Twenty shot including a US Congressmember; six dead including a federal judge; nutcase in custody. Shocking but in many ways sadly familiar. And the search for explanations becomes again sadly necessary. In this case, a clear pathway to tragedy may not be apparent, but the general climate that made this possible or inevitable is too obvious to ignore. In fact, this case seems to illustrate an important feature of the violent and belligerent political climate that is often claimed to exonerate, but in fact implicates, those who create it in the violence then perpetrated by others who have heeded that inflammatory rhetoric: individuals are responsible for their particular acts, but they are influenced by their environment, and those who create a climate encouraging violence as part of the political process are responsible for the consequences they put in train. And it goes without saying, those who do so are almost entirely, and overwhelmingly in terms of numbers and organization, from the right wing.
TRIGGER WARNING: Failure to take right-wing bullshit seriously. May cause discomfort among those who cannot bear to have their fantasies punctured.
The suspected shooter in this case harbored obviously right-wing obsessions, but was not consistent in this respect, and seems too weird to easily classify. But the link between his fixations and derangements, and the eliminationist and violent rhetoric of the right wing that shared many of his political obsessions, is obvious and significant.
According to news reports, although he had not previously done anything overtly violent, he was notoriously erratic to the point that people were frequently frightened of him, and the community college he attended received numerous complaints of his bizarre talk and disruptive behavior, until they finally found an excuse to bar him from campus. (I love this one: “Loughner read a poem [in a writing class] about bland tasks such as showering, going to the gym and riding the bus in wild ‘poetry slam’ style — ‘grabbing his crotch and jumping around the room.’” I’ve had students just as strange.) Even so, his behavior, while influenced by right-wing ideology, does not fall into a clear pattern. His Web site contained quotes apparently taken from a notorious far-right anti-government extremist. On YouTube he posted strange videos of burning the American flag and ranting about mind control and losing his rights; he listed a bunch of favorite books on totalitarian or extremist themes, including Brave New World and Mein Kampf, but, although those books are right-wing perennials, they are usually regarded as a warning against fascism in one case, and a program for it in the other – what we are to make of his penchant for Peter Pan is hard to say. He harbored the usual right-wing obsessions: anti-government, the gold standard, weird conspiracy theories and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Constitution. He ranted some sort of incomprehensible gibberish about how the government was engaged in mind control through grammar, and that the community college he attended was “unconstitutional”. A fellow student reported that “he was turning all shades of red and laughing” about a woman who read a written piece about abortion in a class, then said she was “just like a terrorist, she killed a baby”. He tried to join the Army but failed the drug test. He is described as an atheist, which is less common on the right wing (though more so among the libertarians and fascists/Randians/Nietzscheans), but also had some kind of weird voodoo shrine in his backyard, with a toy skull head and a little flower-pot altar with fruit and candles. He had the kind of meticulous obsession with language use and logical argumentation that a lot of disturbed people do – he apparently frequently spoke, and he wrote his farewell note, in the form of logical syllogisms, but the content of those arguments was often incomprehensible. He reportedly took a lot of drugs as his life began to deteriorate, and that probably didn’t help.
It’s easy to paint a picture of him as a right-wing nut: fascist literature, anti-government obsessions and unhinged political theories, abortion lunacy, the gold standard, stalking and shooting a Jewish Democratic politician and a judge. But in this case his violence may be more the product of internal tensions than overt political commitments. He apparently was angry that he had previously confronted Rep. Gifford at an event and she had not heeded his psychotic questioning (“What is government if words mean nothing?”), so he obsessed over her afterwards. It’s not clear that has as much to do with her particular politics as with his mental illness plain and simple. His grudge against her may have been personal rather than political in the broad sense. And a lot of his behavior was merely strange rather than illustrating some specific political allegiance.
But if the suspect in this case does not represent a particular political movement, the circumstances in which he acted, and which in many ways, materially and to some degree socially or politically, contributed to his violence, certainly do. There is no question that the American right wing has a long-standing violent streak, and has increasingly adopted violent language and imagery as political motivators. And it cannot be that that environment does not matter, that it does not alter the balance of forces that make political violence more or less acceptable or likely. To the extent that that is true, that climate of violent antagonism has to contribute to the likelihood of events like the Gifford shooting. It is too simplistic to draw a straight causal line between the general encouragement of violence by the right wing and particular acts of violence by those living in and responding to that environment, but it is more simplistic, and dishonest, to claim that those who encourage violence bear no responsibility simply because they did not personally perpetrate it.
To take the most obvious example: as Gail Collins points out, the gun the shooter used – a Glock 19 with a 31-round magazine, which he purchased new less than two months before the shooting – had been banned under gun-control regulations enacted during the Clinton administration. Those same regulations sent the gun nuts into a raving frenzy for years, and in no small part helped elect the Republican administration that overturned the ban and made the shooter’s gun legal for purchase. During this shooting, the shooter was stopped only when he had to reload and the fresh magazine was knocked away from him by bystanders – after he had shot 20 people with the bullets from a single magazine, without reloading. If the Clinton ban on high-capacity magazines had been in force, he would have purchased the gun with a magazine carrying less than a third of that load. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to shoot so many people before he was stopped while reloading, if the ban had been effective; the fact that it was ended directly made it possible for this suspect to buy a gun capable of loosing over 30 rounds into a crowd before anyone could intervene.
The violent and eliminationist rhetoric of the right is also clearly part and parcel of the real violence that pervades the political environment. Examples are many, and have been well-documented around the Web. Just the easiest examples: the Tea Party with its constant grandiose and belligerent references to the American Revolution, “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants”, and talk of “Second-Amendment remedies”; the pervasive linkage of gun-rights groups to right-wing extremism and the notion that they are somehow under siege and must use violence to defend themselves from “tyrannies” as trivial as health insurance and changes of a few percent in [other people's!] income taxes; idiots like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck talking about “targeting” Democrats, pasting gun-sight graphics over maps of their Congressional districts, raving about revolutions and uprisings, and constantly brandishing guns while spouting stupidly belligerent rhetoric (it reaches weirdly creepy levels: somebody from the UK noticed that Palin has a team of editors that immediately pounce on the slightest critical comment on her Facebook page and remove it in less than two minutes, but left this one up for hours at least: “It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green [9-year-old student government member who came to the speech to meet a real politician] was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”); political candidates – virtually all Republicans – brandishing guns in campaign ads; gun-rights supporters staging deliberately provocative events, displaying guns openly at political speeches (one guy brought a gun to a Gifford rally and fumbled it onto the ground during the last campaign; somebody did the same at an Obama rally earlier) and holding their conventions timed to the anniversaries of the Waco assault and the Oklahoma City bombing (itself a memorialization of Waco by a right-wing anti-government apocalyptic); not to mention the standard-issue fantasy conspiracies about “jack-booted thugs” and war in the streets, and on and on. The judge who was killed this weekend had previously been the target of right-wing death threats: “In February [2009], when U.S. District Judge John Roll presided over a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit filed by illegal immigrants against an Arizona rancher, the Marshals Service was anticipating the fallout. When Roll ruled the case could go forward, Gonzales said talk-radio shows cranked up the controversy and spurred audiences into making threats. In one afternoon, Roll logged more than 200 phone calls. Callers threatened the judge and his family. They posted personal information about Roll online. ‘They said, “We should kill him. He should be dead,”‘ Gonzales said.” Rep. Giffords had been subject to threats and violence throughout the campaign: her campaign office door was destroyed the day after she voted in favor of the healthcare bill; her Republican opponent held a campaign event in which “he invited his supporters to ‘Get on Target for Victory in November’. He asked them to ‘Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office – shoot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly’”; Gifford herself had objected to the gunsight graphics on Palin’s Facebook account: “We have the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve gotta realise there’s consequences to that action.” – Palin now denies there is any connection at all, but has removed the picture. (Palin also never raised the “surveyor’s mark” excuse until after the shooting, though the gunsight graphic had been widely discussed; Palin herself linked the picture from a message telling her supporters “Don’t Retreat – Instead, Reload!”. Now she claims it has nothing to do with guns.)
You can trace it back at least as far as Ronald Reagan’s declaration that “government is the problem” – the right wing has embraced an anti-civilization posture ever since, with increasingly violent rhetoric and imagery. Alex Pareene at Salon makes the links clearer; Jessica Valenti does a great job in the Guardian of calling out the right-wing’s macho rhetoric (“Man up!” “Man pants!”), and its particular use as a tactic by female wingers. David Corn noted the trend with frightening prescience almost a year ago: “these folks . . . are pushing a virulent strain of anti-government extremism that certainly could drive a body to take violent action. . . . [The] gun-rights radicals are downright dangerous. They talk of insurrection — and they do have guns.”. At that same time, the Violence Policy Center cataloged the links between gun-loving groups including the NRA, the Tea Party, and militia and extremist groups, and their common tactic of violent rhetoric and talk of the coming day of revolution and bloodshed.
There is no question this ideology, these fantasies and rhetoric and provocations, are rabble-rousing tools the right wing uses to inflame its base. And there is no question, too, that the violent imagery and open thirsting for bloodshed and a chance to finally find a use for all those guns is more than just rhetoric for many of the most extreme among them. They deny it, of course, but the denial is idiotic. They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. The right wing invented the concept of the “Overton window”: the idea that political discourse takes place within a range of acceptable ideas, and that you can make ideas at one end of the range seem more acceptable by introducing more extremist ideas that move the “window” to place the previous extreme closer to the middle. Whether the extremists on the right are merely manipulating the discourse or really believe what they are saying, the effect is to make extremism seem mainstream; they do it because it works, and because it works, extremism does in fact become more widespread. The same is true for counter-measures like gun control: it’s true that the gun ban wouldn’t have made high-capacity magazines impossible to get, because the gun extremists fought to grandfather in the millions of existing ones – but it would have made them harder to get, and thus less likely to be in the possession of an unstable person who freely bought a gun over the counter and shot 20 people with it. The reason the gun nuts go nuts over restrictive measures like that is that they work – imperfectly, but somewhat. Claiming that gun regulations can’t work is clearly false; they wouldn’t be upset about them if that were true. The right wing does all these things for a reason; it’s absurd to pretend that they are meaningless when the rhetoric becomes reality, after spending decades investing in that very rhetoric because it’s so effective. That doesn’t make any particular right-winger personally responsible for this shooter’s precise acts, but it surely makes right-wing rhetoric, tactics, and beliefs responsible for creating a climate in which violent attacks on government figures could be seen as a normal act within the American political environment. That’s precisely what the right wing has been saying, for decades, and it can’t be an accident that some people take it seriously. It’s not surprising that the ones most likely to do so would be the disturbed or the irrational, but the fact that the one who first begin to respond to deliberately crazy and inflammatory rhetoric are crazy and arousable people does not make that rhetoric sane or responsible.
The right-wing defenses against these obvious observations range from ludicrous to offensive. Palin herself has claimed that the gunsight graphics she used to “target” (her words) politicians, including Gifford herself, are not actually gunsights but “surveyor’s symbols” – after she spent months using gun metaphors in that precise context. Nasty dipshit Bill Kristol has complained that making the obvious point that Palin’s “targeting” Gifford was inflammatory is a form of “McCarthyism” (a charge so bizarre it forces you to ask what he thinks McCarthyism actually is). Glenn Beck is now defending Palin on the grounds of an e-mail she sent him claiming “I hate violence” – this after, I note yet again, years of political grandstanding while waving guns and gibbering about “targets” and “revolution”, and trading off her son in the military. The idiotic “Vox Popoli” looks at the suspect’s entire profile – the right-wing slogans and political obsessions, the fascist literature, the pet economic theories and ranting about “unconstitutional” government – and describes him, solely, as an “atheist” (yes, an atheist with a shrine in his backyard). Michelle Malkin argues that the left is really at fault, and assembles pages and pages of examples running back 10 years – an obsession far outstripping this Arizona dude’s. The examples are mostly things like political cartoons and ordinary public demonstrations; almost none of them are actually violent – one is a political-thriller movie made during the Bush years that takes as a plot premise the assassination of Bush, and which she (and a lot of equally stupid right-wingers) managed to interpret as a claim that Bush should be assassinated (because The Godfather was a movie about how you should put horses’ heads in people’s beds) – my favorite was a cartoon of a chimpanzee taking a shit on John McCain’s head, which I, for one, wholeheartedly approve – another is a rap song from the New Black Panther Party (“bang for black power… hang a cracker”), further testimony to the amazing power of angry black people doing virtually nothing to send right-wingers totally out of their gourds. Some of the examples are sexist, some are angry, but almost all are just more of the many things Malkin doesn’t like, and none are of major organized political groups engaged in concerted campaigns to kill or intimidate political opponents (one is of two Marxists sitting in front of a bed sheet painted with the words “Smash the State” – yeah, that’s a likely threat). The stupidity of this exercise is easily illustrated: within that list of rappers, cartoonists, and people with hand-painted signs on sticks, find me 7 left-wingers who murdered doctors in cold blood because they provided some kind of healthcare the leftists disapproved of; find the leftists who bombed, torched, or poisoned with chemicals thousands of health clinics to prevent people from being treated there as they chose to do; find the liberal politicians who campaigned on a platform of violently overthrowing the government they were seeking to join while brandishing guns; find the organized network of left-wing groups that has stockpiled guns and launched violent assaults on local government figures as part of a secessionist coup; find the major left-wing political party that routinely talks about using guns as “remedies” and bloodletting in its official campaign functions . . . oh, hell, just dry up and blow away. Glenn Reynolds reaches an apogee of grotesque offensiveness by referring to the complaints against Palin – for putting “gunsights” on the liberal Jewish woman whom a right-wing nutcase enamored of Mein Kampf later shot in the back of the head – as a “blood libel”. Oh, yes, poor Sarah Palin – victim of anti-Semitism because people don’t like the fact that she targeted a Jew for death and one of her fellow travelers then shot the woman. Jesus, what an asshole.
The import, and the deliberate intent, of the violent, anti-government, eliminationist rhetoric that has pervaded the right wing for a generation now, and increasingly so today, is unmistakable. The fact that it influences people is hard to deny: the people who commit the violence are often members of the groups promoting the violent rhetoric, and in other cases study and quote it as justification for their acts, but more importantly, they use that rhetoric because it works - it motivates their followers and gives them a reason to think they’re involved in something important (“the Second American Revolution”!), and justifies them in the grievances and gun-waving they’ve wanted to see valorized for so long. This incident is a perfect illustration of the fact that the general political climate of hate and violent threats the right wing has created does not explain any particular act in response – in this case the suspected shooter was so disordered it’s hard to find any rational pattern in what is known of him so far – but that it also contributes to the circumstances that make violence possible and attractive – this suspect is a grab-bag of right-wing talking points and obsessions, chose as a target a left-wing politician who had literally been “targeted” for shooting by the right wing’s most prominent cheerleader, and used a gun that allowed an extraordinary amount of violence without pause, which had been made available in the market only by the deliberate and determined campaigning of the right wing.
Of course Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, the Tea Party, the NRA, and the spectrum of right-wing loons they cater to did not, themselves, shoot those people in Arizona; of course they provided a motivation for doing so, deliberate hints that it should be done, and a political climate that made violence not just possible, not even respectable, but an actual campaign platform of the right wing and its candidates. Can we stop pretending that the rhetoric the right wing deliberately embraces because it works does not in fact have anything to do with the behavior of the people who listen to it – or that it won’t continue to do so as long as they continue to use it?
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
I swear to god I think I love you. NO ONE has been able to more cogently, thoughtfully, fairly and angrily captured this godawful tragedy and it’s befuddling aftermath as have you. If I weren’t happily married, I think I’d propose to you on the spot.
What I’m finding on Facebook with all of these conservative “friends” and in the supposedly unbiased media, which you echo so eloquently and which enrages me most is this fallacy of equitability. As though we simply MUST heap equal portions of focus and, yes, I’ll say it, blame, on the right and the left.
We’ve got our crazies. Absolutely. But our lefty crazies like to hole up in trees and throw mock blood on be-furred rich white ladies. Our people are likely to break out in hives before touching a gun – let alone one with a large-capacity clip! Sure we have crazies. But our crazy is the “naked & chain yourself to a tree on the south lawn in protest” kinda crazy. Sarcasm and mockery? Sure. Jon Stewart, Keith, SNL (to some extent)… It’s not the same. It’s not even close..
We’re just never going to bring Ted Nugent to the table.
I have been weeping steadily since seeing an interview with the little girl’s father (that I promised myself I would not watch) while concomitantly watching my two sons fight about Batman, while arguing the finer points of Despicable Me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think my ‘lefty fight’ within reached some sort of tipping point. I thought the one or two of the like-minded folks at LeanLeft might help. You did.
KTK You should be completely ashamed of yourself for trying to politicize the death of a 9 year old girl. What is the matter with you? Seriously, what is your problem?
Hatred is regularly spewed on this blog but you take the cake this time.
I happened to pass the site 4 times today and there were no tea party revelers or conservatives celebrating. Every conservative I know is deeply saddened by what happened. We call that empathy. Personally, I have been praying every day for Gabrielle, her family and every other victim of this senseless massacre.
A classmate of the assassin described him has a left wing pothead. Big deal. Here’s a newsflash Sherlock; the assassin is the one responsible, not left wing potheads.
Start thinking about the families and stop spewing crap.
Right, and you can do that by making sure you refer to the victim’s family by name, while keeping your identity secret.
To prempt your transparent and ignorant attempt to make a pot calling the kettle black accusation, I know most of us use pseudonyms on the internet, but a)I’m not exactly anonymous, and b)a fairly easily traceable and consistent pseudonym isn’t the same thing as a rhetorical, loaded throwaway, handle.
GTFO with your self-righteousness, son.
Holla at your local troll patrol.
Truly an irony rich environment.
No hateful, unreasonable, or over the top rhetoric here. Just all sweetness and light.
Not much concern for accuracy either:
The Glock was legal even under the Assault Weapons ban (and is protected by that pesky and inflammatory 2nd Amendment) and used, high volume magazines were still able to be purchased legally during the ban. (http://www.factcheck.org/a_false_ad_about_assault_weapons.html)
The Daily Kos had “targeted” Giffords as well. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/25/1204/74882/511/541568)
There are numerous Democratic leadership maps utilizing targets or bullseyes. (http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=253055&kaid=127&subid=171)(http://www.verumserum.com/?p=13647)
Oh yeah, and the Communist Manifesto as one of his listed books clearly makes him right wing.
The guy ranted incoherently and, from the evidence available so far, had no identifiable ideology aside from “Crazy.” But that wouldn’t fit your narrative, would it?
*sigh*. no, it hadn’t.
you’ve got enough good points to make here, you don’t need to use bad arguments and factually wrong claims to back them up. you could cut that entire paragraph and have a shorter, more to the point article that had one less weak spot for nitpickers like me to discredit it with.
Nokilissa:
I accept! Because I’m desperate like that. And thanks!
Matt/Nomen:
Re: the Glock 19: the gun was legal, but the high-capacity magazines were not; under the ban, it would have had to be sold with its lowest-capacity magazine only, rather than the largest-capacity one, carrying more than three times as many rounds, that Loughner purchased. This should be clearer, you’re right, but it changes nothing about my point, or its truth.
Re: “targeting” – that rhetoric does appear sometimes, but hardly with the same import. The Kos article is laughable – he uses the words “target” and “bullseye” in a long post about primary challenges, filled with such inflammatory rhetoric as “bad apples” and “local infrastructure”. And I suppose you’ve proved that “numerous” Democrats used bullseye graphics, in the sense that “one” is a number. Neither of these examples, nor any others I am familiar with, come from candidates who regularly wave guns in their official campaign ads, or encourage their followers to “reload” while viewing the gun imagery, or rant about revolution.
To be sure, this kind of rhetoric is unsettling, and Democrats should be ashamed of using it. Even casual military-style metaphors like Kos’s, which are common in election campaigns, ought to be toned down for obvious reasons. But the pervasive and overt encouragement to violence of the right wing is far beyond any of this.
Re: Loughner’s propensities: I explicitly noted that there are ambiguities in his range of interests and obsessions, and that he cannot be easily classified. Obviously, anybody who lists both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as favorites is not stringently doctrinaire. But that there is a clear rightward tilt to his obsessions is equally obvious.
The one thing I would change in the post above is describing Gifford as a “liberal”. She may have been by Arizona standards, but was known among Democrats as a Blue Dog. That was the reason, in fact, for Kos listing her as a candidate for a primary challenge. Perhaps “relative liberal” is the best that can be said.
Great news today, Gabrielle is in stable condition and doctors continue to be optimistic about her recovery.
digglahhh ??? I assume you were talking to me. The best you can do is take exception to my handle? I don’t care who you are or where you are at, why do you? C’mon man!
Calling concern and empathy self righteousness is your prerogative. I urge you to pray for Gabrielle and all who were involved in this horrible event, which would be far more productive.
Remember folks, all the families involved need support right now.
under the AWB, both the gun and the extended magazine were perfectly legal to own and to sell. the magazine would have had to be a grandfathered-in pre-ban one, as it would have been illegal to manufacture or import while the ban was in effect, but there was no real shortage of them.
and really, i don’t see how this legal technicality of an expired law bears on your central point, which AFAICT is all about inflammatory rhetoric and its real world consequences — and is a very good point, one i largely agree with. i think getting too involved (or involved at all) with the details of gun control only serves to detract from that immediate current concern.
in other depressing news, the “let’s EVERYBODY tone down the rhetoric, equally on BOTH sides” trumpets are starting to blow here and there. as if the political left has been anywhere near as inflammatory, or shares anywhere near an equal amount of blame. i wish i’d never learned the definition of the phrase “Overton window”; now that i have, i can’t keep from seeing the damn thing being shifted all the time.
Here’s the way I see it. A deranged and violent lunatic is more likely to hear something on the right and think “they’re telling me to do it!” compared to what they’ll interpret from the left. But does that mean the right is actually telling people to go on shooting sprees? No.
It seems highly unlikely that Loughner was destabilized and driven to murder by recent political “eliminationist rhetoric” of the teaparty. Look at his background: he was mentally unstable for quite some time. He was severely mentally ill, which means it’s ludicrous to base any sort of argument on the assumption that he had a cogent perspective on politics.
Furthermore, “eliminationist rhetoric” being used by politicians isn’t the same thing as politicians encouraging violence. Furthermore, “eliminationist rhetoric” or whatever you want to call it, is nothing new. And for most people, it doesn’t incite violence. You know why? Because most people aren’t so f***ed-up crazy in their heads to actually go out and kill people. Or to think that the politicians are telling them to do that. When we talk, as politicians, or people posting political blogs, or in public etc, we have to assume that 99.9999% of the listeners are stable enough to not twist our words into “they’re telling me, by saying ‘target’, that I should kill people.”
If this guy was a product of the Right-wing and Tea Party political ideologues and was incited by their “eliminationist rhetoric”, shouldn’t he have been spouting off about Ayn Rand or some shit? And shouldn’t Atlas Shrugged have been on his favorite books list?
I agree with what Nokilissa said in her first comment – it’s true that Right Wing crazies tend to be violent, and lefty crazies tend to roost in trees and toss poo at poeple and do, in fact, have some kind of allergic reaction upon the very thought of touching guns. However, what’s missing in this assessment is proof that Loughner was a) Right wing, and b) was prompted by the Right wing to go on a killing spree. Looking at just how bat-shit insane he was, I have a hard time believing that partisan politics was much if any of a driving force for Loughner. Of course, we might never know. Why? Because the guy is so so far over the edge nutso that he’s practically incomprehensible. As KTK pointed out, he has some consistencies with Tea Party/Right Wing craziness, but those are pretty far overshadowed by how paranoid and delusional he was. It’s not enough to say “well, Teabaggers are paranoid about government takeover and so was this guy, ergo…” Have you even read what he wrote? He was paranoid over government takeovers, but it was all his own conspiracy theory that he cooked up in that psychotic brain of his.
As for Sarah Palin, I don’t give a rats ass about what Sarah Palin things, or what people think of the Sarah Palin connection to this incident. I can think of few things more limp-dicked than trying to draw a connection between this incident and a politician who no one had
really heard of until she was McCain’s running mate, whose political career was so boring that her political
opponents’ strongest offensives were launched at her family life, religious views, and her hunting activities, and, last but not least, who isn’t even in office anymore, and hasn’t been since mid-2009. I’m so f***ing sick of hearing about Sarah Palin.
But, of course, if you repeat something often enough, like “the right-wing/tea party encourages violence” it becomes true.
You know what might be productive – having meaningful and intellectually open but genuine discussion about the environment in which these acts are committed and making an earnest attempt to glean some understanding that just might help discourage future similar incidents. You know what is not productive, clutching my hands and spouting an impotent wish to an imaginary sky creature. You know what else is not productive/helpful? Trolling message boards expressly trying to undermine the type of discussion I alluded to up top. And, further, if you can’t see how the over-the-top pretentiousness of your handle impacts the likelihood that anybody is going to take you seriously, then you mush have received a communications degree at same place Sarah did.
To be honest, I’m not totally even all-in on KTK’s point. I understand where it’s coming from, and I think there’s some merit to it, but this an age-old debate. Should Palin have to apologize for this? I dunno. Should Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre., and MC Ren have apologized for every drive-by shooting for the past 20 years? (KTK- I anticipate your argument about this being a flawed analogy, but I think it’s still largely valid). So, for those who want to say, from their honest and intellectually-objective perspective that Palin’s hands are clean, I’m not going to scream bloody murder. Hell, I want to get at her in this case, but I’m not sure I’d be entirely intellectually honest in doing so. So, at the very best, I can see the argument for throwing Palin in the mix here (and many of her like-behaving cronies), but I can also see the perspective that this persecution of her is unfair.
Here’s a bunch of dogs that don’t hunt though.
1. The fallacy that both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of this behavior. The left is not totally clean, but they’re equally guilty in the same way that Bernie Madoff and the dude hustling half price swipes on his unlimited Metrocard are both scammers and thieves. To the extent the violent political imagery is reponsible for this kind of behavior (again, questionable and abstract), the right is far more “guilty” than the left. You can argue the Frank Zappa, I made a song about dental floss, but nobody’s teeth got any clear defense and say the whole point is moot, but you can’t concede truth to the original argument but then claim we’re all equally to blame. That’s a major fail.
2. The land surveyor backtrack. Holy fuck, Barry Bonds responded more believably when he was found to be taking women’s birth control medicine or whatever. The images were target sites – sorry, ain’t no two ways about it. Palin subsequently referred to the images as such in tweets and screenshots abound even after she deleted them in the last 48 hours.
This is also relevant to the first argument. If you don’t think the imagery is provocational in any way, then there’s nothing to backtrack from. If you think you contributed to this, apologize and move on. If you don’t think you did, then defend yourself. Don’t engage in revisionist interpretation of your actions, don’t try to pander for sympathy by claiming you have a stalker too, just put on your big girl pants and have as much personal accountability and integrity regarding your product as Snoop fucking Doggy Dogg – is that too tough a standard?
3. Not to keep bringing this back to rap music, but if long-standing Republicans don’t feel this imagery is a problem in terms of begetting real violence, you’re going to have to explain to us your real reason for trying to censor black music. Why was 2 Live Crew going to mean the raping of women and Ice-T the killing of cops, but Sarah Palin’s crosshairs not going to mean an uptick in political violence. Again, you can hold a variation of the life will not mirror art defense, but you have to have either held it other instances when it would be applicable or cogently, deliberately, and convincingly explain the difference.
4. Whether Loughner had an expressly right or left political opinion is beside the point. The allegation here is one of creating an environment that was permissive and encouraging of violence toward politicians. To paraphrase a comment on Jezebel, I don’t need to watch Jersey Shore to have it effect their opinion on the eastern Jersey coastal region [and other similar examples], so why would I need to be some sort of political activist for the general climate of political discourse to affect my feelings on various behaviors in the political sphere.
The allegation is simply that Palin and co. created an enabling environment for violence directed at politicians. That’s it. Nobody is saying this kid was acting out Palin’s orders, that he did this in the name of any specific political philosophy, or any of that. The charge is enabling, irrespective of intent.
Oh, and my favorite snarky comment on this whole thing was in regard to the land surveying backtrack.
…See, Miss Teen South Carolina was right after all. Perhaps if there wasn’t such a dire shortage of maps we all would have known this and not misinterpretted the images in the first place.
/South Africa and the Iraq
#likesuchas
digglahhh, and I’m sure everyone takes that handle seriously, congratulations I think you are starting to get it! If we are to glean some understanding that just might help discourage future similar incidents then we need to be discussing how we can prevent a person with a mental illness from acting out in violence. That is what KTK should have done rather than dragging this blog to a new low by politicizing the death of a 9 year old girl.
By the way Gabrielle is the name of the Congresswoman that was shot; you attacked me for nothing on that one.
What is your definition of a troll? Number of times posting? Is it the number of years posting? Is it the number of years using the same handle? Dude, if you do not post daily then you must be a troll too. If you are not then specifically answer all 3 questions.
“…then you mush have received a communications degree at same place Sarah did.” Uhhh… no I didn’t but that mush be where you learned to spell. See digglahhh, trivial attacks like yours take away all of your credibility.
What we all should be doing is focusing on the friends and families of the victims.
I know the names of parties involved, and actually a lot more personal info about them than I might let on.
The tones of your posts on the other threads you commented on yesterday were troll-ish. Trolling means trying to elicit reactions and making inflamatory statements for their own sake without attempting to drive the discussion to anyplace useful – undermining the discourse.
When you’re new to a site – you should take care to attack the substance of an argument and not the poster in the case that you wish the regular commenters consider your input and interest in the discussion as genuine.
If you can’t see the difference between typo and the way you brand yourself via your commenter name, then I’m lost. It’s all good though, you and I are both equally guilty of trolling like the right and left and equally guilty of violent political imagery, right?
And, sure I wish the victims and their families well, but that ain’t what’s gonna “solve” anything, and ain’t much meaningful supporting I’ma do from a keyboard in NYC.
digglahhh are you suggesting the left isn’t guilty of violent political imagery? You just used the word “attack”. By the way I absolutely attacked KTK’s argument by showing his true motive. He is trying to turn the tragic death of a 9 year old into a political attack. I have been posting on this site for 6 years, how long should I wait before calling out someone like KTK when he stoops to the level he just did? Another thing; you are confusing showing the absurdity of a post with making inflammatory statements.
digglahhh you are way to fixated on my handle. Get over it.
I happen to know a couple things about tragic multiple deaths and injuries. The families absolutely need to hear support. All these leftists and those around the country have to offer is trivializing the situation by trying to make an absurd political argument. Pathetic. Save the rhetoric for politics.
Support the families people, they need it more than you realize right now.
“Truth”:
If you’ve been reading this blog for 6 years, you should be familiar with the problem of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder.
You keep repeating some nonsense about politicizing the young girl’s death. It’s not just idiotic; it’s incomprehensible.
If you look carefully and read slowly, you’ll see that that girl is mentioned exactly once in my entire post: in a quote from somebody else, who was in fact celebrating her death because she might have been a liberal, and received the tacit approval of Sarah Palin’s Web editors. How that translates into me politicizing the tragedy defies comprehension. (Specifically, it defies reading comprehension. Please, conservatives: get help.)
I am certainly politicizing the politicizing of violence and murder as partisan tactics by the right wing: it’s time they were held accountable. If they were, we’d have fewer instances like this. But projecting from that to my approval of the consequences of their eliminationist ideologies and violent psychological propensities is an unfortunately characteristic perversion.
Truth,
This is my last response to you – as you clearly trolled TG’s post too. So, here we go.
Shut. the. fuck. up. about the little girl’s death. You are the only person here trivializing it. True story. You trivialize the instance when you are reluctant to speak about it within the larger context of the environment that may or may not contribute to such deaths. And, by extension, you’ll be trivializing any other deaths like this that may occur by refusing to consider – consider, not uniformly agree – whether violent political rhetoric helped propagate this. And, if you don’t engage in the discussion of how is chiefly responsible for that talk – you cited John Wilkes motherfucking Booth in your attempt to contrive this equal blame argument in the TG’s thread – you are trivializing and disrespecting the victims here by not actually looking to hold responsible those who helped instigate it.
You also want people to focus on the fact that a little girl died as opposed to discussing the underlying issues here. You’re trying to pull people’s heartstrings and give that support the family’s jazz to guilt people out of talking about the actual issues. That’s called EXPLOITING the victims. No, it’s not time to look critically at my political views, uh uh, it’s time to send a fucking fruit basket or some shit. Well, go get your Harry and David catalog and put the Christmas Shoes CD on repeat, but don’t expect that faux self-righteous, self-serving, fuckery to fly with people who actually care about preventing this kind of shit.
And, I will repeat yet again, that there is a legitimate argument to be made that this was an isolated incident that really had nothing to do with any of the political rhetoric that has been brought into the discussion, like the argument that drive-bys were going to happen in Crenshaw regardless whether N.W.A. existed or sold a single record. So, if you disagree with KTK, make that fucking argument. To say that both the left and the right engage in the same type of behavior, equally, is just a flat-out lie and it shows where you are truly coming from.
I have absolutely zero interest in defending the mainstream left – you’d know that if you’ve been reading here as long as you claim to have been. I think they’re a bunch of spineless pussies and most of them are just concerned with assuaging their perceived guilt of privilege but are almost never willing to actually do anything that will create meaningful challenge to that privilege. So, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. But it is a matter of fact that the mainstream left’s tactics regarding violent, eliminationist rhetoric are not the same as the right’s. Period. end. of. story.
I’m not fixated on your screen name, I’m fixated on exposing you as the troll you are, and your tactics for the disgusting manipulations they are. Yes, I used the word “attack.” But, the issue is a question of disagrees, and you either know that or are dumber than any of us could have imagined. Also, I’m unaware that I’m an influential mouthpiece for a mainstream political party.
KTK
You obviously got your cue on Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder from the Michael Savage book “Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder”. Try to be a little more original. Heck I think you suffer from Cognitive Reactionary Disability Syndrome but that isn’t really an argument now is it? I wouldn’t expect empathy and civility to be comprehensible to you. See my post to Tgirsch regarding leftists killing presidents, it should open your eyes a bit.I also demonstrated the left is every bit responsible for the rhetoric out there starting with President Obama himself. Oh yeah, doesn’t CNN have a show called “Crossfire”? Face it, if hate based rhetoric could drive people to kill, this blog, CNN and MSNBC would have killed Bush and Cheney years ago.
The issue is mental illness, something you have missed entirely. The other thing you are missing is empathy and compassion for the families but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that either.
digglahhh
I didn’t say that both the left and the right engage in the same type of behavior equally, if anything the left engage in it more so. What I said is Loughner is solely responsible for actions while showing many instances where leftists kill people and President Obama engages in destructive rhetoric.
The fact you don’t understand empathy does not matter. If it makes you feel better to call me names like troll, go ahead. As far as your f-bomb attack on me, I’m not impressed. You see, I hold these views in my personal and public life and the funny thing is no one has EVER talked that way to my face. Go ahead and show us what a man you are by swearing. Your verbal assault kinda falls into the destructive rhetoric column now doesn’t it? As for me, I will stick to facts and point out inconsistencies.
Last but not least, the underlying issue is mental illness. No one is touching that one. By the way, you seem to have an anger issue, please relax. This blog is not worth getting that worked up over.
–Truth
That sir, is a most comprehensive outline of the situation that arose with this young man. My daughter ( a bleeding heart liberal if ever there was one, bless her little heart) said to me: “Dont these people have social programs and interventions for kids like this? Couldn’t somebody have done something? Apparently not. Yes, people slip through the cracks, but somebody should have noticed the direction this kid’s mind was taking and tried to get him some help.
I totally agree that the huge divisions and partisan politics, along with right-wing violent rhetoric have caused this problem. There will be more, that is the sad part, because nobody has learned a thing from this tragic incident. And when there IS more, then there will be people taking up arms in earnest to teach each other a lesson since nobody seems to have learned the secret to civilized democratic negotiation. The seed planted by mentally unstable people who take literally the rantings of right-wing pundits, will grow and spread exponentially.
Janis
How do you explain the fact that Loughner was described as a left-wing pothead by someone that actually knew him?
How do you explain one of the people shot, a democrat activist, threatened to kill a tea party member since the massacre? Not only did he threaten to kill the tea party member but he was arrested by Tucson police and now has a restraining order placed on him to keep him away from the tea party member and his family. I suppose the right drove him to do this. You should be thinking about the families from the massacre rather than defending Loughner.
As it turns out, the truly violent ones are the democrats while the tea party is guilty of being demonized by the left simply because the left knows they can’t beat them with ideas or action. Janis you should look at the facts, they don’t support the rhetoric from the left.
Face it; Loughner is solely responsible for his actions. He doesn’t need you to defend him by crying that he was a victim of the right. I know this difficult for you, and liberals in general, but the concept is one of “Personal Responsibility”.