If you missed Charles Krauthammer’s diatribe from yesterday, it’s worth going back and taking a look. Even by his standards, Krauthammer sunk pretty low.
Oddly enough, his initial sentiment was an admirable one.
What can be said about the Virginia Tech massacre? Very little. What should be said? Even less. The lives of 32 innocents, chosen randomly and without purpose, are extinguished most brutally by a deeply disturbed gunman. With an event such as this, consisting of nothing but suffering and tragedy, the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice. Unfortunately, in today’s supercharged political atmosphere, there is the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage…. It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage.
So true, so true. It’s a genuine shame when anyone tries to exploit a tragedy to score political points or to push an ideological agenda.
In fact, I was particularly offended by one pundit who appeared on Fox News less than 48 hours after the shootings, arguing that the madman responsible for the slayings was connected to Al Jazeera, the Palestinians, and other Muslim enemies of the right.
“[I]f you look at that picture [of Cho Seung Hui], it draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers over the last half decade in Palestine, in Iraq and elsewhere,” the pundit said. “That’s what they end up leaving behind, either on al Jazeera or Palestinian TV. And he, it seems, as if his inspiration for leaving the message behind in that way, might have been this kind of suicide attack, which, of course, his was. And he did leave the return address return ‘Ismail Ax.’ ‘Ismail Ax.’ I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.”
The pundit, of course, was Charles Krauthammer. “Ideological mileage out of the carnage,” indeed.
As Glenn Greenwald explained:
What can one even say about a person this dishonest? While many individuals on both sides of the gun control issue quickly sought to depict these shootings as evidence of the rightness of their views, at least that issue has a clear connection to this incident.
But I don’t think that anyone exploited these shootings as crassly or as manipulatively — or as quickly — as Krauthammer did in order to link it to their own personal political agenda transparently remote from the actual incident. Is there a single individual anywhere who exploited these shootings more shamelessly for political gain than the person who ran on television before any facts were known to blame it on Al Jazeera, the Palestinians and the whole slew of Arab enemies that have long been his primary obsession?
I really always wonder in such cases — when Krauthammer went to write his column sternly lecturing all of us about how wrong it is to try to use the VT shootings to make political points, does he (a) somehow block out of his brain that, the very day before, he engaged in that exact behavior more extremely than virtually anyone else on the planet, or, does he (b) realize that he is stridently condemning the very behavior he engaged in most flamboyantly but proceed with the lecture anyway?
Shouldn’t the most minimal amounts of shame and basic self-awareness (if nothing else) prevent such transparent dishonesty?
I’d add just one thing: Krauthammer’s column not only contradicted the pundit’s rhetoric the day before, it also contradicted itself.
After Krauthammer devoted one paragraph to lamenting the “supercharged political atmosphere” in the wake of the tragedy, he then devoted three paragraphs to bashing gun-control advocates and five paragraphs to bashing Barack Obama.
Krauthammer concludes by recommending that we “agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.” He seemed woefully unaware of the irony.