With Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life after Saturday’s shooting in Arizona, Rush Limbaugh angrily blasted the left on Monday for its “sick” attempts to take political advantage from the tragedy.
Limbaugh railed against suggestions from the mainstream media and others that Sarah Palin, the tea party, and conservatives in general were somehow to blame for inspiring 22-year-old shooter Jared Loughner, whose rampage killed six and injured 13.
“What an embarrassing weekend,” Rush told listeners to his radio show. “I knew this was going to happen.
“It has led a number of people to make fools of themselves. The sheriff of Pima County has made a fool of himself.
“Most in the drive-by media have been illustrating why we call them the drive-by media. To take an incident like this, and try to turn it to political advantage by connecting it to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the sordid event, is silly on its face.
“One of the first acts of insanity is to take an obviously deranged kid, insane, irrational, and try to analyze him with sanity and rationality.
“It is all political. I was blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.”
When these kinds of incidents occur, Limbaugh said, “I don’t recall one conservative, one Republican, one conservative blogger, making a mad dash to a computer to blame Democrats for what happened.
“Here we have a 22-year-old dopehead, insane, irrational, and the desperate hope that the losers of 2010 had was that they could revitalize their political fortunes because of this unfortunate shooting.”
The left has been trying “to make a connection between this nut and Sarah Palin. But the majority of people don’t buy it,” Limbaugh said.
“They’re trying to link this shooting to me, to Sarah Palin, to talk radio. There’s no logic in any of the assertions they’re trying to make.”
Limbaugh noted that Loughner reportedly has been stalking Giffords since 2007 — before the tea party came into being.
The reaction to the Arizona shooting has been a “lame, purely political attempt by the left to do what they cannot convince the American people to do, and that is support them. It’s embarrassingly, depressingly sick.”
Summarizing his views, Limbaugh said he and those who listen to him, Palin, and the people who voted for her, and “half the country have been indicted for the actions of a lone, deranged individual.”