Liberals can’t leave well enough alone. They have to make a political issue out of everything. The latest bit of pettiness comes from the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords suffered a near fatal gunshot wound to the head. Her recovery has been slow, but she has a resolute fighting spirit. Everyone is pulling for her recovery. It’s unfortunate that her husband is using his wife’s tragedy to score some political points. Here’s the story as reported at The Hill:

In a new book, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D-Ariz.) husband scolds House Speaker John Boehner for failing to visit his wounded wife while she was recovering from injuries sustained in a shooting.

In his and his wife’s new volume, Mark Kelly writes that Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t take an opportunity to visit Giffords when he was in Houston for a basketball game and added that all they heard from the Speaker after the shooting came in the form of “a simple get-well card.”

Kelly noted that in April, Boehner was in Houston for the NCAA Final Four Tournament while Giffords was at a rehabilitation center there following the Jan. 8 attempt on her life.

“Considering that she was a member of Congress and he was the highest-ranking member, we thought he’d ask to visit Gabby or at least give a call to see how she was doing,” Kelly writes in Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope. “Our only contact with him had been a simple get-well card he’d sent a few days after Gabby was injured.”

But they didn’t hear from the Speaker.

As you might expect, there’s more to this story. There could have been any number of reasons why Boehner did not stop in to see Giffords while she was rehabbing in Houston. If Boehner’s like I am, I always feel like I’m intruding on someone’s personal space, especially in a hospital setting with family present. Rehab is arduous and can be very taxing. There’s also the possibility that Boehner did not want to appear being political, you know, visiting for a political photo op. Boehner cries at the drop of a hat. Maybe he wanted to avoid appearing too emotional.

But as you dig deeper into the story, you find out that Boehner has been very supportive of Giffords.

[W]hen Giffords returned to Congress in August to vote on legislation raising the debt ceiling, she was greeted by Boehner, who welcomed her back — which she responded to by hugging him.

A GOP leadership aide defended the Speaker, saying Boehner contacted Giffords’s chief of staff within hours of the shooting. The aide added that Boehner’s staff has been in contact with Giffords’s staff throughout the year — and Giffords’s staff have expressed appreciation for the Speaker’s efforts.

Boehner was criticized shortly after the shootings, when he didn’t attend a memorial service in Tucson, Ariz.

His office explained at the time that the Speaker had been at a bipartisan prayer service for the victims in the Capitol Visitor Center earlier that day and would have had to miss it in order to fly to Tucson. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did miss the Capitol Hill service so she could catch a flight to Arizona for the memorial. Boehner’s office noted that if he also missed it, leaders of both parties would have been absent.

 It used to be that politics revolved around issues. We are now in an era where it’s everything but the issues. No wonder our nation is a mess.