n January 2011, President Obama spoke at a memorial service in Tucson, Arizona to honor the victims of a massacre that left 6 people dead, including a federal judge and a 9 year-old girl and left 13 others wounded, including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who suffered a grievous gunshot wound to the head.

Liberals, including the editorial writers at the New York Times, were quick to link the mayhem to conservative hate speech, even though it turned out that the gunman was a mentally unstable young man who by all accounts had no interest in politics of any kind.

The president, doing his best to keep politics and partisanship out of his talk, was eloquent, as he called for civility and decency in our national conversation.

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized,” he said, “at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”