ARIZONA – AT 10:20 A.M. ET:  There will be briefings later today on the condition of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and the suspect will also appear in court later today.  From what we can gather, no change has been reported in Ms. Giffords's condition.  She is stil in Intensive Care, in critical condition.

An overnight report from a local station in Arizona said that the congresswoman was awake and speaking with family, but we have seen nothing to back that up.

There has been an outburst of vulgarity on the political left, claiming that this all happened because of "right-wing rhetoric," with some grossly irresponsible commentators blaming Sarah Palin.  We'll have more about this later, but Byron York, in a superb Washington Examiner piece that I commend to you, contrasts this vulgarity with the endless cautions that were issued after Major Nidal Hassan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009.  One commentator after another warned us about jumping to conclusions, even though the background and motivation of the murderer were obvious from the first moment.   York writes:

Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

Now, even though we know so very little about yesterday's shooter, the left is out making all kinds of wild statements about his motive.  Shame, shame.  York:

Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.

COMMENT:  I hope that conservatives have the backbone to blast the wild irresponsibility that we're seeing, but I doubt it.

January 9, 2010