Two Events In Tucson

Sickening.
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Human Events

"Two events were held concurrently at the University of Arizona in Tucson on Wednesday night. One of them was a memorial service for the dead and wounded from Jared Loughner’s rampage on Saturday. This event went quite well. The other was an embarrassing political pep rally, held before a mob of rowdy kids whose cell phone numbers were likely harvested by the Obama campaign at rock concerts in 2008.

The undisciplined audience was bad enough to provoke criticism from observers across the political spectrum, and that leads to some questions. It is said that the event organizers cannot be blamed for the behavior of the crowd. Is that really true? They staged this thing like a pep rally, complete with rush-week T-shirts bearing the rock-concert name of the event, “Together We Thrive.” Organizers could have prepared the crowd by insisting on silence during the speeches, and making sure the kids understood the gravity of attending a memorial service that would be viewed by the entire world.

President Obama gave a good speech. The most anticipated, and problematic, passage was his call for a return to civility in politics. “What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,” he declared. Sorry, Mr. President, but a vast segment of your supporters has already done that. Admonishing every part of the political spectrum to avoid “pointing fingers and assigning blame” is horribly disingenuous. Barack Obama is not a centrist wandering into a partisan squabble and offering a hand of peace to both sides. He’s a hard-core liberal, and the hard Left has been doing all of the finger-pointing during this drama, beginning within minutes of the shooting.

There was never any political dimension to the awful story of a deranged loner who tried to assassinate a woman he was obsessed with, killing six other people in the attempt. The only reason we are discussing the nature of our discourse in connection with the case is because the Left manufactured that connection out of thin air.

There’s no reason Obama couldn’t have delivered this fine speech last Sunday, when it would have made a real difference. That would have been leadership. What we saw tonight was a solid performance. Those are two very different things.

— John Hayward