“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.” –- Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
I noted the other day that too many liberals, myself included, wrongly jumped to the conclusion that Jared Loughner was probably a right-wing nut, even though, as I wrote, “it was a reasonable conclusion, considering the hysterical, violence-tinged noises heard from the right’s fringes,” especially in Arizona. It’s pretty obvious at this point that Loughner is simply someone, as one of his teachers put it, “whose brains are scrambled,” but the categorization of the right’s rhetoric as nasty and often violence-tinged, is still very, very valid.
Consider reactions to Pres. Obama’s speech last night. As expected, Obama spoke at a gathering in Tucson in which he called for more civility in America’s public discourse. Today, as I fully expected, right-wing blogs are filled with hate for Obama, all those godless liberals and, for good measure, those who don’t think Sarah Palin is a goddess.
The RedState site’s piece on the speech, by the usually zealous Erick Erickson, was relatively restrained — until it veered into a weird fantasy about some “Media Matters reader who even now is dreaming” of killing Sarah Palin. In RedState’s comments section, you’ll find nothing but the usual angry bitching, and even a complaint or two that since “Giffords is not dead,” there shouldn’t have been such an “over the top” event, and that, in any case, she doesn’t deserve the kind of praise Obama gave her. On the FoxNation site, the story about Obama’s speech pleading for more civility was headlined “Obama Distances Himself From Loons on the Left.”
And that follows yesterday’s defensive attack by Palin on those who dared think the gun crosshairs on her map might be provocative — a speech in which she blundered into using the term “blood libel,” associated since the Middle Ages with anti-Semitism. Palin can’t help it, though, she was just repeating a phrase she’d picked up from one of her favorite ventriloquists, the Wall Street Journal.
I’m still waiting to see if anyone — anyone at all — on the right will even acknowledge that there may be just a teensy problem with their movement’s pissed-off-at-the-modern-world, spittle-spraying rhetoric. I don’t’ think I need to wait any longer for the answer, though, if today’s reactions are any indication. As we’ve said before, self-awareness hasn’t exactly been one of the right’s strong suits.
Take, for example, our old friend Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), of “terrorist anchor babies” fame, who said yesterday that he thought the government could be withholding information about the Arizona shootings because Jared Loughner is a Marxist who might upset Obama’s political plans.
Or how about Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries, who said that if Giffords was so concerned about violent rhetoric, then it’s her fault she was shot because she “had no security whatsoever.” Oh well, so much for the right dialing down its rhetoric. To quote Joni Mitchell out of context, “Guess that was just a dream some of us had.”
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2011.
Funny you whine about right-wingers not toning down rhetoric when it was your own side blaming Palin over and over for causing the guy to do the shooting, even when evidence contradicts those claims. Yet offer no apologies but continue to attack Palin and others for defending themselves? And you gripe about the other side not toning it down?
Your side did this!
Use your real name and I might give a rip what you have to say. I’m tired of you cowards who hide behind your anonymity sitting on your butts and slamming anything you disagree with. Have some guts, for crying out loud — and that means all you trolls who frequent this site.
Why would the right abandon a system that is working so well?
Just read the comments under any article in any newspaper. 75% of the people posting are mindlessly parroting the angry rhetoric.
Palin has no defense.
Those were gun crosshairs on her map, plain and simple.
Conservatives claim they’re not culpable for anything because Loughner is not a conservative; he’s merely crazy. Well, of course he’s crazy! When we, including eventual victim Gabrielle Giffords herself, complained about the Tea Party’s over-the-top rhetoric and imagery, we weren’t envisioning that some level-headed Republican might walk in somewhere and shoot the place up. No! We knew if it happened, it would be a nutcase.
Back during the election cycle, Sarah Palin and her crew were warned, but they chose to scoff at those warnings, despite the fact that they market to gun enthusiasts and have to know that at least a small part of that constituency are gun-obsessed nuts. Apparently they couldn’t think things through enough to recognize that if a tragedy did occur, they would be scrutinized.
Whether the Tea Party’s actions directly affected this guy in any way is still to be determined, but even if it didn’t, people, appropriately, are now taking a disapproving look at the irresponsible tactics they used.
Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio host down in Florida, said at a rally, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will.” And she then pledged to lead the insurrection against the government if her side didn’t see results in the last election. Although it didn’t ultimately work out this way, Allen West, a Tea Party candidate winner in Florida, tried to hire this crazy woman as his chief-of-staff in Washington right after he was elected. Conservatives who try to claim that the rhetoric on both sides is equal are not being objective at all.
Oh, and one other thing.
Embedded in all that gibberish Loughner posted on YouTube, there were a few fairly coherent snippets. He wrote, “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!” He also wrote, “The majority in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution. You don’t have to accept the Federalist laws.”
Railing against non-adherence to the gold standard and anti-federal-government rhetoric is fairly standard extreme-right-wing-conservative fare.
By no means am I labeling Loughner a conservative, but assertions by some that Loughner is a liberal and didn’t have any conservative ideology whatsoever floating around in his brain are, at this point, way premature.
Mr. Gohmert is right, Washington’s Capitol Hill is dangerous. Those people in Tucson were killed outside a Safeway supermarket, and there’s one of those on Kentucky Avenue, a mere 14 blocks from the Capitol.
See http://bit.ly/gOiEPp