OK, I'll Weigh In

“And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there...wants to be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out…Bail him out and then go ask him some questions."

This is the kind of reaction we expect today to a horrific event, and one that is sadly all too common. How can anyone look at this event and justify it somehow, and want the perpetrator released? Whatever your feelings about the victim, who can condone this kind of thing?

Now, I know what you're thinking, and you're right. This is some kind of misdirection, right? Well, yes. Those words were spoken by Charlie Kirk after a crazy guy named David Depape broke into Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home and when he found she wasn't there, gave her husband a skull fracture that required brain surgery to repair.

Does one, or even several frankly nasty comments sum up a life? No, of course not. But it does sum up the kind of vitriol that passes for political commentary today, on both sides of our ever-widening political divide. It's easy to pick out some of the most egregious on the right like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer and Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson.

But the left has the so-called "Young Turks" led by the annoyingly loud Cenk Uygur, a guy named Hassan Piker, who, like Carlson, has taken a real liking to Putin and other despots - Breht O'Shea, Jeremy Johnson, and a lot of other folks you never heard of.

My guess is that outside of their ideological bubbles, most average Americans had never heard of any of these people, including Charlie Kirk, until now. That's because, unlike me, who has to listen to this dreck, most people have lives to lead and watch politics only out of necessity. After all, they have to vote sooner or later.

But these folks trade in political provocation, offering extreme commentary guaranteed to set the listeners off, on both sides. Much has been made of Charlie Kirk's willingness to engage with political opponents on college campuses where his organization, Turning Point USA began. Yes, these "debates" were often of the shooting fish in a barrel nature, but his fame in these venues, like others on the above list, was very lucrative. Worth $12-million at the time of his murder, Kirk parlayed his politics as many on both sides have, into great wealth.

Is that necessarily bad? No, of course not. Although his statements on race, gender and other topics may offend some, including me, they seem to have been genuinely felt, and that, of course, is everyone's right. And if it makes you money, so much the better, I suppose.

But provocation has a price. We all saw that this week. We saw it, the same day, in Evergreen, Colorado where a 16-year-old named Desmond Holly, full of hate for Jews and admiration for school shooters, shot up his school. The Anti-Defamation League described the website that authorities say "radicalized" the boy...

According to the ADL report, several school shooters in the past year, including Holly, had been active on the same website, which the organization says is known for hosting content backing white supremacist ideas as well as material portraying graphic violence against both people and animals. People can navigate to the website, WatchPeopleDie, and access a forum where they can watch real images of beheadings, shootings and other violence. The site started on Reddit, before being banned in March 2019.

Here's what's interesting about this site. CBS News talked to the hosting company and they report...

A spokesperson for Cloudflare told CBS News that it is not the hosting provider for the website, adding that the company "typically does not host websites and doesn't have the capacity to remove content that is hosted by others."

They basically threw up their hands and said, "Gosh, there's really nothing we can do."

The killer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, seems obviously to be on the left, and he, according to family members, was similarly radicalized in the last few months. Growing up in a conservative Mormon family and the son of a Sheriff, he also knew guns and was proficient in their use, bragging to a co-worker he had once made a 450-yard shot. No doubt we will find out more about his conversion from being apolitical, according to his family, to a political assassin.

And no doubt, some extreme leftist political online site helped in that transformation.

Now, look, I could list some of the offensive things Charlie Kirk once said about blacks, women, and anyone to the left of him. But the guy is gone, and a wife and two kids are without a father. I won't join in the hagiographic descriptions of a political provocateur, but if we start taking sides in what is clearly a tragic event, we then join the worst of our current political cast of characters.

Let me offer a couple of old quotes...

Robert Kennedy, the good one, had to break to a crowd in Indianapolis the news that Martin Luther King, a man Charlie Kirk called "evil", had been shot and killed.

 "What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." Kennedy reiterated his belief that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites and encouraged the country to "dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world." He finished by asking the audience members to pray "for our country and for our people." Rather than exploding in anger at the tragic news of King's death, the crowd exploded in applause and enthusiasm for a second time, before dispersing quietly.

President George H.W. Bush:

“This is the age of the offered hand. I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.”

President George W. Bush after 9/11:

"These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.  And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself:  In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil.  For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.  That's not what Islam is all about.  Islam is peace.  These terrorists don't represent peace.  They represent evil and war.'

Former President Clinton on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing:

“The domestic terrorists who did this awful thing believed that it would spark a nationwide upheaval against the American government, and would eventually destroy our government, our democracy and our life. Instead, you gave them, as the mayor said so eloquently, the Oklahoma Standard. You gave them service, honor and kindness.”

And President Trump on the killing of Charlie Kirk:

"For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now.

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country... radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives."

So now, in the wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, we see the President blames only one side for the state of all things political, and ignoring the killings in Minnesota of a democratic House Speaker and her husband, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the firebombing of Governor Josh Shapiro's home, the kidnap plot against Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the January 6th attack on the capitol and threats against his own Vice-President.

Asked about these examples of right-wing violence, on Fox of all places, the President replied, "I couldn't care less."

Congressman Clay Higgins (R-Gumboville), had a comment on any negative observations about Charlie Kirk...

"I'm going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'm going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination."

This is the Louisiana C0ngressman who posted this after the Paul Pelosi attack,

We could play tit for tat all day with this stuff.

So, let me say again, the killing of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy, not because of the things he said, but because someone decided that saying them deserved, not a vibrant counter-argument, but homicide. That isn't the country the Founders envisioned.

With the bloodiest war in our nation's history nearing an end, but still raging, along with the emotions it generated, President Lincoln said this in his 2nd inaugural address:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Looking at this sad event and the intolerance for any naysayers, isn't encouraging for the American experiment. Can we at long last say this is shameful, on both sides? Can we recognize the extremist provocateurs for what they are? Can we at long last remember when it didn't used to be this way? It isn't all that long ago.

In the heat of a tough Presidential race, Senator John McCain responded to a woman who called Candidate Barack Obama an Arab:

Who in our current political climate would say this? This is who he was and who we should be.

I hope we can be again.