New York Times:
It is a president’s responsibility to salve a national wound. President Obama did that on Wednesday evening at the memorial service in Tucson for the six people who died in last weekend’s terrible shooting. It was one of his most powerful and uplifting speeches.
Mr. Obama called on ideological campaigners to stop vilifying their opponents. The only way to move forward after such a tragedy, he said, is to cast aside "point-scoring and pettiness." He rightly focused primarily on the lives of those who died and the heroism of those who tried to stop the shooter and save the victims. He urged prayers for the 14 wounded, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the target of the rampage. Their stories needed to be told, their lives celebrated and mourned.
It was important that Mr. Obama transcend the debate about whose partisanship has been excessive and whose words have sown the most division and dread. This page and many others have identified those voices and called on them to stop demonizing their political opponents. The president’s role in Tucson was to comfort and honor, and instill hope.
Eugene Robinson also praised the president for rising above partisan pettiness:
In Tucson tonight, President Obama played the role that all presidents must play at times of great tragedy: consoler in chief. His speech at the memorial service for the victims of Saturday's massacre seemed not to come from a speechwriter's pen, but from the heart.
Asking whether it "helped" or "hurt" the president politically seems petty. After he described how Rep. Gabriel Giffords' husband, Mark, had just visited her and announced that "Gabby opened her eyes for the first time," politics vanished. At a moment of great sorrow, there was a glimpse of the kinder, gentler America that Obama described -- an America in which "we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."
Naturally, not everyone heard the president's speech as non-partisan. Marc Thiessen, former Bush speechwriter, said the president actually gave two speeches: the first one, brilliant, and the second one, courageous.
In the first, Obama delivered a traditional memorial address, and did so with elegance and eloquence.
And the courageous part?
The president could have ended there. But instead he pivoted to a second speech on our political discourse -- and delivered a clear rebuke to those on the left who were so quick to politicize this tragedy and assign blame to their political opponents[.]
Of course it was a rebuke to the left because only the left politicizes tragedy. No one on the right has ever used tragedy to score political points. Ever.
Gail Collins:
Maybe President Obama was saving the magic for a time when we really needed it.
We’ve been complaining for two years about the lack of music and passion in his big speeches. But if he’d moved the country when he was talking about health care or bailing out the auto industry, perhaps his words wouldn’t have been as powerful as they were when he was trying to lift the country up after the tragedy in Tucson.
"Our hearts are broken, and yet our hearts also have reason for fullness," he said, in a call to action that finally moved the nation’s focus forward.
The days after the shootings had a depressing political rhythm. There was the call for civility, followed by the rapidly escalating rhetoric over whose fault the incivility was, which climbed ever upward until Wednesday when you had a congressman from Texas claiming that the F.B.I. was hiding information on the gunman’s political beliefs because the truth would embarrass the White House.
For me, Obama’s best moment came when he warned that "what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another." In his honor, I am not saying a word about Sarah Palin’s video.
Doyle McManus, however, makes no such promise:
Still, the Arizona shootings and their aftermath will probably be remembered as the end of Palin's chances of being taken seriously as a Republican presidential candidate. She had an opportunity to rise to an occasion, and she whiffed.
...
Palin had a chance with her statement on the Tucson tragedy to show voters she's equal to the demands of the presidency. Instead, the eight-minute video she released Wednesday reflected her chosen role as lightning rod of the right. Rather than rise to the occasion, she continued the partisan slugfest.
Dana Milbank says some nice things about Congress:
As it happened, the best and worst of American politics was on display Wednesday morning. The ugly side emerged a few hours before the debate in the form of a Facebook posting by Sarah Palin. Rather than soften her own excesses (in this case, the map showing bull's-eyes over Giffords' and other districts with accompanying instructions to "RELOAD") Palin defended her actions and inflamed the debate further by accusing her opponents of a "blood libel" - a reference to centuries of anti-Semitism.
Happily, the lawmakers did not fall for Palin's provocations. Speaker John Boehner, who distinguished himself with his original response to the shooting - "an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve" - began Wednesday's session with an admonition that "we gather here without distinction of party."
The notoriously weepy speaker, sitting alone in the front row of the chamber, wiped a tear from his eye as the clerk read the resolution and choked up as he spoke. But this time, he had company in his tears.
And now for your weekly Mark Morford:
Every tragedy births a supplication. Every assault, violent attack, assassination attempt and murderous spree begets the same series of questions, a palms-open appeal to the gods of law, society, humanity.
It goes like this: What will we learn? What will change? Will any solutions emerge? Who can fix this? Is it even possible? And finally, what the hell is wrong with us?
So it is that, in the wake of the Tucson rampage wrought by a deranged monster named Jared Loughner, a man with far too easy access to firearms and a brain far too full of tortured rhetoric, comes the collective wail from the right, the left, the president himself: Something must be done. We will get to the bottom of this. We will examine from every angle, figure this out, heal the wound.
Right. What wound would that be, exactly? The bottom of what? What, really, can or will be done? No one seems to know. Or rather, they sort of do, but no one has the nerve to do it. Ain't that America.
Regardless, some have already taken action. Already, two political creeps have decided to reduce themselves to, well, almost the same level as Loughner himself. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) have declared that they will start packing heat, carrying their own handguns around D.C. like twitchy thugs, because gosh, it just makes sense. More guns will somehow equal less guns, and violence never begets more violence. Well done, boys. You're a couple of goddamn geniuses. Now shut up.
Finally, in some non-Tucscon-related news, Ann Jones has a novel proposal for peace in Afghanistan:
Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it's time to try something totally different, like putting into action, for the first time in history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325.
Passed on Oct. 31, 2000, the resolution was hailed worldwide as a great victory for both women and international peace. In a nutshell, it calls for women to participate equally in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking and reconstruction.
The resolution grew out of a recognition that while men at the negotiating table still jockey for power and wealth, women who are included commonly advocate for interests that coincide perfectly with those of civil society. They are concerned about their children and consequently about shelter, clean water, sanitation, jobs, healthcare, education — the things that make life livable for peaceable people.
Letting women participate in their own political process? Nah, that'll never work.