Thanks, Jon. That was well said.

It has been three days since our nation's sensibilities were shaken ... again. The terrible business that occurred last Saturday in Tucson still seemed unreal ... even to those of us who have gone through a series of assassinations that robbed us of some of the country's brightest and best.

What happened in that store was bad enough. What happened next -- the bad reporting and the sadly predictable blaming of each side for the acts of a madman -- probably surprised no one.

Take the reporting first. Yes, it was a Saturday afternoon -- when the TV version of the backup catchers were on duty. That still doesn't excuse the cable folks who reported people were dead when they weren't. I could only imagine Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkhite and all the brilliant journalism teacher (like my college prof, Father Whalen) shaking their heads in disbelief as they watched from above. TV cable news offers little journalism these days. Instead, they are entertainers with political points of view ... and those points of view seem to always come first and foremost before giving us the facts.

As for the blame game, what did we expect? Did we really think that Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would miss a chance to nail those who disagree with them with a form of blame? Did we really think that a gasbag like Ed Schultz or the many bloggers who lean left would resist the urge to blame this on the wild, biased rhetoric Fox spins out? The answer, of course, is no. Most of today's talkers are interested in only one thing -- getting attention for themselves. Getting attention gets them ratings. Ratings translate into money. The rest of it is simply collateral damage ... something they can find a way to ignore.

It is likely most of the talkers wouldn't know Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot, from Frank Gifford, the former football player. (Well, some of them might know Frank is married to Kathie Lee.) Nor would it matter to them. The names are interchangeable. It is the policy and the ideas -- whether they be conservative or liberal -- that seem to matter most.

Because this happened on a Saturday afternoon, it took a while to get the network anchors in action. When they got on the job, a form of sanity returned to the airwaves. There is a reason why guys like Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the cable bombthrowers don't work for ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS. (Some of them used to.)

Their shtick wouldn't pass muster there.

Ironically, it was Jon Stewart, who works for Comedy Central, who offered the proper perspective n how we should view this situation. His opening monologue on Monday was one of the best speeches I have heard in a long time. (The link is here: http://tv.gawker.com/5730178/watch-jon-stewarts-poignant-speech-on-the-arizona-shooting.) It ranks up there with Ronald Reagan's speech the day of the Challenger disaster and Bobby Kennedy's speech the day after Martin Luther King was killed.

Stewart came out and said what many of us felt. The time has come to simply admit madmen were just that ... nothing more, nothing less. Furthermore, there have been madmen before and there will be madmen in our future. We simply cannot escape them.

But we can do something to limit their access. We can quit using rhetoric that gives them ideas. We can have civil dissent, dammit. It's isn't sexy and it doesn't produce ratings. More than ever, however, it is what we need to do these days.

Thanks, Jon, for injecting a note of common sense. After two days of bluster and blame, his should be the only cable comment we should be listening to.