America: Just A Crazy Little Girl

The pundits find U.S. reaction to the Tucson shootings not so encouraging.

“If America were a person, it would be a 14-year-old girl,” writes the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente of the national reaction to the shootings in Tucson. “The media are treating the shooting of a minor politician by a crazed gunman … as an existential moment in America’s life.” Wente gauges that a far more important assassination, but one largely ignored by self-insulated Americans, was the murder of Pakistani governor Salman Taseer last week. While Wente says the Tucson shooting is not a sign that the U.S. is about to collapse, popular support for Taseer’s assassination among Pakistan’s strict Muslims is indication that the strategically vital country is edging towards disaster. “But Sarah Palin has no part in it. So, really, who cares?” writes Wente.

The Globe's editorial board regrets that, despite its “eloquence and poetry,” Barack Obama’s unity speech last night did not include any mention of “the cancer of handgun worship and violence in America … A call to rein in America's gun obsession was, sadly, left unsaid.” Like many Canadians, we in The Mark Newsroom cannot fathom the U.S. firearms cult and so we’re sympathetic with the Globe’s argument. But the fact is, in America you cannot call for unity and talk about gun control at the same time. If Obama is to tackle the issue, which he should, it’s going to take a concerted, divisive effort.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s Bogdan Kipling takes a healthy run at left-wing U.S. media, accusing them of an “ethical collapse” for rushing to blame Jared Lee Loughner’s crimes on right-wing rhetoric. “They pinned this misleading tag of political responsibility pretty much en masse, and within minutes of the shooting,” he writes, calling commentary in the Washington Post and New York Times “blatant partisanship.” The fact that Sarah Palin is clearly not to blame for Tucson aside, for Kipling to single out left-wing media for rushing to judgment obscures the fact that, from “groupthink” on Iraq to reporting on “death panels,” journalistic standards across the spectrum have been lowered to depressing levels by the U.S. 24-hour news cycle.