PHOENIX PAPER SLAMS SHERIFF DUPNIK

The Arizona Republic is now on record as telling Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik that he is out of bounds. They even gave him a pass for his words in the hours after the shooting. Where they're drawing the line is his repeated media appearances in order to echo and exacerbate the sentiment.

Via AZ Central:

On Saturday afternoon, with his friend Gabby Giffords in surgery fighting for her life, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik railed against the tense partisan politics - "the anger, the hatred, the bigotry" - that prompted the mass murders outside Tucson, in his view.

And, jarring as such claims may be, we understood. Or tried to understand, despite the spectacle of a lawman - an official whose very job it is to dispassionately gather facts and to maintain order and calm - tying the attack on Rep. Giffords and others to political speech in Arizona, which he considers prejudiced and bigoted. There is no evidence that the state's politics in any way contributed to this atrocity.

Was Dupnik unnecessarily inflammatory? It seemed so. But it came mere hours following a horrific, bloody mass murder. If you weren't on edge, you weren't being human. But then, on Sunday, the venting continued anew. And a horrified nation began paying closer attention to the Pima County sheriff.

Read it all.

h/t to Gateway Pundit