Unless you’ve been living in a cave with no access to the news, you’re aware of Wednesday’s near tragedy on a baseball field. You may be interested in reading many of the morning stories, which almost to a newspaper, TV show and columnist say it’s time for congress and the citizens to work together. Below are some of those headlines.
The baseball game between the Republicans and Democrats, will be played tonight at 7:05 PM.
New York Times: Shaken Lawmakers Soften Partisan Tone While Uniting in Concern
Representative Chuck Fleischmann stood just outside the House chamber in the Capitol on Wednesday morning recounting his harrowing survival of a shooting rampage aimed at a group of lawmakers practicing for an annual charity baseball game. He was still wearing his cleats and red jersey with “Republicans” emblazoned across the front.
But for once, such party labels were not the defining trait. Badly shaken members of Congress — both Democratic and Republican — were united in concern for those wounded and in shock at the events as they assessed where the nation’s increasingly harsh political climate had led them: an early-morning playing field sprayed with gunshots that could have killed dozens of their colleagues, aides, security personnel and volunteers involved with the game.
Wall Street Journal: Political Disorder Syndrome
Public Theater should cancel its Trump assassination play. But it won’t.
James T. Hodgkinson, who on Wednesday shot Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and four others, posted this on his Facebook page March 22: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
Sitting in the dying light of World War I, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” What’s our excuse? Displays of political or social excess seem to be everywhere. Whatever once fastened the doors of people’s minds to something secure and stable has become unhinged.
RealClearPolitics (AP Story): Congress Seeks Normalcy, Heads Back to Work After Shooting
Five weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Franklin Roosevelt received a handwritten letter from Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the former Tennessee judge who had been appointed by baseball owners in the wake of the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal to restore the sport’s reputation.
Would playing the 1942 season, Landis asked the president, help or hurt the war effort? “My dear Judge,” FDR replied the following day. “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.”
TheHill: The Memo: After shooting, soul-searching on United States’ polarization
The fierce heat of political debate in an increasingly polarized nation took center stage Wednesday after a gunman with left-leaning political views opened fire on GOP lawmakers practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game.
Republicans said they felt as if they had been hunted by the shooter, whom the FBI named as 66-year-old James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill.
