Significance! What a temptation to a journalist!

Of course it was very sad about all those people being killed. Especially the children. But there was no sense just letting their deaths go to waste, was there? If some significance could be derived from the tragedy which would boost progressivism and check resurgent conservatism, then why not derive it? It wasn’t as if the other side~dash mean-spirited, Nazi barbarians that they were—did not richly deserve to have the bombing pinned on them. The forces of political darkness have an undeniable affinity one with another; evil is a seamless garment. The right wing’s bizarre attachment to guns and paramilitary apparatus was sufficient evidence of their implication in child murder.

So must have thought some significant portion of the punditry, that unnatural flock of carrion crows, as they surveyed the feast laid before them by the Oklahoma bombers. I wonder if they would have yielded to the temptation even if they had not been given the news hook supplied by the president’s denunciation of the “loud and angry voices” in our national political debate which “spread hate” and “leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable”? Perhaps not. But so low has the level of public discourse sunk in America that Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, cannot even see anything wrong with making political capital out of tragedy:

Let’s assume that President Clinton’s attack on “loud and angry voices” and “promoters of paranoia” was