Tea Party as victim in Arizona
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeA nine-year-old girl lies in the morgue. A member of Congress faces a lifetime of struggle to recover from a bullet in the brain. A city is bracing itself for a string of funerals as it tries to fathom the carnage.The attacks on the Tea Party are an outrageous blood libel and slander. Tuscon must have one of the most irresponsible Sheriffs in the country. If he runs again he should be targeted for defeat.
But Trent Humphries says there is another innocent victim left by Jared Lee Loughner's killing of six people and wounding of 14 others in his assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It is his Tea Party movement and, more particularly, his family. The killings, he says, are evolving into a conspiracy to destroy his organisation and silence criticism of the government.
Humphries is the co-founder of Tucson's Tea Party, a movement besieged by accusations that its use of the rhetoric of armed resistance against political opponents played a role in the shootings.
The local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, quickly pointed the finger at the growing vitriol, hate and anger directed against the government on talk radio and by Tea Party supporters in Arizona, where Democrats and liberals from President Obama to Giffords are portrayed as enemies of the people, un-American or Nazis.
Giffords herself warned that the Tea Party favourite, Sarah Palin, was "firing people up" with a campaign poster that put the Democratic party congresswoman in the crosshairs of a rifle.
Humphries is having none of it. "A lot have taken as gospel that the sheriff says that this was caused by talk radio, by Tea Party extremists, that that must be the case. I think it's done a lot of damage. It's given people the idea that somebody like my wife and I caused this murder. There's no evidence. And there's no evidence Sarah Palin caused this murder," he said. "The Democrats are using this opportunity to bludgeon their opponents. People don't want to hear that it was just some stupid, evil act that had no bearing in rationality. They want it to make sense."
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The Tea Party has ever right to be critical of the government and those trying to deny them that right want to get away with an unacceptable status quo. The criticism will continue and those who have been accusing their opponents of being accessories to murder will find themselves in a new political fight in 2012.
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