Labour Press Officer Jo Moore once notably, and career-endingly, said that September 11 was a good day to bury bad news. Self-evidently reprehensible as that is, people keep finding a way to raise the repugnancy bar. It has been barely a week since Anders Breivik killed so many people, many of them children, in Norway – yet people are already using it to publicise their own causes and careers.

First Katharine Birbalsingh posted a piece in the Telegraph blog focused on the idea that Breivik was irreparably damaged by his father’s departure from his life as an infant. Fair enough, Jens doesn’t sound like a great father but people grew up without male parental influences all the time. They don’t kill people.

Then Glenn Beck made a statement on his talk show comparing the Utoya Political Camp to the Hitler Youth. He then went on to discuss Hitler later on his radio show, making comparisons between Nazi Germany and Obama’s America. Both rants were, apparently, inspired by a book Beck was reading about Hitler. Apparently not a very good book, since he appears to equate public disagreement with under-educated and offensive comments with being stripped of basic human rights and then killed.

Now, Morrissey (who, I admit, I would not normally expect to see lumped in with Beck) has decided that he just could not let the situation pass without comment. So at a recent concert he decided to dismiss the deaths in Norway compared to what goes on in McDonald’s every day. Even if he did think that, what purpose did saying it aloud serve? I doubt anyone heard him and decided to forswear pigs forever. It was a blatant, and rather pathetic, bid for public attention.

I suppose it is fair enough to say this post is more or less the same. I am not expecting a great deal of attention for it though, I just wanted to point out how many people were trying to use a horrible tragedy to springboard their own special interests. Is it too much to ask that people in the public eye look at dead children and instead of thinking of how to use it, they just say that it was terribly sad and a horrible crime?