Point / Counterpoint

Brent Bozell on the massacre in Tucson:

The star of the media's Smearing Olympics was Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat who rushed to the readily available media microphones to proclaim the shooting was the natural outgrowth of hot "anti-government" talkers, that "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from the people in the radio business and some people in the TV business" was to blame

Brent Bozell on a television ad for Doritos:

[N]ever underestimate the ability of some people to go too far, where talent and imagination are rejected for sophistry and shock....

Oh, I'm sure they knew there would be outraged Christians, but there would also be a "free media" bounce, as in some "buzz" on the Internet.

Michelle Malkin on the massacre in Tucson:

Despite desperate attempts by the progressive left to pin the massacre on the "harsh tone" of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.

Michelle Malkin on rap music:

What kind of relief do we get from this deadening, coarsening, dehumanizing barrage from young, black rappers and their music-industry enablers who have helped turn America into Tourette’s Nation?

Janice Shaw Crouse on the massacre in Tucson:

In a pseudo-sophisticated culture that is put off by the notion of the existence of evil, commentators have to go on a witch hunt to find someone to blame when the human capacity to replicate Cain’s murderous behavior becomes glaringly obvious.

Janice Shaw Crouse on promiscuous sex:

As promiscuous sex has become “normalized” — thanks in part to Hollywood’s incessant push to expand the borders of the sexual revolution — the percentage of children born outside of marriage from 1970 to 2006 has mushroomed.

Maggie Gallagher on the massacre in Tucson:

[I]s our climate of hate so entrenched that rather than seek solutions we prefer to say this is yet another reason to hate Sarah Palin?

Maggie Gallagher on Kate Michelmen's responsibility for the murder of a 7-year-old child:

[T]he feminist leaders of Kate Michelman's generation, still painfully peddling sexual liberation as a path to empowerment for women, have never accepted responsibility for the carnage that has been unleashed in feminism's name.

Michael Reagan on the massacre in Tucson:

In Dubnik's twisted logic, Loughner may be a murderer but somehow or other it's all Rush's fault for his unforgivable habit of calling a spade a spade and referring to liberals as being mentally disjointed as the majority of them are.

Michael Reagan on the decline of civility:

The America in which I grew up had standards, and people’s public behavior was judged by how well they measured up to those standards. One was expected to toe the line when it came to the way they communicated with one another....

In a society headed for the sewer, anything goes. And when anything goes -- when the most extreme forms of language and behavior come to be seen as normal -- civilization is transformed into barbarism.

Sarah Palin on the massacre on Tucson:

[J]ournalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Sarah Palin on the Obama administration's sacrifice of innocent children to its false gods:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

George Will on the massacre in Tucson:

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate."

George Will on valid moral norms:

[B]iology and environment interact. And the social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire....

[C]onfusion can flow from the notion that normality is always obvious and normative, meaning preferable. And the notion that deviations from it should be considered "disorders" to be "cured" rather than stigmatized as offenses against valid moral norms.

Andrew McCarthy on the massacre in Tucson:

It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism.

Andrew McCarthy on the rhetoric that caused the violence in Tucson:

[E]lites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.

And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.