Jake Tapper Gets Imus to Admit a Weakness

Though they both look younger than their younger brothers, Imus and Jake Tapper, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, found little other common ground this morning during a conversation about the political implications, if any, of Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona, where six people were killed and 14 wounded, among them Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
 
President Obama heads to Tucson tomorrow, where he will remark on the horrific events of last weekend.  “We’ve seen presidents tested at moments like this before,” Tapper said, citing as a recent example the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. “Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.”
 
Imus views the aftermath of Saturday’s events as an opportunity for everybody—politicians, journalists, talk radio hosts, plumbers—on both sides of the political spectrum to dial back their rhetoric, regardless of what role it played (or didn’t) in suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s decision to (allegedly) shoot up a Safeway.
 
“It certainly seems like this guy was psychotic,” Tapper said, further stating that “while it may be a worthy issue to discuss,” it’s premature to imply, at this point, that politics had any effect on the actions of a peron who, by all accounts, is nuts.
 
Actually, Tapper is interested in learning more about why it has become so difficult to involuntarily institutionalize people like Loughner, whose aberrant behavior at Pima Community College was reported by frightened fellow students months ago.
 
But Imus was immovable on his belief that whether harsh political verbiage contributed to Loughner’s deeds or not, “it’s time to dial back this unfortunate rhetoric on the part of everybody, from the President, to Rush Limbaugh, to all of these other yahoos.” And Tapper’s unwillingness to concede that point was even further proof to Imus why ABC’s Sunday morning news show is called "This Week with Christiane Amanpour," and not Jake Tapper.
 
“You just gave a big speech about civility in politics, and then unloaded one second later on your guest,” Tapper told Imus, who apologized, and insisted his point had merely been that to suggest politics played no role—considering Loughner shot, among others, a politician—would be crazy.
 
To counter this assessment, Tapper noted that John Hinckley, Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan, had done so not because Reagan was the President, but because he was a mad man trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster. 
 
“I’m sorry for being stupid,” Imus said, finally seeing Tapper’s point. “But I can’t help it.”
 
-Julie Kanfer