In the Capitol shooting liveSlog from a few minutes ago, I posted this screenshot of Arkansas Congressman Tim Griffin’s Twitter feed:
I then proceeded to give Griffin the benefit of the doubt, writing:
It’s nice that he took a break from the shooting news to complain about President Obama’s “violent rhetoric.” (Most likely, it was an ill-timed scheduled tweet, but still…)
Turns out, I was totally wrong about that. Griffin did not deserve the benefit of the doubt. BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray reports:
Arkansas Congressman Tim Griffin, a Republican, said he had “tweeted out of emotion” on Thursday after appearing to blame Democrats for a shooting on Capitol Hill…
“We are still processing information about this shooting, but as I have been saying for days, we all need to choose our words wisely because violent rhetoric only coarsens our culture, creates an atmosphere of incivility and is not helpful. I tweeted out of emotion but agree that the timing was not helpful,” Griffin said.
What a piece of shit! Griffin, as I noted before, is a very pro-gun politician. For him to try to pin this shooting on President Obama is the lowest kind of partisan hackery. It doesn’t get much more despicable than this.