In today's Washington Post, columnist Charles Krauthammer echoes the revulsion of The Hedgehog Blog in reaction to a campaign speech by Senator Barack Obama, made on the afternoon of the Virginia Tech Murders. [See the Hedgehog Blog, Wednesday, April 18, 2007, "Senator Obama Compares Virginia Tech Shootings to Don Imus and Export of Jobs Abroad."] Krauthammer writes:

This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.

Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.