Jon Stewart is having none of the heated-rhetoric teaching moment about the Arizona shooting:

“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine,” Stewart said on “The Daily Show” Monday night.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? But even Stewart’s attempt at levelheadedness falls short. The perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, actually listened to heavy-metal music. There’s no evidence that Jared Lee Loughner listened to right-wing broadcasts or frequented right-wing websites, etc. In this case, no connection really means no connection.

But Stewart’s comment raises an interesting point. The same people who were so quick to refute the possibility that media phenomena like heavy metal, Goth culture, and videogames influenced the Columbine killers are the same ones pushing the less credible heated-rhetoric line about the killings in Arizona. Lest we forget, Michael Moore called his silly movie Bowling for Columbine specifically to drive home the contention that blaming heavy metal for the shootings was as absurd as blaming bowling, a pastime the shooters also enjoyed. Yet this past Monday, his website featured an item headlined “Fox News: The No. 1 Name in Murder Fantasies,” laying blame for the Arizona shooting at the feet of conservative commentators. Which is it?  Does media inspire murder or does it not?

No doubt, Moore has already launched a little massacre media tour. It would be nice if a member of the oh so newly civilized press asked him about this dissonance.