OK, conservatives, maybe it wasn’t your rhetoric. Shut up anyway.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords continues to improve.  She blew past “miraculous” days ago.  Best wishes and prayers for continued progress, ma’am.

In its relentless efforts to cast this tragedy as a logical consequence of conservative political rhetoric, a significant portion of the American Left has behaved deplorably.  These efforts are:

• Shamefully disrespectful to the memories of the fallen, the plights of the injured, and the emotions of all those who love them.
• Distracting the country from a meaningful conversation about mental health care—a cause that should know no political stripe, and an eminently plausible candidate issue for the unity they claim to crave.
• Wholly unsupported by any examination of the facts, whether casual or sustained.
• Breathtakingly hypocritical, and demonstrable of a near-total lack of self-awareness.

It has been—and continues to be, in some quarters, despite Obama’s mostly spot-on cease-and-desist directive at an otherwise thoroughly bizarre “memorial” service—the reaction of a cornered and scared animal, completely unencumbered by reason or reflection.  That is the only explanation that makes any sense.  They’re still bleeding from November, they have no position that resonates with a majority of the American people (actually they hate most of them; see this hilarious David Kahane gem), they’re scared to death of Sarah Palin, and…well, there you go.

(Speaking of ol’ Caribou Barbie, what of her?  After being pummeled with 96 straight hours of libel and slander, how dare that redneck bimbo make a statement that addresses it?  Sheesh.)

There can no longer be any illusion that American liberals possess any genuine respect for considered disagreement.  (Doubtless there are individual exceptions, but not enough to matter.  Call me when you can hear the reasonable liberal’s voice among the lynch mob, okay?  Oh, my goodness gracious me—I just used the term “lynch mob.”)

Whether you consider yourself Republican, conservative, libertarian, some combination, or whatever, if you hold political positions to the right of mainstream liberal thought, then you are not to be accommodated in any way.  You are to be silenced.  From the mouth of a liberal, “let’s restore civility to our political discourse” means “shut up, you radical right-wing nut.”

You see, conservatives are “(short-circuiting) debate or (changing) the subject rather than (engaging) the arguments of their critics.”  That the “arguments of their critics” have no basis in fact is immaterial.  See, after the Obama speech, the line is different, but no more reasonable.  Now it seems to be “conservatives, whether your hateful rhetoric had anything to do with the Tucson massacre isn’t as important as what we’re going to do about your hateful rhetoric anyway.”  Fairness Doctrine?  Yeah, someone’s polished that up and trotted it out too.

Shut up, conservatives.  You’re just messing everything up.

Is the liberal message really any more complicated than that?

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