I have spent the last two days in Barbados and Domenica, so I have not had access to all of the news sources that I usually peruse, but what I have seen of the coverage of the Arizona shootings has puzzled me. The gloom and doom emanating from the commentators make this event into a "game changer" for the country. It is as if this is the end of the world as we know it. On MSNBC (yes I actually watched it) they were discussing the shooting as the result of the current nature of poltical discourse in the country. From what I can tell, the shooter was not political but rather was just another nut job. I was contrasting the reaction on TV with the one that followed the shooting at Fort Hood where more than twice as many people were killed by Major Hassan in a terrorist attack. The coverage that I recall after that attack was mostly warnings against premature decisions that this had anything to do with terrorism as well as justifications as to why Major Hassan would do such a thing.
I do not want to indicate that I condone in any way the attack in Arizona, but I don't think it was on a par with the Fort Hood shooting. The major acted in furtherance of his twisted quai-religious philosophy. The Arizona shooter seems just to be mentally unstable.
Maybe it means more to the progressive TV commentators that in the Fort Hood shooting only soldiers (who they do not like) were killed, while in Arizona one of the wounded was a Congresswoman.
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