Talk Radio-The Conservative Version Of Rap Music

A week ago today, tragedy struck a church in Knoxville, Tennessee. A man, armed with a shotgun and a fanny pack full of shells, entered the church while children were giving a musical concert and opened fire. Two people were killed and several others were injured.

I had pointed out what I still consider to be a very thoughtful post by grumps, and had left it at that.

Initially, after the shooting, it was immediately known that he had targeted the church because of their more liberal teachings, including a tolerance and acceptance of homosexuals. It was later learned that the shooter was also an avid listener and reader of conservative ranters like Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Bloggers and talk radio have been going on about the shooting and the findings most of the week. Even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel picked only two blogs for today's Best of the Blogs, one from James Rowen and one from Rick Esenberg, to highlight the two sides of the issue.

They're both correct. And they're both wrong.

This guy obviously wasn't mentally stable to begin with. Reports indicate that he had a poor work record and couldn't hold down a job. Whether the mental imbalance led to the poor job record, or the poor job record led to the mental imbalance is not known. Regardless of how the causal relationship goes, talk radio did not cause his anger at the world. But it did definitely give this guy a focus for his anger.

Talk radio has continuously put the blame of every woe known to man on liberals, Democrats, or anyone that doesn't conform to their way of thinking.

Gas prices too high? Blame the Democrats, ignoring the fact that the Republicans owned the White House and both houses in Congress for six years and did absolutely nothing.

Having a hard time making ends meet? Blame the Democrats for raising your taxes $12 dollars, while ignoring that electricity, natural gas, health insurance, etc. have gone up exponentially every year, with the help of both parties.

The list goes on.

So, here we have a guy with either a mental illness and/or unmanageable stress being told that liberals are to blame for all of his problems. Is anyone really surprised that when the guy did snap, he went after liberals?

There are two real ironic twists from the right regarding this. One is that they are more than willing to through Michael Savage under the bus, in order to defend the likes of Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling, and Rush Limbaugh, who are no better than Savage. So much for their sense of loyalty. It's only a matter of time before the others get thrown under the wheels, one at a time.

The other irony is that every time, every single time, that there is a shooting or other violent crime, the right is awfully quick to blame rap music and video games. Sorry, folks, but you can't have it both ways. Either both talk radio and rap music have an influence on people's behaviors, or neither do.

As for me, I'm in with the "both" crowd.