Newt Gingrich has Huge Cajones

Posted by Mary Mancini on April 23, 2007 under Uncategorized |

Newt Gingrich wants to school me in morality. How dare he even try.

This morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Newt firmly entrenched himself yet again in the Rush Limbaugh camp and showed his true anti-Americanism by blaming the shooting in Virginia on Liberals. No, I am not kidding. And even though he didn’t make much sense, watching it live was like being kicked in the stomach.

Newt Gingrich still believes he can go on national television and point his adulterous and hypocritical finger to his fabricated and twisted definition of my belief system and people will listen to him. He still believes he has credibility. He still believes he is relevant.

It would be easy for me to go on the air and say that Seung-Hui Cho was a conservative gun nut whose mind was warped by the pressure of a paternalistic and unforgiving society that expected him to simply fall in line and do what he was told. But I wouldn’t dream of being that disrespectful to the victims, the victims’ families, the students of Virginia Tech, or half the population of this country. Nor would I dream of using this tragedy as a political football, which is what Gingrich, Limbaugh, Gill et al are doing.

Liberals believe in fairness, equality, opportunity, prosperity and security for all people, not just a select few. Liberals believe in the free exchange of ideas. Liberals believe in freedom of religion. Liberals believe in transparent and open government. Liberals believe in free and fair elections. Liberals believe that all citizens should have equal rights by law. Liberals believe that all citizen should have an equal opportunity to succeed.

I don’t know what Cho’s ideological beliefs were or even if he had any. But if I did, I certainly would respect the seriousness of this tragedy and not use it as a political football. Nor would I twist what he did for my own political gain.

UPDATE: I see that Tennessee’s own Terry Frank fell in line with her conservative buds. On April 17 (the day after the massacre), in a response to this quote in the Knoxville News Sentinel:

“I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident,” said 18-year-old Billy Bason, who lives in the residence hall where the first shootings occurred. “When you don’t have a suspect in a college environment and to put the students in a situation where they’re congregated in large numbers in open buildings, that’s unacceptable to me.”

She wrote:

“Yes, Billy, I agree. But then I have to question Billy, if life is really that big of an issue for the liberal intelligentsia in many of America’s colleges. Sex? Yes, big issue. Racism? Yes, big issue. Women’s studies? Yes, big issue. Global warming? Yes, big issue. Life? Not so big, Billy. That might explain the tepid response to the first shootings.

Ironically, the beginning of her post was about the “ghouls” who initiated “a gun-control debate” before we even knew all the details and before the dead had been identified.” So according to Terry, it’s not OK to talk about gun control the day after a horrific school shooting which left 32 innocent people dead (which I agree with) but it is ok to trot out your cowardly blame-the-victim conservative ideology?

Earth to Terry, some of the victims of last Monday’s events were your so-called “liberal intelligentsia.”