WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle yesterday bemoaned the “toxic rhetoric” they say has infected US politics and may have set off the Arizona rampage that left one of their own fighting for her life.
“It has been a much angrier, confrontational environment over the last two or three years . . . And I think there is worry about that,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) insisted, “Words matter.”
“Those who use inflammatory rhetoric to achieve cheap political gain wound our country and weaken the ties that bind us.”
Added freshman Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), “Both sides are guilty of this [heated rhetoric]. You have crazy people on both sides . . . A bunch of people on the left . . . are using the same kind of vitriol.”
The Washington soul-searching came after the shootings that left Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded with a bullet through her head and six others dead — including federal Judge John Roll and the 9-year-old granddaughter of former Yankees and Mets Manager Dallas Green.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) laid some blame for the shooting on Sarah Palin, who in March posted on her Web site a map that showed cross hairs over 20 districts, including Giffords’.
Palin also had tweeted to supporters: “Don’t Retreat. Instead — RELOAD!”
“We live in a world of violent images,” Durbin said on CNN. “The phrase ‘don’t retreat, reload,’ putting cross hairs on congressional districts as targets . . . they invite the unstable.”
“Don’t we have an obligation to say this is beyond the bounds [or] that just goes too far?”
But a Palin aide called such accusations “obscene” and “appalling.”
“We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights,” Rebecca Mansour said on an Alaska radio show. “We never imagined — it never occurred to us — that anybody would consider it violent.”
Kurt Colucci, vice chairman of the New York State Tea Party, said Palin’s critics had stepped “over the line.”
“In terms of Sarah Palin and the bull’s-eye, we have to understand that when someone is a political target, it doesn’t mean they are a target for assassination,” he said.
The Tea Party has “never and will never call for violence as a solution to a political problem,” Colucci said. “We can’t in a civilized society be incriminated for the actions that one maniac takes.”
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he hoped the Tucson bloodshed would convince overheated partisans to take a much-needed “timeout.”
“Maybe in a certain sense, this terrible tragedy can importune us to take a timeout, to look, each of us, into ourselves and remember the shared values that we really do all have,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”