Blaming Palin, Beck, et al...

The shooting in AZ is still being blamed on Tea Party fervor, and I can't understand why.

Olbermann has blamed Palin for the shooting, and has demanded that she apologize for her rantings or be dismissed from politics entirely. This coming from someone who routinely "cashes in" on the entertainment value that rhetoric and vitriolic phrasing provides a viewing/listening audience in this country.

This upsets me not because it does a disservice to Palin (or anyone else he might blame for the tragedy), but because it does such a disservice to the victims of this shooting. As time goes by, more and more evidence of the unbalanced nature of the shooter and his motives becomes available and a clearer image of the mindset behind the violence is seen... yet Olbermann is willing to ignore this in light of his own opinions and agendas, removing the responsibility of the shooter's actions and placing it on those that couldn't have had anything to do with it in the first place.

As the aftermath of this event unfolds before us all, we will get to see the real "liberal" in the likes of people such as Keith Olbermann (but not ONLY Olbermann...): people who are always willing to blame someone else or something else for failures in individual choices and responsibilities. It can't be solely the shooter's fault... there must be a root cause, an initial impetus that pushed him into bringing a handgun to a political rally and shooting a score of people. THAT is where the blame lies... not with the man behind the trigger.

I'm tempted to give him credit for retracting some of what he has said in the past as contributory to this sort of tragedy... but I don't think it was genuine at all. In fact, people like Olbermann routinely point their finger at the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, George Bush, et al and ignore the likes of Mike Malloy, who (almost every time I have ever listened to him) wish death and disease on anyone associated with traditional conservative lifestyles and views. He has advocated the "elimination" of people such as Cheney, Bush, Palin, and Rumsfeld because of the "crimes" they committed, he was glad to hear of Cheney's illness and hospitalization and hoped it would prove terminal, and has gone so far as to say that Palin needs to be "gang-raped" so she can know what people in Iraq and Afghanistan are feeling under US occupation (I heard him say this very recently on one of his broadcasts). Where is the call for HIS apology? Where is the vocal display of his outrage at THIS sort of rhetoric and vitriol?

Even the most out-spoken and opinionated conservative pundits and hosts have never said what the liberals have said. I have listened to a lot of Beck, Levin, Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reily, Wilkow, and Church... and none have ever advocated/wished for/looked forward to anything even remotely as ugly and hateful as I have heard from the liberal left... and that includes Olbermann. His "Worst Person in the World" segment gained him much in the ratings column, but did absolutely nothing to make him any more credible or rational in my eyes... and (seemingly) in the eyes of the rest of America, because he had to stop running it for the last several months.

Sure, conservatives use hyperbole as much as anyone, but it is far more rational and defensible than anything coming from the left. Wilkow (for example) loves to point to the Marxist manifesto as the foundation of Obama's view of what America should be... but he admits that Obama isn't a "Marxist" in the way he is a Democratic Party member. Many of Obama's views seem to parallel what Marx wrote about in his Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei all the way back in 1848... but parallels do not mean equals, and I'm sure there is no bigger supporter of a multi-party system of government then Barack Obama. Wilkow is a smart guy... he knows this and points out the parallels, but goes no further. Glenn Beck is another example. He is a real "doom and gloom" advocate lately... but he blames only the trend to liberalism, not any one person or even group of people the way liberals do to conservatives. His obsession with the fall of America into chaos and anarchy may be genuine and heart-felt... but if the mountains of "evidence" he offers don't satisfy you, he still listens to your views and counters and considers what you have to offer in return.

In short, from the right you are getting rational, reasonable debate and discussion (sprinkled liberally with hyperbole and emotion, I do not deny), while the left offers only one-sided opinions and mantras of past promises and dreams that cannot be supported by historical evidence as attainable goals or ends.

Who, then, is the real "problem starters" in this country, and who are the "problem solvers"?

I know which category I'm putting Keith Olbermann in...