Giffords is a Democrat who won reelection to her 3rd term by a fairly narrow margin against a Tea Party supported Republican. She also had had her offices in Tucson vandalized earlier last year.
Hearing this and the possibility that this may have been at least partially politically motivated, has me worried that I'm going to be hearing and reading a lot of people who are going to blame this on the Republicans or the Tea Party or some other political "gremlin."
I do not think that the Republicans are any more to blame than the Democrats, the press and the commentators at both ends of the political spectrum. If there is any politics behind this the blame lies equally with all of these who have created and promoted an increasingly polarized partisan environment; and led WAY TOO MANY people - including many of my friends who I believe should be too intelligent and astute to fall for this nonsense - to adopt the attitude that "everything my party says and does is good, everything the {only} other party says and does is evil, and if you don't agree with me and/or my party 100%, you must be part of the evil other party."
This kind of fracturing over what are really VERY MINOR real differences in the actions of either of the two major political parties is, I am growing to fear more and more each year, going to end up tearing this country apart. And I equally fear that if this country falls apart the result will be bad for everyone - probably everywhere in the world.
I would like to see politicians and commentators across the political spectrum use this event as a wake up and stop villanizing their political opponents. But, I fear that at the most this will either end up fading from view, dismissed as (and I suspect that this is 90%-99% the real case) an incident caused by a deranged individual, or worse used to further villanize Giffords' opponents.
Sorry about the ranting and politics. I'll return to my usual posts about life, thoughts and fandom shortly, I hope
