As the world learns more about Jarred Loughner, the unlikelihood that any “political rhetoric” had even the most oblique role in causing his atrocity over the weekend is becoming more and more clear to just about everyone.
Everyone that hasn’t been waiting for something to come along to shut up the newly-uppity right, anyway.
America’s village idiot Paul Krugman tipped his hand, comparing the episode to Oklahoma City in his deeply depraved column over the weekend. But he wasn’t entirely off base; there was at least one valid comparison to 1995.
Back then, Bill Clinton had just seen his agenda repudiated at the polls with the second-greatest mid-term drubbing in recent memory. The left lost both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a generation. Clinton needed something to get his message across; his administration didn’t “waste the crisis”; Hillary as much as blamed the horror on Rush Limbaugh and his “rhetoric”.
It was, of course, “rhetoric”, itself.
Today’s left isn’t wasting the Tuscon massacre. Carolyn McCarthy (D[emigog], NY) is using the crisis to introduce gun control legislation of the type that utterly failed to prevent her own husband from being murdered in New York, or to keep Chicago from being the most dangerous city in the Western Hemisphere north of Juarez – a place that suffers as many deaths as Tuscon once or more a week.
And James Clyburn wants to redefine free speech as, well…:
The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use ‘better judgment.’
‘Free speech is as free speech does,’ he said. ‘You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.’
Clyburn used as an example a comment made by Sharron Angle, an unsuccessful U.S. senatorial candidate in Nevada, who said the frustrated public may consider turning to ‘Second Amendment remedies’ for political disputes unless Congress changed course.
Clyburn’s lying, by the way; Michael Medved addressed Angle’s “second amendment remedies” comment last August (here’s the audio). Angle was not calling for armed insurrection…
…but as we’ve seen throughout the left’s reaction to the Tuscon massacre – as during the Healthcare debate, with its spurious claims of violence – what people actually say and do isn’t really the issue.
A Center-Left friend ‘helpfully’ pointed me to a piece CNN’s Gloria Borger did saying that while no one should ascribe any particular political motivation to this madman’s act…we should look at the last TWO years of angry political rhetoric and reflect on whether or not this is good for the Republic. Apparently Ms. Borger spent 2000 – 2008 in a bubble, missing all of the angry left political rhetoric that was a part of every day life in the U.S.
The fact that a ‘Senior Democratic Strategist’ told Politico that Barry needs to spin this tragedy the way King Bill Clinton did the Oklahoma City bombing has me thinking that Democrats don’t see mass murder as a tragedy – it’s a tactic in their strategy.
It would be a terrible shame if this tragedy was used to ram through some kind of legislation, but it would also be a terrible shame if we wasted the opportunity to re-examine our pop culture and our politics to get a better handle on how we are able to constantly talk past each other.
Language has many uses, and communication of ideas is only one of them. Language also is used to establish identity, like a dog barking at the mailman – it says, “I’m a big scary dog!” even if the barker is just a li’l white terrier. That kind of language is often used to divide, the cool from the not-cool, one side from another.
I want my kids to be Americans. Not democrats, republicans, lefties or tea-partiers. I want us to start using language to get over our differences, not define the packs that run with ’em.
Free speech is something so central to who we are that it cannot be defined in legislation, no matter how well intended. But it also demands a lot of responsibility from each of us. The stuff you pointed to here is pretty clearly wrong, IMHO, for some very fundamental reasons. But I also think it’s equally wrong to squander the great gift of free speech that defines us as one people.
A tragedy crafted by a schizophrenic is one thing. A schizophrenic nation is another altogether. Tragedies like we had are part of the price of freedom, sadly, but not taking a step back and learning from them is a price I am tired of paying.
I want my kids to be Americans. Not democrats, republicans, lefties or tea-partiers.
Sadly, the Democrat party doesn’t share hour hope. They want your kids to be Democrats, period. The “Progressives” want them to be Socialists. All of them.
Never forget, there was a time when both the USSR and China had two parties. How did that work out?
Oh where oh where is our little Dog Gone?
Oh where oh where can she beeeeeeeee?
/another comment of the year contender
Clinton used the Oklahoma City “tradegy” to his advantage. Today’s Democrats have turned this weekend’s events into another Wellstone funeral.
And yet Erik, in your calm and polite reasonable tone, you miss the whole point here.
By saying at your blog that this act was ‘political violence’, you ascribe to Loughner a certain political thinking that was inspired by (you say) an angry political culture – which is not evidenced by anything uncovered by law enforcement or media.
If you want to change the political culture, than speak out forcefully when someone you generally agree with politically says something more for its caustic effect than to illuminate their own position.
Rep. Clyburn (noted above) participated in a shameful episode in this country’s political discourse when he claimed he and the Congressional Black Caucus were the subject of racial epithets preceding the vote on the Health Care legislation. He offered no proof and subsequent analysis of video and audio of the event showed that his claim was false. And yet as late as Sunday, this event is still noted in the news as having happened. If I spend time researching your blog, will I find your condemnation of this act or of violent rhetoric by Democrats?
It’s good that many now are recognizing the ‘violent imagery’ in political speech is excessive. Some consistency in the criticism would lead to the constructive political dialog that I think you desire.
I want my kids to be Americans. Not democrats, republicans, lefties or tea-partiers. I want us to start using language to get over our differences, not define the packs that run with ‘em.
Well then, you’re a bigot, Eric. That’s right; a bigot.
That’s not my conclusion mind you, it’s the conclusion set in stone by the leftist masons of PC newspeak.
Thanks to the left, we’re no longer a melting pot, we’re a mosaic…remember? We celebrate our differences….we erect brightly lit marquees to advertise the difference in the color of our skin; of our gender and of our national origins.
To suggest there isn’t something inherently special about our differences is to deny the awesome wonder that is DIVERSITY.
In truth, however, even if the left should suddenly realize that erecting walls between us might be great for fund raising and victimhood, but not be such a good idea for the overall health of our Republic, we’d still be left with the damage abortion and the welfare state have inflicted upon the most intimate connections between us as human beings.
In short, you’re either too late or too naive.
Aw, Foot……..were you missing me?
I was busy writing something fun about the latest failure with the SCOTUS of birther queen Orly Taitz.
I actually just stopped over here to make sure I got the title correct of the lovely piece that Mitch wrote yesterday, sending his sympathy to the people who were the victims, and their families. Since he did not have it open to comments, I was going to send him my compliments in an email.
But since you bring it up….
I notice Fox News inaccurately — again — claimed a white supremacist connection for the shooter that turned out not to be valid. Ahhh, Fakes News, you never disappoint those of us who find you consistently factually wrong.
However, a more plausible suggestion that I just read for what the shooter may have relied on, based on his youtube creations and his writings is the conspiracy theory web site of a man described as “an anti-taxer and quasi-celebrity of the fringe right” has promoted for apparently more than a decade a very similar notion to the subject matter of grammar and brain washing as that espoused by the Arizona (alleged) shooter. Thatwould be Milwaukee, WI David Wynn Miller. Miller insists he has never met Jared Loughner, but that doesn’t address Loughner getting his inspiration from Miller and his web site.
If this IS the source of Loughner’s actions, this right-wing political conspiracy, and it does seem to track pretty closely with what Loughner claimed as the reason for his actions, then I am not so sure that it is the case that Loughner acted out of mental illness along the lines of schizophrenia. It would seem more like the kind of bat-shit crazy we see out of Orly Taitz and the right wing conspiracy / lunatic fringe.
But don’t take my word for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wynn_Miller
I hope I did not disappoint you, Foot.
Ah, I see Dog Gone is still relying on the 1/5th power electrical impulses powering what passes for her neurons to augment her handicapped world views.
Good lord, Dog Gone, take up stamp collecting or something, you worthless excuse for an Internet sleuth.
Aw crap. Sorry everybody. I just thought it was a clever little goof.
“I was busy writing something fun about the latest failure with the SCOTUS of birther queen Orly Taitz. ”
Coherent writing comes from coherent thinking. So I took that above-quoted line was a warning as to what was to come.
(I decided to not bother.)
(Yes, I split an infinitive. I ask you to seriously bite me.)
I saw something yesterday that said Sarah Palin’s odds with Irish bookies has dropped sharply after the shootings over the weekend. And then yesteday it was announced that her reality tv series was not going to be renewed. Last episode airs on Sunday. I gather her second book, another one she didn’t write, just put her name on, isn’t doing as well as the first one either.
Perhaps Sarah Palin is finding her choices for political language out of favor? Or maybe she has just peaked too soon? Given the timing, I’m betting on language being the greater issue. Apparently her trying to deny that she was using cross-hairs for an image didn’t go over well with some people who were less passionately her hard-core base.
Erik,
Let me employ language for another of its uses – obfuscation and delaying – by using that wondrous business weasel-phrase, almost Hindi in its byzantine nuance, “I don’t disagree”.
Not completely, anyway.
The fact is, we are and have always been a nation built on fragments; we have three major and many minor ethnic groups, 1.2 primary languages, three major strains of both conservative and liberal politics; historically, we built a nation out of Patriots and former Royalists, abolitionists and plantation owners and white trash and immigrants and freedmen, Turks and Armenians, Russians and Jews.
At its best, the current brouhaha reminds me of the 1828 election when, after a very bitter campaign, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, presiding over a huge surge in participatory democracy brought on by advances in communications, beat John Quincy Adams’ Whigs. Adams’ supporters were horrifed – they thought Jackson’s were a bunch of uncouth rubes, and were horrified at the debasement of politics. But can we say Democracy was worse for having expanded, even to include people who are, by the standards of the previously-dominant class, unpolished and bumptious?
The Dems are clutching at their pearls over “rhetoric” because the right’s unpolished, bumptious, sometimes angry newcomers to politics (the Tea Party and millions of others) outpolled their unpolished, bumptious,., emotional former newcomers (the Obama cultists); it’s a threat to democracy, obviously
I’m going to find a conclusion to this yet. I promise.
And it’s this; language can bring us together, all right. For my part, it’ll be to sayi “grow up, people, and learn to accept the fact that people can differ from you, whatever it is you believe, and it’s not necessarily a threat to you”.
I notice Fox News inaccurately — again — claimed a white supremacist connection for the shooter that turned out not to be valid.
Really, Dog? You “noticed” that? In what hour? What specific program? Who made the claim? We want FACT CHECKING, Dog.
Otherwise you are just engaging in vitriolic rhetoric ™, and are, my dear, part of the supposed problem.
Hooo, boy:
I was busy writing something fun about the latest failure with the SCOTUS of birther queen Orly Taitz.
About whom absolutely nobody cares in the least.
I actually just stopped over here to make sure I got the title correct of the lovely piece that Mitch wrote yesterday, sending his sympathy to the people who were the victims, and their families. Since he did not have it open to comments, I was going to send him my compliments in an email.
Well, thanks. I don’t close comments often, but every once in a while I don’t want what I write subjected to the whims of the peanut gallery. That was one.
Dog gone, when you look in the mirror, do you think the person looking back at you is sane?
Last night, I was listening to Nancy Nelson (Betty McCollum’s teh crazee aunt) on AM950. She was, of course, listing the top ten reasons to despise Republicans and of course Palin’s hate filled candidate targeting page came in as #1, closely followed by every conservative talk show host in the country.
So I called in to inform her that the DCC had been posting a targeting page that was for all intents and purposes identical to Palin’s…bulls-eyes rather than crosshairs being the only difference.
She didn’t know about that, but promised to look into it.
I then offered a helpful suggestion. See, if she was truly as disgusted with the violent rhetoric being broadcast, she had the opportunity to lead the charge against it by demanding that Mike Malloy be removed from her stations line up.
See, Malloy is utterly incapable of speaking of anyone to the right of Hugo Chavez without inflicting his audience with a torrent of expletives deleted.
Fact is, I had recently heard him suggest that very soon, “people” would wake up and realize what those “sons of bitches”, those “cockroaches” (that’s you and me and the people we vote for) have been up to, and promised that “blood would flow”.
Nelson allowed that Malloy “sometimes went a bit too far”, but that AM950 dutifully called his producer every time he did so….then she hung up on me.
But they weren’t going to let it go at that, of course; Matt McNeil jumped in to explain the whole thing to us.
Turns out that Malloy is a night time guy, see?
And also turns out that even though he might say something unkind once in awhile, there was so much more coming from the right, it just can’t be morally equivalent.
So there it is folks. It’s not what is being said, it’s when and how much of it is being said. ….I guess invective is kind of like beer.
I notice Fox News inaccurately — again — claimed a white supremacist connection for the shooter that turned out not to be valid.
The demands of the instant news cycle causes news organizations to jump ahead of the facts to try to be first with a story – especially with stories like this, where networks clear the decks and run live coverage, which involves stretching a few facts with a lot of dubious analysis.
Ahhh, Fakes News, you never disappoint those of us who find you consistently factually wrong.
Speaking of “factually wrong”, DG – at 1:15 on Saturday, you left a comment claiming that this shooting validated your claim that the right was engaged in an orgy of violence.
Fakes? Consistently wrong?
Just saying.
BTW, you do know that NPR was the first to claim that Rep. Giffords was dead, don’t you?
Perhaps they should be called Not Phactual Radio?
However, a more plausible suggestion that I just read for what the shooter may have relied on, based on his youtube creations and his writings is the conspiracy theory web site of a man described as “an anti-taxer and quasi-celebrity of the fringe right” has promoted for apparently more than a decade a very similar notion to the subject matter of grammar and brain washing as that espoused by the Arizona (alleged) shooter.
Interesting.
In the sense of “interesting that DG would seize on this no-name, when there are many, many other examples of thinkers, of every strain of politics, who’ve floated the idea that controlling language helps one control society.
Noam Chomsky is the most famous, and by no means the first.
Is Chomsky a “right wing anti-taxer?”
Because it’s vastly more plausible that Loughner seized upon the very, very famous Chomsky – who is very popular and well-known, especially among self-styled anarchists, compared to the complete no-name you apparently conjured forth from Google.
And given that he fairly obviously has a serious dissociative disorder, it’s infinitely more plausible that he seized upon some agglomeration of ideas and munged them into a demented creation of his very own, with no meaningful geneology or political slant to it.
deegee, I speak for myself of course, but I’d bet my next paycheck that just about everyone here would agree that if it were conclusively proved that Sarah Palin had purchased Loughner his pistol using money sent in by Rush Limbaugh, they would still be your moral superiors.
See, I’d gladly lose 100 congressional rep’s, federal judges and adult hangarounds for the life of just one of the innocent children you delight in knowing are ripped limb from limb from wombs every day.
That’s because while murder is morally and legally wrong, legalized infanticide not only subjects a wholly innocent child to a bloody, horrific death, it reduces our humanity.
Among sane, decent human beings, you and your ilk have no moral standing to judge anyone of anything. You’re not only tragically ignorant, you’re completely bereft of one of our most important human characteristics; compassion and love of our children.
I hope that clears things up for you, dear. You may go sit by your dish.
swiftee: Come on, give the doggie a break. All that happened on Saturday was a 40th trimester abortion. Using the term “murder” is highly inflamatory and defames a simple medical procedure! How right-wing of you.
MyGov,
That’d be “160th Trimester”. Four trimesters per year.
Mitch: I respectfully defend my number. A trimester is a 3 month period. Hence, you divide the child’s age in months (112+) by 3 to create 3 month segments (37.8). Add in the 3 trimesters during the pregnancy and you get 40.
I nominate swiftee for re-education immediately. Select whatever nearest gulag to intern him into…
I see your point; depending on how far any of the victims were from their mothers, it could probably be construed as a “partial-birth abortion”…they were just more “partially born” than most.
Does anyone remember Dog’s swift condemnation of Wanda Sykes public wish that Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail? How about Janeane Garafalo claiming every single Tea Party attendee was a “racist, straight up”? Any inflammatory Vitriolic Rhetoric ™ from the right soundly condemned by Dog Gone?
Still waiting for the FACT CHECK on Fox News, btw.
Aaaaah, you’re talking about the 9 year old girl. My bad. I was doing the math for Giffords.
More hate speech about a womyn’s right to choose. As Great Leader Obama said on the campaign trail “If one of my daughters makes a mistake, I don’t want her punished with a baby”. Now THAT is morality writ large.
“If one of my daughters makes a mistake, I don’t want her punished with a baby”
Obama’s mother was 18 years old and unmarried when Obama was conceived.
Does Obama think that he was a mistake? Barry has some odd psychological tics that the MSM ignores.
Kermit;
Allow me to add that Doggy also expressed no outrage when that brilliant moron Montel Williams suggested that Michelle Bachmann should “just slit her throat,” or when her black messiah urging his useful idiots to “bring a gun to a knife fight”, not even when Matthews, Olbernazi and Madcow go bat shit over anything they deem offensive to their dear leader!
swiftee;
I saw Nancy “Looney Tunes” Nelson on Channel 9 news last evening, trying to go toe to toe with Jason Lewis and Jeff Passholt. What a stupid, elitist sycophant she is, literally screaming ala NY Rep Anthony Weinerdog to try to drown Jason out, while he calmly gave he a verbal beetch slapping. She absolutely refused to acknowledge the vitriol that ALWAYS comes from the left nuts. Screaming “I’ve got over two hundred clips of Rush, Beck, et al making hateful comments, so (nyaa, nyaa, nyaa) Jason, you get me some clips, then we’ll debate it.”
“If one of my daughters makes a mistake, I don’t want her punished with a baby”.
What he really meant was he didn’t want to be punished with a grandchild. Hope and Change at the end of a scalpel.
deegee, did you know that 40% of gestating children in New York city are brutally murdered each year? It’s closer to 60% for black kids.
Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/nyregion/07abortion.html
After you finish dancing with joy, FACTCHECK the bloody genocide you and your ilk have perpetrated against our kids and get back to us.
That’s what I mean by psychological tics, Scott. When Obama made the statement about not wanting to see his daughter punished with a child, he bore the same relation to his daughters that the grandparents who raised Obama (after his mother and father abandoned him) bore to him.
Weird.
Agreed Terry! He titled his book Dreams of My Father when maybe it should have been Absense of My Father.
I just happened to be walking by an MSNBC booth at CES last week while Hardline was taped. In the 2 minutes that I stopped in my tracks, Mathews managed to offend EVERYONE at the CES by calling everyone around him “white males to the right of the digital spectrum”. Never mind that half of the exhibition was dominated by Asians; and a lot of people milling around were fresh off the hippie patch. I do want to say that whoever he was “debating” – a woman, – was handing his a** to him with facts and knowledge. I think they were talking about whether stimulus worked or not. I could not stand Mathews’ shrill bold-faced lies, condescension and just plain stupidity for more than 2 minutes.
And that’s your
Blazing Reichstag. I loved that movie. Especially the scene where they sitting around the campfire eating sauerkraut.
Kermit, you are making a joke that alludes to the film Blazing Saddles. That film is rife with stereotypical, bigoted representations of jews and blacks, including frequent use of that word which we are not supposed to say, you know the one that begins with the letter between ‘m’ and ‘o’.
Racist.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:
Hsss!
Terr, don’t forget irish, chinese, germans, politicians, schoolmarms, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.
And who could forget the big production number at the end? That’s the French Mistake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMK6lzmSk2o
Berg holding a vitriolic, rhetorical gun to his own head:
“No one moves or the blogger gets it.”
Dog Gone “Someone help that poor man!”
(Hey since she won’t answer any challenges to her deeply flawed comments, she should at least get a cameo.)
It’s worth noting that Fox’s “error” in citing the alleged killer’s racist affiliations more or less was quoting investigating authorities, the FBI, and the SPLC. If they got it wrong, so be it.
Left wing rhetoric and vitriol have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille.
Mitch ought to have a “BS” tag for statements like this.
Let’s dissect the statement “You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and call it free speech”.
Of course you can. What are supposed to do when you are in a crowded theater and see a fire? Sneak out the back without saying anything?
The original Homes quote says that it is not a matter of free speech to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater and so cause a panic.
Clyburn seems to think that this means that government may regulate speech to prevent any outcome the government thinks is undesirable.
The context of the Holmes quote was a WWI-era SC case about whether or not a citizen may urge others to avoid the military draft. Holmes’ metaphor did not reference safety, it referenced lawlessness, that is, the 1st Amendment cannot shield speech that promotes lawlessness. The Holmes decision was eventually overturned and a much stricter test is now applied to justify the government in prior restraint of speech.