Today's Shooting in Alexandria, Virginia

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com


Is this a case of the chickens coming home to roost? Perhaps.

It is always tricky to assign the blame for an act of violence on rhetoric unless the words and violence happen in immediate concert. But we have a 66-year-old man who took a rifle to a park where congressional Republicans were practicing for a traditional baseball game against Democrats. Once he confirmed that the men on the field were Republicans he began shooting and wounded five before being taken out by Capitol Police. As I write, Congressman Steve Scalise (R) is in critical condition.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/06/14/virginia-gop-baseball-practice-shooting-multiple-people-shot.html

As a side note, this appears to the the second recent case of assault with a deadly weapon by a Bernie Sanders supporter. The other incident was in Portland, Oregon, where a white nationalist stabbed two people to death who intervened when he was berating a couple of Muslim women. Do we condemn all Sanders supporters for this violence or the senator himself? Of course not, but the left needs to take a hard look at itself in their collective mirrors.

We should also take a close look at the rhetoric by Democrats and the media when it comes to President Trump and his supporters. Maxine Waters, in particular, has used rhetoric that-at least last Sunday in Los Angeles- bordered on inciting insurrection, in my view. CNN has surpassed even MSNBC in its daily, non-stop demonization of Trump. Their reporting is reckless and often inaccurate. They have their first amendment right and criticizing the president is a healthy part of American democracy. What is not healthy is throwing objectivity to the wind and painting the president and his team as inherently evil people who must be removed from power. As an example, this issue of Trump team collusion with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton is being beaten to death even though the investigators have publicly stated they have found no evidence of such collusion.

Donald Trump has his share of flaws, but being an evil man is not one of them as he is being portrayed. Many of his subordinates, most notably Steve Bannon, have been unjustly called Nazis and other names.

We are a badly divided nation, and many on the right do not speak or act for me. But this latest act of violence, coupled with the rise of ANTIFA, is very troubling. Would it surprise anyone if President Trump were one day the target of an assassination attempt? I well remember the last one ( I was 18 when Kennedy was assassinated.) In my opinion, this nation has never recovered from the shock. It seems we have been going downhill ever since. Now we face an enemy every bit as evil as Nazism. That is radical Islam, which seeks to destroy us and our freedoms. More than ever we need to come together as a nation and set aside these political and ethnic differences which are being magnified out of all proportion.