!  Rush Limbaugh’s website is telling the elite liberal media to stop picking on poor Sarah Palin and her crosshairs graphic.  As if we’re talking about that one isolated instance of bad judgment, instead of the rhetoric as a whole.  As if anybody thinks that graphic alone is the cause of this incident.  Rush Limbaugh’s got a lot of something (money?  anger?  pissed off conservative listeners?), but apparently character ain’t it.