And rightly so:
Loughner’s pistol was probably still warm when Krugman wheeled into print in an effort to make political capital out of the tragedy. “Assassination Attempt in Arizona” should join that rogues’ gallery of disgusting Times stories that wallow in the gutter of political innuendo and mendacity even as they preen themselves on their exhibition of holier-than-thou virtue.
The folks at Powerline instantly got to the crux of the matter with The Contemptible Krugman, noting that he was among the first to “seek political advantage from mass murder.” Krugman’s column, they show, belongs to the Lillian Hellman species of utterance as described by Mary McCarthy: everything he wrote is a lie, including “and” and “the.” “We don’t have proof yet that this was political,” Krugman begins, “but the odds are that it was.”
Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
[. . .]
. . . fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.
See also John Hayward, The Climate of Krugman. And don't miss Pat Buchanan, Poisonous Politics.
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