Joe Scarborough Offers His Take on Arizona Tragedy

As both a former congressman who represented the Panhandle and in his current incarnation as cable news host, Joe Scarborough mulled over the mass shootings that occurred in Arizona on Saturday in a column at Politico.

Scarborough focused on what he considered extreme rhetoric directed at politicians on both the left and the right.

This feedback loop of hate speech has created an angry environment that inspires the most troubled, wrote Scarborough. In that loop lives a talk-show host who called this president a racist, another who called the last president a fascist, a congresswoman who urges her constituents to be armed and dangerous, and a national figure who told her followers to reload against her political enemies.

Too many dismiss these extreme eruptions as crass commercial calculations, Scarborough continued. Saturday taught us that we have to hold bad political actors accountable. It is a shared responsibility. Those with the loudest megaphones have to understand the audience and the actions they risk provoking. Those on the listening end have to know that in America, philosophical differences and personal violence can never overlap.