Personal responsibility. Those were among the many watchwords of the Republican Party in the 1994 elections.

People need to stop blaming society for their problems and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They need to take responsibility for their own actions and lives.

How soon the Republicans have forgotten.

Two recent tragedies have drawn the attention of Republican congressional leaders. But rather than tell the perpetrators of these crimes to take responsibility for their own actions, they have chosen to blame society instead.

It appears that nothing is too reprehensible or disgusting to be exploited for political gain.

The first incident was the slaying of a welfare mother and two of her children in suburban Chicago just before Thanksgiving. After killing the mother, the perpetrators cut her full-term baby from her womb and abducted it, claiming it as their own.

Speaking at a conference of Republican governors, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a long list of culprits for the crime, including the welfare system, the criminal system and society in general.

Conspicuously absent from Gingrich’s blame list were the people who actually committed the crime. Gingrich did not absolve the perpetrators from blame, but in the midst of a tirade of finger-pointing, he forgot to save a finger for the people who were really responsible.

The second and most recent incident took place in New York, when some young men poured gasoline in a subway ticket booth and set it on fire, critically injuring the employee inside. This scenario is similar to a scene in the recently released movie Money Train.

Never one to miss an opportunity to blame Hollywood for the problems of our society, senate majority leader and presidential wannabe Bob Dole blasted Columbia Pictures for releasing the movie and encouraged people to boycott it.

Dole loves to take verbal shots at the movie industry, but his judgment of movies appears to be a little skewed. While condemning some movies for portraying gratuitous violence, Dole held up True Lies as an example of wholesome family entertainment.

Dole hadn’t seen the movie, so he must have assumed that any movie that starred a valuable Republican fund raiser like Arnold Schwarzenegger must be okay. Dole probably never saw Commando either, in which Schwarzenegger wipes out a small island nation single-handedly.

This raises an interesting question. What would Dole say if someone viewed a violent scene from True Lies and copied it in real life?

Let’s say, for example, that someone decides to try to shoot Iowa’s favorite son, Tom Arnold. This is something I’ve considered doing several times myself. (Come on, you know you’ve thought about it.)

Would Dole retract his praise for True Lies and condemn it as yet another example of how Hollywood is contributing to the collapse of our society? If he did, would Schwarzenegger continue to raise piles of money for the Republican Party?

So if personal responsibility is so important to the Republican Party, why does its leadership try to use social programs and the movie industry as scapegoats for these horrible crimes?

Dole is running for president, and is trying to ride a tidal wave of self-righteousness into the White House. Gingrich, on the other hand, just has a knack for saying stupid things, and has not yet learned that in some situations, it’s best to just be quiet.

But more importantly, the Republicans are trying to have it both ways. They advocate personal responsibility, except when it’s politically valuable to do so.

When women or minorities complain about systematic discrimination in the work place, the Republicans take the side of the business establishment and tell people to stop blaming society for their problems.

But it is apparently acceptable to blame Democratic social programs or liberal movie makers for the brutal murder of innocent people.

Our society has crazy people running around in it. Crazy people do crazy things.

It has nothing to do with what government benefits they receive, what race or sex they are or what movie they saw the night before.

The Republican Party needs to stick to its guns and place the blame for these horrible crimes squarely on the shoulders of the people who committed them.

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Steven Martens is a junior in journalism mass communication from Cedar Rapids.