Stephen Steinlight emails: Hello,
This is the first of several pieces I’ll be forwarding responding to the sophomoric, cheap and ugly politicization by many in the mainstream/liberal media about “moral responsibility” for the monstrous tragedy in Tucson. The rush to judgment is not only unseemly but downright disgusting. It is a classic exercise in the post hoc fallacy.
I should note in passing that the Washington Post, which acquitted itself with rare restraint and thoughtfulness on this occasion, recently published an editorial making the entirely unsupported allegation that all the state legislators who wish to adopt laws in similar to Arizona’s SB1070 support the mass deportation of illegal aliens. No one across the entire spectrum in the political camp that opposes illegal immigration or amnesty supports such a preposterous idea. This monstrous red herring is used to vilify opponents and to cause respondents in push polls that offer only amnesty and mass deportation to choose amnesty.
To charge that legislators endorse the kind of policy only a Hitler or Stalin or contemporary believer in ethnic cleansing would support is to endulge in precisely the dangerous form of rhetoric which the K-Mart sociologists are now claiming somehow propelled the lunatic in Tucson. Yet this goes unnoticed, of course.
