Apparently Bill Kristol thinks appropriating tragic events for political use is really terrible:
Conservatives are circling their wagons around Sarah Palin and other incendiary figures on the right in the wake of Saturday's shooting spree in Arizona. The latest is Weekly Standard editor, and Palinisto Bill Kristol, who said that Palin's critics are practicing "McCarthyism."
On C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" Monday morning, Kristol claimed there's no evidence to suggest that shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner is an acolyte of Palin's. "The attempt to exploit this tragedy is distasteful," Kristol said.
I have a few reactions to this -- one being that it's funny to hear conservatives use the word "McCarthyism" negatively since so many of them actually believe that Joseph McCarthy was right and that there was nothing wrong with him ruining people's lives with scurrilous accusations. McCarthyism is a form of political discourse at which Kristol excels -- having personally been involved in accusing Justice Department lawyers of being sympathetic to terrorists and Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak of being a friend of Hamas. McCartythism is William Kristol's native language.
The Weekly Standard was at the forefront of exploiting the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 by drawing a false connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. Conservatives spent the last summer waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 to oppose everything from civilian trials of terrorists to the property rights of American Muslims, and there's been no end to the exploitation of images of 9/11 for the purposes of conservative political pageantry.
I'm not confining this critique to Kristol -- immigration restrictionists used the possibility that the murder of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was caused by an illegal immigrant to push for harsher immigration laws, even though it's now unclear that an immigrant was even responsible.
This can sometimes be tacky, but the point is that politics is how democratic societies deal with public problems. Conservatives are accusing liberals of "exploiting the tragedy" not because they think it's wrong to exploit tragedies but because they're going to have a hard time exploiting this one.
