Less than 24 hours after Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at a constituent gathering by a 22-year-old high school drop-out nutburger named Jared Loughner, the screeching heads on the left seeking political gain from the tragedy were so loud that Ms. Giffords might have been able to hear them even though Doctors had her in an induced coma. (As this is written, she is still clinging to life.)
First out of the box was Pima County (Tucson) Arizona Sheriff Clarance Dupnik.
During a briefing on what had happened to the media, this guy who styles himself as the anti-Joe Arpaio said:
“Let me say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that,” the sheriff said during the briefing. “That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”
During an interview earlier in the day that aired on MSNBC via local NBC affiliate KPNX, Dupnik declared that “it’s time that this country take a little introspective look at the crap that comes out on radio and TV.”
As opposed, of course, to the crap which comes out of that self-righteous Sheriff’s mouth.
It happens that I owned five talk radio stations in 1995 in the great state of Oklahoma when Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, killing 168 people. The left-wing rhetoric was almost exactly the same.
Let me tell you what my then afternoon host, Pat Richardson, told a world-wide audience the next morning when a self-righteous twit from New York City asked what we in Oklahoma had told the children.
“I’ll tell you what I told my three-year-old,” said Pat. “I said to my three-year-old that some nutcase blew up a building and we don’t do that in our family.”
The response from New York?
“That’s the worst of talk radio.”
Mind you that was almost 16 years ago.
So before all you self-righteous left-wing types get into high dudgeon over this tragedy, consider this:
Congresswoman Giffords may be a liberal Democrat but she is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.
Congresswoman Giffords’ last official act on the floor of Congress before this tragedy was to read the First Amendment as part of a GOP inspired reading of the Constitution for the first time ever on the House Floor. She crossed over party lines to join the Republicans to do so.
The shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic nut.
The same tragedy could happen to any 16 people anywhere in the United States precisely because we have a free and open society.
In short, whatever happens in the future with Congresswoman Giffords’ medical situation, she is not and will never be a poster child for shutting down talk radio and conservative commentators on TV which is really what Sheriff Dupnik was screeching about.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Those were Congresswoman Gifford’s last words on the House Floor before she was shot.
We would hope blowhards like the Lord High Sheriff of Pima County don’t continue to try and make a mockery of that.
