Local conservative talk radio host Bob Durgin hasn’t pulled his on-air punches in the wake of

, lambasting liberals for using the tragic event to slander conservatives like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

“God, I hate the liberal media,”

. “It’s like, if you don’t follow Obama and believe in Obama’s policies, then you are a potential terrorist.”

In talking about The New York Times, often seen as queen of the left by conservatives, Durgin added, “Somebody ought to burn that paper down. Just go to New York and blow that sucker right out of the water.”

Durgin now concedes that last remark may have been a bridge too far in an overheated environment.

“I don’t regret saying it, but I know I probably shouldn’t have,” he said this week during a telephone interview. “That’s just me. When I go on the air I announce my true feelings. What they hear is who I am.”

Sarah Palin accuses liberals of 'blood libel' in video

In truth, Durgin’s tirade may have just been a little ahead of the political curve in the wake of the Tucson attack, which left six people dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life.

America’s rancorous political dialogue already shows signs of returning to the status quo, a non-stop barrage of accusation and counter-accusation carried out on television, radio and online.

“Everything travels with the speed of light now,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. “We are constantly bombarded.”

Just after the shootings, however, when the killer’s motive was very much in doubt, both Republicans and Democrats seemed to pause for a deep breath.

Obama talks about togetherness during Arizona shooting memorial

Fox News chief Roger Ailes went so far as to direct his conservative commentators to “shut up, tone it down,” while MSNBC liberal Keith Olbermann said he was reassessing his own fire-breathing rhetoric.

During Wednesday’s memorial service in Tucson, President Barack Obama called for more civility in political rhetoric, appealing to Americans to communicate “in a way that, that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

what many were thinking when he said, “This polarization in this country has to stop. You can disagree without being disagreeable.”

Now, though, it seems increasingly apparent that the shooting outside a Tucson supermarket was simply the work of a deranged mind. Suspected gunman Jared Loughner’s views are a bizarre mishmash that would be hard to connect with any particular philosophy.

“He’s a wacko,” is how Durgin put it.

Thus, any brief moment of national self-examination the crime inspired may already have passed. A CBS poll on Tuesday said six of 10 Americans see no link between the shootings and heated political rhetoric.

“I think we never really got away from the uncivil discourse this time,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. “The very hand-wringing about the problem that was being done, was being done by people who were screaming at each other. If it weren’t such a tragic story, it would have been kind of comical.”

Thompson doesn’t think our political discourse is deteriorating so much as proliferating.

“There are just so many more venues for so many more people to be coarse and uncivil in,” he said. “There are so many places for anger to be vented.”

Violent imagery





Political passions have frequently run high in the United States, which was born as a frontier nation of 13 former colonies and grew to be among the world’s dominant nations.

One of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804 over what amounted to a political dispute.

“The strain of violence in and the paranoid style of American politics is as old as the Republic,” Madonna said. “Is this event (in Arizona) likely to change the nature of our civil discourse? The answer is, probably not.”

Contemporary culture and language also are loaded with violent imagery, making former Alaskan governor Palin’s notorious gunsight political ads pretty mainstream, akin to terms like “battleground state.”

“Let’s face it,” Michael Tremoglie, former editor of the conservative website FrontPage.com, told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. “This country has been in a lot of wars, and it shows: Our taste for violence pervades everything, and it’s used to sell everything.”

Certainly, Durgin’s on-air comments about the Times seemed to cause few ripples among listeners.

A couple of anonymous calls were placed to The Patriot-News, expressing concern. R.J. Harris, operations manager at Clear Channel-owned WHP, said he wasn’t aware of any complaints received by his station.

“We do not advocate violence, period,” Harris said Wednesday. “That’s why this whole outcry over the shootings in Tucson being linked to talk radio is just crazy.”

Durgin, who has been on WHP for 20 years, plans to continue expressing his conservative views, unedited. He thinks the nation’s divisions will get worse before they get better.

“We live in a hateful time,” he said. “Conservatives hate liberals, and liberals really hate conservatives. I don’t see an end in sight.”