Shameless Prejudice and Bigotry

Lawmakers: Time to cool the political fury - CNN.com

Certainly "prejudice and bigotry" are bad, but to equate them with 'political rhetoric" and somehow attempt to link a guy that believes in some form of mind control from the government as somehow being related to the Tea Party or any other sort of political movement that might want a smaller government is just one more sign of how common prejudice and bigotry are.

I remember well when Ronald Reagan was shot. I personally knew multiple people that were convinced that Reagan was going to "get us all nuked", and all sorts of crazy articles about his "Dangerous Cowboy attitude" and "Nobody builds a bunch of nuclear weapons unless they plan to use them" sorts of gibberish were being spewed. Even by 1985, the left was at least claiming to STILL be extremely afraid of nuclear war, and not at all above heated rhetoric and dramatizations that claimed that the policies being followed were going to get us all killed. Last I checked, we are still here and the USSR isn't exactly in the ascendancy. Apparently Hinkley was actually in love with a movie actress and trying to impress her when he shot Reagan, but I didn't hear much concern for movies contributing to insanity at that point either.

During the Bush Administration, we had "Fahrenheit 9-11" and "The Assassination of George Bush", along with regular marches and protests about the two wars still going on and Gitmo. The two wars are still in progress and Gitmo is still open, so I think it is pretty safe to say that all the heated rhetoric on those subjects was very much about politics and a prejudice much more against Bush than the supposed targets.

Were one actually anxious to "cool the political fury" rather than to shamelessly use a tragic action by an obviously mentally unstable individual to further expose your prejudice and bigotry against political views that might disagree with yours, this would be a GREAT time to leave politics out of it and just mourn the victims and maybe say a little prayer for the mentally ill young man and his family as well.