How The Hippies Lied About It

by DAVID BROOKS

Darn, those rascally hippies! First they invent Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, and the Federal Drug Administration--and now they lie about the shooting of Ms. Giffords.  Have they no shame?




Instantly they blame the heated rhetoric of violence-laden imagery and death threats emanating from everywhere on the right--while suppressing the truth that this was a crime committed by man with a severe mental illness.  Almost as though no one knew anything about this man before he shot a congresswoman.  Imagine that?  And there are roughly 30,000 articles so far listed on Google News on this topic, so you have to question as to whether or not I really had the time to parse all of this data.  And just because a sheriff is spouting off, blaming 'rhetoric', proved or unproved (and yes, impossible to prove--it's not like the Divine Cultural Transmission I'm always going on about) doesn't mean you have to report it! Fox News would never report unsubstantiated opinion as fact!

So anyway, in spite of our spineless GOP-endorsed gun-regulations, IRS-plane-flying-into-of and general all around hate speech...none of that means that anyone on the right-wing is in anyway responsible for anything.  Especially not anything that goes wrong in this country.

Perhaps one day, we'll have some sort of centralized system of governance of some kind that will allow us to establish some kind of mental health safety net...a place where we could send them for help...we could call it, "Australia" or perhaps "Penitentiary".  Well, that's just a pipe dream, but as John Lennon might have said (had he not been shot in the head), "Who knows?"  Guess I'm just a cock-eyed dreamer after all.





David Brooks