By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
There isn't a shred of evidence that deranged Tucson massacre suspect Jared Loughner ever listened to talk radio or cared about illegal immigration. Indeed, after 300 exhaustive interviews, the feds "remain stumped" about his motives, according to Tuesday's Washington Post. But that hasn't stopped a coalition of power-grabbing politicians, progressive activists and open-borders lobbyists from plying their quack cure for the American body politic: government-sponsored speech suppression.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting rampage, Democratic leaders mused openly about reintroducing the Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine" -- a legislative sledgehammer targeting conservative viewpoints on public airwaves. New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter assailed the Federal Communications Commission for failing to police broadcast content and vowed to "look into" more aggressive language monitoring. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey blamed "incendiary rhetoric" for triggering "unstable individuals to take violent action." In his own manifesto calling for resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn pressed public officials to "rethink parameters on free speech."
This week's fashionable new media meme is to deride talk radio hosts for taking these speech-squelching threats seriously. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman sneered at the "persecution complex" of conservative broadcasters who reacted to Slaughter and company. Politico's Keach Hagey dismissed concerns about the Democrats' chilling campaign against right-leaning media outlets and knocked conservative talkers' "defensive posture." (Sound familiar? This is the same tactic they used against Sarah Palin and all those on the right falsely accused of being accessories to the Tucson massacre: Attack 'em. Attack 'em for responding. Accuse the smear victims of playing the victim card. Repeat.)
Make no mistake: The Hate Speech Inquisition is real. And it's being fought on all fronts. Last week, using the non-radio-inspired Tucson massacre as fuel, the National Hispanic Media Coalition called on the FCC to gather evidence for the left's preconceived conclusion that conservative talk radio "hate speech" causes violence. It's Red Queen science -- sentence first, research validation later.
The head of the NHMC is Alex Nogales, who has filed more than 50 petitions to deny broadcast licenses and has led anti-corporate crusades to "force" broadcast stations across the country "to hire Latino reporters and anchors" and adopt "diversity initiatives." Grabbing the Tucson shooting limelight, Nogales told Broadcasting and Cable magazine last week:
"We can't stand there with our arms crossed and make like there isn't a reason why this is happening. ... We started this dialog(ue) in the last immigration debate four years ago. We could see that it was just out of control. It started with just an issue of immigration, then every pundit on radio and TV who wanted an audience started talking about it and started using the worst of language, and now it has spilled out into mainstream."
Loughner's wild Internet rants and creepy campus meltdowns clearly demonstrate that crazy doesn't need a motive. But progressive censors need their bogeymen, and Nogales isn't about to give them up for reality's sake. The NHMC first filed a petition in October 2009 demanding that the FCC collect data, seek public comment and "explore options" for combating "hate speech" from staunch critics of illegal immigration. The petition followed on National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia's call for media outlets to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves "even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights."
Nogales' group is part of a larger "media justice" coalition dedicated to curtailing and redistributing conservatives' political speech under the guise of diversity and decency. As left-wing philanthropists at the Media Justice Fund put it: The movement "is grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies." But, hey, we better just ignore these communications control freaks lest we be accused of suffering a "persecution complex."
The Praetorian Guards of civility keep telling us that "words matter." Threats should be taken seriously, they insist. Except, of course, when those words and threats are uttered by those hell-bent on regulating their opponents' discourse out of existence.
Showing posts with label Giffords. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giffords. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
History Rebuts Tucson Lies
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The debate between left and right on contributing factors in the Tucson shootings has unfolded along utterly predictable and thoroughly unenlightening lines.
Liberals accuse conservatives of overheated, gun-related rhetoric that created a hostile, edgy climate that may have encouraged the killer; the right responds that there’s no evidence of Jared Lee Loughner’s conservative orientation and that liberals make equally reprehensible and irresponsible statements.
Neither side bothers to examine two highly dubious core assumptions:
1-That the Obama era constitutes a uniquely polarizing and hostile political period.
2-That assassinations take place most frequently when politicians and commentators make vicious comments against one another.
First, no American with a memory can honestly suggest that today’s political divisions count as more toxic than ten years ago -- when a majority of Democrats questioned Bush’s very legitimacy as president, or the late ‘90’s when Republicans mobilized a determined effort to drive Clinton from office through impeachment.
Moreover, where is the evidence that bitter political divisions produce murder?
The national murder rate has fallen precipitously in precisely the period (the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama) associated with ferocious partisan warfare and even (in 1995, the beginning of the plunge) an unprecedented government shutdown.
Some past periods of nasty debate produced no assassinations—the McCarthy era resounded with charges of treason, espionage, disloyalty, demagoguery and cover-ups, but no major shootings of public figures. Even earlier, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams battled one another in 1800 in what many historians consider the nastiest, most divisive presidential battle in all American history, but well-armed Americans attempted no assassination of a president until more than a quarter century later (when a delusional loser – sound familiar?—tried to kill Andrew Jackson). In 1884, Republican Presidential candidate James G. Blaine and Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland fought through an epic orgy of mudslinging featuring charges (true, as it turned out) of an illegitimate daughter and financial corruption; neither individual nor any members of their administration faced crazed shooters.
Killings often occur in relatively placid political climates of consensus – as with the assassinations of two popular, young centrist presidents, James A. Garfield (1881) and John F. Kennedy (1963), following close elections in 1880 and 1960 when the major candidates (all of them widely admired war heroes) largely agreed on issues.
Despite the current attempts to blame partisanship and polarization for a (non-existent) “rising tide of violence” the evidence of history is clear: fierce rhetoric doesn’t cause shootings, any more than moderate, consensus politics guarantees safety for our public figures.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The debate between left and right on contributing factors in the Tucson shootings has unfolded along utterly predictable and thoroughly unenlightening lines.
Liberals accuse conservatives of overheated, gun-related rhetoric that created a hostile, edgy climate that may have encouraged the killer; the right responds that there’s no evidence of Jared Lee Loughner’s conservative orientation and that liberals make equally reprehensible and irresponsible statements.
Neither side bothers to examine two highly dubious core assumptions:
1-That the Obama era constitutes a uniquely polarizing and hostile political period.
2-That assassinations take place most frequently when politicians and commentators make vicious comments against one another.
First, no American with a memory can honestly suggest that today’s political divisions count as more toxic than ten years ago -- when a majority of Democrats questioned Bush’s very legitimacy as president, or the late ‘90’s when Republicans mobilized a determined effort to drive Clinton from office through impeachment.
Moreover, where is the evidence that bitter political divisions produce murder?
The national murder rate has fallen precipitously in precisely the period (the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama) associated with ferocious partisan warfare and even (in 1995, the beginning of the plunge) an unprecedented government shutdown.
Some past periods of nasty debate produced no assassinations—the McCarthy era resounded with charges of treason, espionage, disloyalty, demagoguery and cover-ups, but no major shootings of public figures. Even earlier, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams battled one another in 1800 in what many historians consider the nastiest, most divisive presidential battle in all American history, but well-armed Americans attempted no assassination of a president until more than a quarter century later (when a delusional loser – sound familiar?—tried to kill Andrew Jackson). In 1884, Republican Presidential candidate James G. Blaine and Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland fought through an epic orgy of mudslinging featuring charges (true, as it turned out) of an illegitimate daughter and financial corruption; neither individual nor any members of their administration faced crazed shooters.
Killings often occur in relatively placid political climates of consensus – as with the assassinations of two popular, young centrist presidents, James A. Garfield (1881) and John F. Kennedy (1963), following close elections in 1880 and 1960 when the major candidates (all of them widely admired war heroes) largely agreed on issues.
Despite the current attempts to blame partisanship and polarization for a (non-existent) “rising tide of violence” the evidence of history is clear: fierce rhetoric doesn’t cause shootings, any more than moderate, consensus politics guarantees safety for our public figures.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Who Is Most to Blame for the Shootings?
By Andrew Tallman
Monday, January 17, 2011
This is the right question.
Sadly, it’s the one few people are answering in columns and on the radio in recent days. This is an understandable mistake, since the question I’ve asked has only one all-too-obvious answer: Jared Lee Loughner is most to blame.
Since that doesn’t leave much pretext for unending hours of comment and coverage, it’s not the most sale-able question. Hence, the not-quite-articulated one you are hearing and reading a lot about is, “Who else can we blame for the shootings?”
But before we invest time addressing that question, wouldn’t it make sense to estimate its real significance? If the murderer is mostly responsible, then how big is that mostly?
Despite the natural difficulty of quantifying such things, I’ll take a foolish shot at it: 95 percent. I propose that the man who read the political manifestos, attended a Giffords event in 2007, tuned his radio knob, browsed the Internet, nurtured his frustrations, used drugs, acquired a gun, and used it to kill 6 and wound 14 is 95 percent responsible for this tragedy. (I’m including within that 95 percent whatever mental illness, whether biological, chemical, or spiritual, from which he may have suffered, since these things are still “in him.”)
This means that if you put everything else together (gun laws, political climate, inadequate security, talk radio, friends, family, video games, police dereliction, and any other factor you’d care to mention), I contend it amounts to at most 5 percent of the total responsibility for this tragedy. Now 5 percent isn’t zero, to be sure. But if I’m right, then even perfecting that 5 percent to any ideologue’s wildest utopian fantasies would still not have mattered enough to change the outcome.
The frustrating truth is there’s just no clear or workable solution to the fundamental problem of a single, highly-motivated, wicked person in a free society.
But there’s a difficulty with accepting this analysis. Despite its obvious truth, it’s not very satisfying. (And, look, it took me only 300 words to say. How will you sell ad space around such brief analysis?) So if we all know where 95 percent of the answer is, why do we have such a heated national discussion about the other 5 percent right now? It’s simple. We hate to feel powerless.
As a Christian, I have no problem saying that evil exists and will continue to cause horrible events in our lives for as long as this world persists. When evil strikes, whether human evil (this case) or natural evil (such as Katrina), I’m not surprised. Nor do I seek an explanation beyond the fact that I live in an ugly world. Evil will continue for the foreseeable future, and I can’t ward it off with my very good behavior or my very smart theory. God is in control, and I don’t need to be. If He protects me, great. If not, so be it. This was the essence of Jesus’s answer to the question about the Galileans Pilate slaughtered in Luke 13:1-5.
But to the secular mind (even when it happens to be in the head of a churchgoer), the most important issue is power. It’s vital to have an explanation for tragedies in order to perpetuate the myth that my knowledge is adequate to predict (and therefore control) the universe and protect me from it. So, instead of focusing on the 95 percent truth that this man’s actions were well outside my control, I will emphasize how my plan for things would have prevented this, if only others would listen. When they do, it bolsters my terribly fragile sense of my own power, temporarily reinforcing the delusion that I would make a decent deity.
“I can stop murders through gun control.” “I can stop murders through video game and television censorship.” “I can stop murders through talk radio civility.” “I can stop murders through better mental health infrastructure.” Or even (think Columbine here, but not this case just yet, oddly), “I can stop murders through holding parents responsible for their children’s behavior.”
“And if only I talk about these things long enough and loudly enough (to paraphrase the infamous Hitlerism), eventually I’ll believe it.”
In other words, all the discussion about other causes and targets of blame is really just a con game to distract ourselves from contemplating the disheartening reality of a world we cannot control … and the implications.
However, this is only one of the con games in town. Sure, it’s the one most often run by liberals, but they certainly have no monopoly on self-delusion.
With all the recent talk about, well … talk (among other things), you probably didn’t notice the other big self-scam. But if you listen to the discussions, you’ll hear certain terminology from conservatives used to describe Jarred Loughner, terms like madman, deranged, nut-job, crazy, druggie, anarchist, and lunatic, just to name a few. On occasion, someone might verge on kindness by only calling him unbalanced. (But note that “unbalanced” serves the first con game. “Maybe society’s 5 percent is enough to keep him from tipping….”)
As I said, you probably didn’t even notice, and that’s because this seems perfectly normal. He is all of these things, right?
Sure. But why is it so important for us to say so?
Because establishing that Mr. Loughner is somehow distinctly and radically different from me is vital to my belief that I would never do anything like this. And the more often I can reinforce that he is different from me by kind rather than merely by degree, the safer I can feel from the other source of evil in the world: me.
See, we all want to be safe from the evil “out there.” But we all also know that there is just as much, if not more, personal danger (guilt, consequences, e.g.) from the evil “in here,” a knowledge we bury as deeply as we possibly can. And the biggest shovel conservatives use for digging is their faith in moral rectitude. “I would never do something like that because I am better than he is, more self-controlled than he is, less deranged than he is, etc.” Yet isn’t, “I never thought I would do anything like this,” a proverb among the fallen?
When Jesus tells us that murder begins by hate, He’s not saying they’re the same. But He is saying they’re both on the same road. And if you strip off the veneers of legal deterrence, social control, self-discipline, and God-bribing, none of us are good. We’re just well-restrained. And since our sense of personal worth as well as (usually) our sense of entitlement with God depends on believing we really are good, admitting we’re not much different from Mr. Loughner is unimaginably threatening. This, too, is a very sophisticated con game we run on ourselves.
So the liberal con says that evil can be stopped by fixing society. Hence, the moral nation-improvement project is the one that counts. “If I get government to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” In contrast, the conservative con says that evil can be stopped by fixing individuals. Hence, the moral self-improvement project is the one that really counts. “If I get you and me to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” But the reality is that you can’t end evil. Both the “out-there” kind and the “in-here” kind are way too strong for you.
Realizing this, by the way, is the beginning of seeing the need for a Savior who actually is strong enough to beat both kinds. But I don’t want you to get the idea that I think “I can stop murder by getting people to become Christians.” I can’t stop all evil with my project any more than you can with yours. God controls evil, not me. That being said, I suppose it is worth pre-empting a likely criticism.
“Are you saying that neither social structures nor personal morality should be worked on?”
Not at all. I really believe in these things, both of them, by the way. But believing first in a sovereign God gives me the freedom to admit fixing them won’t solve everything or even most of the things. Then I can work on them vigorously, but with realistic expectations. It also gives me the ability in the event of a tragedy like this to avoid the distraction of laying blame and do the most important things: grieve and pray and comfort others.
I can’t solve it. I can’t prevent it. And I probably can’t even completely understand it. Therefore I don’t waste very much time trying to do any of these. And if I have one goal in writing this column, it would be to help free you from them so you can do what really matters, too.
Monday, January 17, 2011
This is the right question.
Sadly, it’s the one few people are answering in columns and on the radio in recent days. This is an understandable mistake, since the question I’ve asked has only one all-too-obvious answer: Jared Lee Loughner is most to blame.
Since that doesn’t leave much pretext for unending hours of comment and coverage, it’s not the most sale-able question. Hence, the not-quite-articulated one you are hearing and reading a lot about is, “Who else can we blame for the shootings?”
But before we invest time addressing that question, wouldn’t it make sense to estimate its real significance? If the murderer is mostly responsible, then how big is that mostly?
Despite the natural difficulty of quantifying such things, I’ll take a foolish shot at it: 95 percent. I propose that the man who read the political manifestos, attended a Giffords event in 2007, tuned his radio knob, browsed the Internet, nurtured his frustrations, used drugs, acquired a gun, and used it to kill 6 and wound 14 is 95 percent responsible for this tragedy. (I’m including within that 95 percent whatever mental illness, whether biological, chemical, or spiritual, from which he may have suffered, since these things are still “in him.”)
This means that if you put everything else together (gun laws, political climate, inadequate security, talk radio, friends, family, video games, police dereliction, and any other factor you’d care to mention), I contend it amounts to at most 5 percent of the total responsibility for this tragedy. Now 5 percent isn’t zero, to be sure. But if I’m right, then even perfecting that 5 percent to any ideologue’s wildest utopian fantasies would still not have mattered enough to change the outcome.
The frustrating truth is there’s just no clear or workable solution to the fundamental problem of a single, highly-motivated, wicked person in a free society.
But there’s a difficulty with accepting this analysis. Despite its obvious truth, it’s not very satisfying. (And, look, it took me only 300 words to say. How will you sell ad space around such brief analysis?) So if we all know where 95 percent of the answer is, why do we have such a heated national discussion about the other 5 percent right now? It’s simple. We hate to feel powerless.
As a Christian, I have no problem saying that evil exists and will continue to cause horrible events in our lives for as long as this world persists. When evil strikes, whether human evil (this case) or natural evil (such as Katrina), I’m not surprised. Nor do I seek an explanation beyond the fact that I live in an ugly world. Evil will continue for the foreseeable future, and I can’t ward it off with my very good behavior or my very smart theory. God is in control, and I don’t need to be. If He protects me, great. If not, so be it. This was the essence of Jesus’s answer to the question about the Galileans Pilate slaughtered in Luke 13:1-5.
But to the secular mind (even when it happens to be in the head of a churchgoer), the most important issue is power. It’s vital to have an explanation for tragedies in order to perpetuate the myth that my knowledge is adequate to predict (and therefore control) the universe and protect me from it. So, instead of focusing on the 95 percent truth that this man’s actions were well outside my control, I will emphasize how my plan for things would have prevented this, if only others would listen. When they do, it bolsters my terribly fragile sense of my own power, temporarily reinforcing the delusion that I would make a decent deity.
“I can stop murders through gun control.” “I can stop murders through video game and television censorship.” “I can stop murders through talk radio civility.” “I can stop murders through better mental health infrastructure.” Or even (think Columbine here, but not this case just yet, oddly), “I can stop murders through holding parents responsible for their children’s behavior.”
“And if only I talk about these things long enough and loudly enough (to paraphrase the infamous Hitlerism), eventually I’ll believe it.”
In other words, all the discussion about other causes and targets of blame is really just a con game to distract ourselves from contemplating the disheartening reality of a world we cannot control … and the implications.
However, this is only one of the con games in town. Sure, it’s the one most often run by liberals, but they certainly have no monopoly on self-delusion.
With all the recent talk about, well … talk (among other things), you probably didn’t notice the other big self-scam. But if you listen to the discussions, you’ll hear certain terminology from conservatives used to describe Jarred Loughner, terms like madman, deranged, nut-job, crazy, druggie, anarchist, and lunatic, just to name a few. On occasion, someone might verge on kindness by only calling him unbalanced. (But note that “unbalanced” serves the first con game. “Maybe society’s 5 percent is enough to keep him from tipping….”)
As I said, you probably didn’t even notice, and that’s because this seems perfectly normal. He is all of these things, right?
Sure. But why is it so important for us to say so?
Because establishing that Mr. Loughner is somehow distinctly and radically different from me is vital to my belief that I would never do anything like this. And the more often I can reinforce that he is different from me by kind rather than merely by degree, the safer I can feel from the other source of evil in the world: me.
See, we all want to be safe from the evil “out there.” But we all also know that there is just as much, if not more, personal danger (guilt, consequences, e.g.) from the evil “in here,” a knowledge we bury as deeply as we possibly can. And the biggest shovel conservatives use for digging is their faith in moral rectitude. “I would never do something like that because I am better than he is, more self-controlled than he is, less deranged than he is, etc.” Yet isn’t, “I never thought I would do anything like this,” a proverb among the fallen?
When Jesus tells us that murder begins by hate, He’s not saying they’re the same. But He is saying they’re both on the same road. And if you strip off the veneers of legal deterrence, social control, self-discipline, and God-bribing, none of us are good. We’re just well-restrained. And since our sense of personal worth as well as (usually) our sense of entitlement with God depends on believing we really are good, admitting we’re not much different from Mr. Loughner is unimaginably threatening. This, too, is a very sophisticated con game we run on ourselves.
So the liberal con says that evil can be stopped by fixing society. Hence, the moral nation-improvement project is the one that counts. “If I get government to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” In contrast, the conservative con says that evil can be stopped by fixing individuals. Hence, the moral self-improvement project is the one that really counts. “If I get you and me to be right, things will be better and God will owe us.” But the reality is that you can’t end evil. Both the “out-there” kind and the “in-here” kind are way too strong for you.
Realizing this, by the way, is the beginning of seeing the need for a Savior who actually is strong enough to beat both kinds. But I don’t want you to get the idea that I think “I can stop murder by getting people to become Christians.” I can’t stop all evil with my project any more than you can with yours. God controls evil, not me. That being said, I suppose it is worth pre-empting a likely criticism.
“Are you saying that neither social structures nor personal morality should be worked on?”
Not at all. I really believe in these things, both of them, by the way. But believing first in a sovereign God gives me the freedom to admit fixing them won’t solve everything or even most of the things. Then I can work on them vigorously, but with realistic expectations. It also gives me the ability in the event of a tragedy like this to avoid the distraction of laying blame and do the most important things: grieve and pray and comfort others.
I can’t solve it. I can’t prevent it. And I probably can’t even completely understand it. Therefore I don’t waste very much time trying to do any of these. And if I have one goal in writing this column, it would be to help free you from them so you can do what really matters, too.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Why Waste A Good Tragedy?
By Ken Connor
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ continues to dominate the headlines and occupy the attention of our President and Congress. Fueled by the relentless nature of the 24-hour cable news cycle and the modern impulse to derive a sociological lesson from even the most inexplicable and senseless acts of violence, there is already talk of a need for laws regulating the use of "inflammatory" imagery and rhetoric. And, not surprisingly, it looks likely that the issue of gun control will once more find a place at the forefront of the national public policy debate.
In response to pronouncements from many prominent figures on the Left that the Tea Party and Sarah Palin are responsible for inciting Jared Lee Loughner to commit his murderous act, many commentators – from both the Left and the Right – have felt compelled to respond. The general consensus is that it is neither helpful nor fair to cast about for a larger villain when it is an unavoidable fact of human existence that from time to time demented individuals do terrible things for reasons we'll never understand – or, perhaps, for no reason at all.
In the world of politics, however, who gives a fig about helpful or fair? Never let a good tragedy go to waste, to paraphrase the inimitable Rahm Emmanuel. If there is political hay to be made, best to seize upon a time when emotions are running high and the people are feeling vulnerable. This is when government does its best work, after all! There are new laws to pass, new regulations to draft, new liberties to curtail in the name of safety and security for all! There is, however, something deeper and more insidious at work in the Left's reaction to this shooting than the mere desire to score a few political points: the Left's irresponsible, baseless, and hyperbolic accusations and aspersions of all things conservative, Republican, libertarian, and Tea Party is designed to create a chilling effect on any speech that runs contrary to their world view. George Will addressed the Progressive habit of ideological demonization through sociological explanation in a recent Washington Post column:
"Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of President Kennedy. They explained why the 'real' culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a 'climate of hate' in conservative Dallas, the 'paranoid style' of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism. Last year, New York Times columnist Charles Blow explained that 'the optics must be irritating' to conservatives: Barack Obama is black, Nancy Pelosi is female, Rep. Barney Frank is gay, Rep. Anthony Weiner (an unimportant Democrat, listed to serve Blow's purposes) is Jewish. . . . The Times, which after the Tucson shooting said that 'many on the right' are guilty of 'demonizing' people and of exploiting 'arguments of division,' apparently was comfortable with Blow's insinuation that conservatives are misogynistic, homophobic, racist anti-Semites."
There's more than mere hypocrisy and political opportunism at work here. The Left's method of dealing with ideas they don't like is to distort the ideas and slander those who promote them, with the ultimate goal of rendering the conservative viewpoint so repugnant and morally objectionable that it becomes socially, culturally – and perhaps even legally – taboo. George Will aptly refers to this tactic as"McCarthyism of the left" that "expresses limitless contempt for the American people."
Andrew Klavan of City Journal takes Will's observation a step further, suggesting that the viciousness of the Left's unwarranted accusations are motivated by the unwelcome realization that their ideology is crumbling around them. In a word, they are – bit by bit – losing control of the narrative:
"The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can't ignore.
That's the hateful rhetoric they're talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts. As for leftists' reaction to the Arizona shooting, call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil. Shame on them."
The freedom to freely voice one's opinion is a cornerstone of American liberty that must not be infringed upon, particularly not by a dishonest faction seeking to hamstring legitimate political dialog for the sake of their own ideological ends. The moment we begin persecuting groups or individuals because of their thoughts, beliefs, or statements is the moment we cease to be a truly free society. Of course, political civility is a good thing and something to be encouraged; but as long as Americans have the right to speak freely, they will be free to say rude, inflammatory, and hyperbolic statements. Nothing draws out this tendency more than the spectacle that is American politics, and no political party or persuasion is innocent on this score.
It would be nice, however, if everyone could recognize that there are certain occasions when politics have no place in the discussion – namely, times of tragedy and loss. It is at times like these that we truly cease to be Republican or Democrat, and should be able to grieve together simply as Americans.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ continues to dominate the headlines and occupy the attention of our President and Congress. Fueled by the relentless nature of the 24-hour cable news cycle and the modern impulse to derive a sociological lesson from even the most inexplicable and senseless acts of violence, there is already talk of a need for laws regulating the use of "inflammatory" imagery and rhetoric. And, not surprisingly, it looks likely that the issue of gun control will once more find a place at the forefront of the national public policy debate.
In response to pronouncements from many prominent figures on the Left that the Tea Party and Sarah Palin are responsible for inciting Jared Lee Loughner to commit his murderous act, many commentators – from both the Left and the Right – have felt compelled to respond. The general consensus is that it is neither helpful nor fair to cast about for a larger villain when it is an unavoidable fact of human existence that from time to time demented individuals do terrible things for reasons we'll never understand – or, perhaps, for no reason at all.
In the world of politics, however, who gives a fig about helpful or fair? Never let a good tragedy go to waste, to paraphrase the inimitable Rahm Emmanuel. If there is political hay to be made, best to seize upon a time when emotions are running high and the people are feeling vulnerable. This is when government does its best work, after all! There are new laws to pass, new regulations to draft, new liberties to curtail in the name of safety and security for all! There is, however, something deeper and more insidious at work in the Left's reaction to this shooting than the mere desire to score a few political points: the Left's irresponsible, baseless, and hyperbolic accusations and aspersions of all things conservative, Republican, libertarian, and Tea Party is designed to create a chilling effect on any speech that runs contrary to their world view. George Will addressed the Progressive habit of ideological demonization through sociological explanation in a recent Washington Post column:
"Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of President Kennedy. They explained why the 'real' culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a 'climate of hate' in conservative Dallas, the 'paranoid style' of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism. Last year, New York Times columnist Charles Blow explained that 'the optics must be irritating' to conservatives: Barack Obama is black, Nancy Pelosi is female, Rep. Barney Frank is gay, Rep. Anthony Weiner (an unimportant Democrat, listed to serve Blow's purposes) is Jewish. . . . The Times, which after the Tucson shooting said that 'many on the right' are guilty of 'demonizing' people and of exploiting 'arguments of division,' apparently was comfortable with Blow's insinuation that conservatives are misogynistic, homophobic, racist anti-Semites."
There's more than mere hypocrisy and political opportunism at work here. The Left's method of dealing with ideas they don't like is to distort the ideas and slander those who promote them, with the ultimate goal of rendering the conservative viewpoint so repugnant and morally objectionable that it becomes socially, culturally – and perhaps even legally – taboo. George Will aptly refers to this tactic as"McCarthyism of the left" that "expresses limitless contempt for the American people."
Andrew Klavan of City Journal takes Will's observation a step further, suggesting that the viciousness of the Left's unwarranted accusations are motivated by the unwelcome realization that their ideology is crumbling around them. In a word, they are – bit by bit – losing control of the narrative:
"The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can't ignore.
That's the hateful rhetoric they're talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts. As for leftists' reaction to the Arizona shooting, call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil. Shame on them."
The freedom to freely voice one's opinion is a cornerstone of American liberty that must not be infringed upon, particularly not by a dishonest faction seeking to hamstring legitimate political dialog for the sake of their own ideological ends. The moment we begin persecuting groups or individuals because of their thoughts, beliefs, or statements is the moment we cease to be a truly free society. Of course, political civility is a good thing and something to be encouraged; but as long as Americans have the right to speak freely, they will be free to say rude, inflammatory, and hyperbolic statements. Nothing draws out this tendency more than the spectacle that is American politics, and no political party or persuasion is innocent on this score.
It would be nice, however, if everyone could recognize that there are certain occasions when politics have no place in the discussion – namely, times of tragedy and loss. It is at times like these that we truly cease to be Republican or Democrat, and should be able to grieve together simply as Americans.
Where Will Obama Go From Tucson?
By David Limbaugh
Friday, January 14, 2011
President Obama is receiving uniform praise for his memorial remarks in Tucson, Ariz. Even conservatives are saying he hit the right notes, substantively and tonally. I agree, with a few qualifiers and gentle cautions.
Obama was eloquent in his tribute to the victims and appropriately acknowledged that "none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack ... or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind."
More importantly, he said: "But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. That we cannot do. ... Let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy; it did not."
Bravo. I don't know whether he was delicately reprimanding unhinged voices from the left in that statement or why, if he believes the blame game is damaging to the national psyche, he didn't use his bully pulpit earlier to condemn the hysterical accusers of right-wing talk. But I'm grateful nevertheless for his gracious words, and I applaud him for them.
I also appreciated his and some of the other speakers' elegant and fitting references to Scripture. I was a bit confused by his seemingly New Age admonition that we "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations," but to each his own.
All in all, we must be gracious in turn and applaud the president for choosing the high road on this most somber occasion, even if, regrettably, the atmosphere of the event was anything but appropriately somber and more closely resembled a political rally.
But where do we go from here? Where does Obama go from here?
I doubt that the political left will tone down its bellicose rhetoric -- its clear effort to blame the shootings on right-wing thinking and expression. No less a prominent figure on the left than MSNBC's Chris Matthews just suggested -- again -- that talk radio played a role in the shootings. More disturbingly, he said, "We can assume innocence in terms of Palin's role or anything Glenn Beck said or anybody else, but you can't exonerate them until we know the truth here."
Exonerate them? They should never have been accused in the first place. So it's outrageous for Matthews to lend further credence to the slanderous allegations by saying we can't exonerate them until we know the truth. We already know enough facts to say that the accused killer, Jared Loughner, isn't a bitter-clinging, Palin-following tea partyer. Matthews' statement is reminiscent of the old Democratic line justifying the appointment of a special counsel to investigate alleged Republican corruption even when there was no evidence of it: "It's the seriousness of the allegations, not the nature of the evidence, that's important."
Even Democratic luminary James Carville recognizes the resurrection of this tactic among his brethren, saying in a television interview, "Everything about the shootings points to politics except the evidence." That's a far cry from Matthews' formulation, hmm?
So if we take Obama (and Carville) at his word, are we not entitled to assume and expect that Obama henceforth will resist from reinstituting his well-established pattern of demonizing his opponents with combative imagery, for example, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun" or telling Hispanics to vote Democratic to "punish our enemies" or, most recently, identifying Republicans as "hostage takers" with whom he was "itching for a fight"?
I don't know that Obama, the avowed Saul Alinskyite, is capable of switching gears and trying to govern in some other way than by targeting, isolating and demonizing his opponents, but his November "shellacking" may be causing him to reconsider, even if he doesn't go so far as adopting Clintonian triangulation.
But the more important question involves Obama's prospective position on freedom of political speech in this country. Will he truly distance himself from his leftist base's conspiratorial scheme to silence voices on the right by attempting to link their speech to violence?
For let there be no mistake, the left has promoted a selective censorship syllogism at least as far back as Clinton's opportunistic linkage of conservative talk radio to the Oklahoma City bombing. That syllogism is: Conservative talk is often hate speech; hate speech leads to violence; so conservative talk must be severely regulated.
That's the rationale behind the left's efforts to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, to promote network neutrality rules and to justify campus speech codes.
This march to "criminalize" conservative speech, I believe, began when liberals realized they had lost a monopoly on the media with the advent and explosive popularity of alternative media.
So, I'm willing to praise Obama for a fine speech. But will he follow his own words and lead his party away from its destructive efforts to silence its opponents?
Friday, January 14, 2011
President Obama is receiving uniform praise for his memorial remarks in Tucson, Ariz. Even conservatives are saying he hit the right notes, substantively and tonally. I agree, with a few qualifiers and gentle cautions.
Obama was eloquent in his tribute to the victims and appropriately acknowledged that "none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack ... or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind."
More importantly, he said: "But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. That we cannot do. ... Let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy; it did not."
Bravo. I don't know whether he was delicately reprimanding unhinged voices from the left in that statement or why, if he believes the blame game is damaging to the national psyche, he didn't use his bully pulpit earlier to condemn the hysterical accusers of right-wing talk. But I'm grateful nevertheless for his gracious words, and I applaud him for them.
I also appreciated his and some of the other speakers' elegant and fitting references to Scripture. I was a bit confused by his seemingly New Age admonition that we "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations," but to each his own.
All in all, we must be gracious in turn and applaud the president for choosing the high road on this most somber occasion, even if, regrettably, the atmosphere of the event was anything but appropriately somber and more closely resembled a political rally.
But where do we go from here? Where does Obama go from here?
I doubt that the political left will tone down its bellicose rhetoric -- its clear effort to blame the shootings on right-wing thinking and expression. No less a prominent figure on the left than MSNBC's Chris Matthews just suggested -- again -- that talk radio played a role in the shootings. More disturbingly, he said, "We can assume innocence in terms of Palin's role or anything Glenn Beck said or anybody else, but you can't exonerate them until we know the truth here."
Exonerate them? They should never have been accused in the first place. So it's outrageous for Matthews to lend further credence to the slanderous allegations by saying we can't exonerate them until we know the truth. We already know enough facts to say that the accused killer, Jared Loughner, isn't a bitter-clinging, Palin-following tea partyer. Matthews' statement is reminiscent of the old Democratic line justifying the appointment of a special counsel to investigate alleged Republican corruption even when there was no evidence of it: "It's the seriousness of the allegations, not the nature of the evidence, that's important."
Even Democratic luminary James Carville recognizes the resurrection of this tactic among his brethren, saying in a television interview, "Everything about the shootings points to politics except the evidence." That's a far cry from Matthews' formulation, hmm?
So if we take Obama (and Carville) at his word, are we not entitled to assume and expect that Obama henceforth will resist from reinstituting his well-established pattern of demonizing his opponents with combative imagery, for example, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun" or telling Hispanics to vote Democratic to "punish our enemies" or, most recently, identifying Republicans as "hostage takers" with whom he was "itching for a fight"?
I don't know that Obama, the avowed Saul Alinskyite, is capable of switching gears and trying to govern in some other way than by targeting, isolating and demonizing his opponents, but his November "shellacking" may be causing him to reconsider, even if he doesn't go so far as adopting Clintonian triangulation.
But the more important question involves Obama's prospective position on freedom of political speech in this country. Will he truly distance himself from his leftist base's conspiratorial scheme to silence voices on the right by attempting to link their speech to violence?
For let there be no mistake, the left has promoted a selective censorship syllogism at least as far back as Clinton's opportunistic linkage of conservative talk radio to the Oklahoma City bombing. That syllogism is: Conservative talk is often hate speech; hate speech leads to violence; so conservative talk must be severely regulated.
That's the rationale behind the left's efforts to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, to promote network neutrality rules and to justify campus speech codes.
This march to "criminalize" conservative speech, I believe, began when liberals realized they had lost a monopoly on the media with the advent and explosive popularity of alternative media.
So, I'm willing to praise Obama for a fine speech. But will he follow his own words and lead his party away from its destructive efforts to silence its opponents?
Blame Palin
The ten most inane comments connecting Sarah Palin to the Tucson shooting.
Katrina Trinko
Saturday, January 15, 2011
In the week since the Arizona shootings, much of the media’s commentary exemplified Palin Derangement Syndrome. It became a joke: On Twitter, one of the most popular “hashtags” was #blamePalin, which was used to, well, blame Palin for TV-show cancellations, malfunctioning toilets, and bad restaurant service.
Unfortunately, for all the joking of the Twitterati, liberals were serious. Here’s a list of the top ten most inane comments connecting Palin to the shootings.
10. Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall responded to Palin’s video message by writing, “Today has been set aside to honor the victims of the Tucson massacre. And Sarah Palin has apparently decided she’s one of them.” Not mentioned was the fact that the Left had previously castigated Palin for refusing to address her “role” in the shootings.
9. Nuanced thinking isn’t the forte of at least one New York Daily News headline writer; the paper published a column titled, “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ blood is on Sarah Palin’s hands after putting cross hair over district.” The columnist, Michael Daly, pontificated that “Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care. But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.”
8. Jane Fonda took her grievances to Twitter. “Progressive Arizona Rep Gabrelle Giffords is shot. In her ads, Sarah Palin had her targeted in a gun site. Inciting to violence,” tweeted Fonda. “@SarahPalinUSA holds responsibility. As does the violence-provoking rhetoric of the Tea Party,” she later tweeted.
7. Keith Olbermann, whose show used to feature “Worst Person in the World” segments and still features other displays of incivility, decided that Palin needed to repent. “If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics,” railed Olbermann. “She must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.”
6. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.) told Mother Jones that “both Gabby and I were targeted in the [Palin] apparatus in that cycle [saying] these people are ‘enemies,’” adding that “the Palin express better look at their tone and their tenor.”
5. Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik agreed that it wasn’t just Sarah Palin at fault — Sharron Angle had contributed, too. “When you have people like Sharron Angle in Las Vegas running against Harry Reid making outrageous statements such as, ‘We may need to resort to taking the Second Amendment into certain cases,’” Dupnik told Fox News, “and for people like Sarah Palin to say, ‘We have people like Gabby Giffords in our cross hairs,’ I think those statements are totally irresponsible and they’re not without consequences, and I think we may be seeing the fruit of it here.”
4. In response to Palin’s video speech, MSNBC host Larry O’Donnell made this cheap dig: “Palin leveled a cold-eyed outrage at ‘people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.’ Palin’s self-defense seems aimed at [Giffords]. On Saturday, [Giffords] fell into the crosshairs of a gun that sent a 22-cent bullet into the back of her head exiting over her left eye. She is therefore unable to respond to Sarah Palin tonight.”
3. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was one of the first prominent pundits to jump on the blame-Palin bandwagon. “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was,” blogged Krugman the afternoon of the shooting. “[Giffords has] been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that ‘the whole Tea Party’ was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list.”
2. For liberal radio host Thom Hartmann, Palin is on par with Osama bin Laden. “Sarah Palin. She hasn’t come out of her cave up there in Alaska. Sarah bin Palin, should we call her? But she has issued a video!” he remarked. In case that hadn’t made his point, Hartmann continued to rail against Palin for being upset that she was accused of being responsible for Loughner’s actions: “Talk about making your head explode. Sarah Palin is trying to conflate her being accused of this crime as being some kind of an incredible victim, as if for a thousand years, well, I mean, I don’t want to get into hyperbole here, but I just, I find this astounding.”
1. Almost immediately after the shooting, when virtually no details were known, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted, “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin,” with a link to Palin’s crosshairs map.
Katrina Trinko
Saturday, January 15, 2011
In the week since the Arizona shootings, much of the media’s commentary exemplified Palin Derangement Syndrome. It became a joke: On Twitter, one of the most popular “hashtags” was #blamePalin, which was used to, well, blame Palin for TV-show cancellations, malfunctioning toilets, and bad restaurant service.
Unfortunately, for all the joking of the Twitterati, liberals were serious. Here’s a list of the top ten most inane comments connecting Palin to the shootings.
10. Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall responded to Palin’s video message by writing, “Today has been set aside to honor the victims of the Tucson massacre. And Sarah Palin has apparently decided she’s one of them.” Not mentioned was the fact that the Left had previously castigated Palin for refusing to address her “role” in the shootings.
9. Nuanced thinking isn’t the forte of at least one New York Daily News headline writer; the paper published a column titled, “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ blood is on Sarah Palin’s hands after putting cross hair over district.” The columnist, Michael Daly, pontificated that “Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care. But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.”
8. Jane Fonda took her grievances to Twitter. “Progressive Arizona Rep Gabrelle Giffords is shot. In her ads, Sarah Palin had her targeted in a gun site. Inciting to violence,” tweeted Fonda. “@SarahPalinUSA holds responsibility. As does the violence-provoking rhetoric of the Tea Party,” she later tweeted.
7. Keith Olbermann, whose show used to feature “Worst Person in the World” segments and still features other displays of incivility, decided that Palin needed to repent. “If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics,” railed Olbermann. “She must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.”
6. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.) told Mother Jones that “both Gabby and I were targeted in the [Palin] apparatus in that cycle [saying] these people are ‘enemies,’” adding that “the Palin express better look at their tone and their tenor.”
5. Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik agreed that it wasn’t just Sarah Palin at fault — Sharron Angle had contributed, too. “When you have people like Sharron Angle in Las Vegas running against Harry Reid making outrageous statements such as, ‘We may need to resort to taking the Second Amendment into certain cases,’” Dupnik told Fox News, “and for people like Sarah Palin to say, ‘We have people like Gabby Giffords in our cross hairs,’ I think those statements are totally irresponsible and they’re not without consequences, and I think we may be seeing the fruit of it here.”
4. In response to Palin’s video speech, MSNBC host Larry O’Donnell made this cheap dig: “Palin leveled a cold-eyed outrage at ‘people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.’ Palin’s self-defense seems aimed at [Giffords]. On Saturday, [Giffords] fell into the crosshairs of a gun that sent a 22-cent bullet into the back of her head exiting over her left eye. She is therefore unable to respond to Sarah Palin tonight.”
3. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was one of the first prominent pundits to jump on the blame-Palin bandwagon. “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was,” blogged Krugman the afternoon of the shooting. “[Giffords has] been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that ‘the whole Tea Party’ was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list.”
2. For liberal radio host Thom Hartmann, Palin is on par with Osama bin Laden. “Sarah Palin. She hasn’t come out of her cave up there in Alaska. Sarah bin Palin, should we call her? But she has issued a video!” he remarked. In case that hadn’t made his point, Hartmann continued to rail against Palin for being upset that she was accused of being responsible for Loughner’s actions: “Talk about making your head explode. Sarah Palin is trying to conflate her being accused of this crime as being some kind of an incredible victim, as if for a thousand years, well, I mean, I don’t want to get into hyperbole here, but I just, I find this astounding.”
1. Almost immediately after the shooting, when virtually no details were known, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted, “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin,” with a link to Palin’s crosshairs map.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Once More unto the Breach of Civility
Who’s to blame for Tucson? Why, Sarah Palin and you, of course.
David Kahane
Friday, January 14, 2011
One of the tropes you wingnuts try to pin on us all the time is this: You just can’t help yourselves. By which you mean that, when a good Emanuelian crisis comes along and it simply cannot go to waste because it fits the narrative (two legs, good; four legs, Republican swine), we invariably expose ourselves as the sneering, sadistic little cultural sappers we are.
And you know what? You’re right!
Like many of us stalwart men of the Progressive-Media-Entertainment Complex, I have never been so beamish. As the president explained so eloquently Wednesday night, what happened in Tucson was a tragedy and all, but watching the wild-eyed Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, pin the Glock on the elephant in the pages of the New York Times was simply wonderful. Based on nothing more than the loud voices coming through the fillings in his teeth, our bearded, pot-bellied superhero leapt into action the day after the Tucson shootings and started pointing the finger of blame where it always belongs: at Sarah Palin and the “climate of hate” she has brought down from Mystery, Alaska, to torment us here in the Lower 48. Naturally, a few of you protested that there was no actual evidence that the hated succubus who haunts our fever dreams and saps our purity of essence had anything to do with the gunman. Nor did any of the other right-wing crazies on our (symbolic!) hit lists — and you Limbaugh-loving teabaggers know who you are.
It’s true that Obama said: “But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”
But so what if he did? In the fantasy world in which we dwell, the only thing that counts is what’s inside our heads, and in our heads is where Sarah Palin lives and where she willfully continues to insert herself into the national conversation. Raised on relativism, psychiatry, and sociology; on values instead of morals; on transactional relationships instead of “absolute truths”; on heavy-metal music, atheism, and abortion on demand — we long ago slipped the moorings of empiricism and have ascended to the rarefied heights of Cockaigne and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Black is white, up is down, in is out — this is our world and you’re not welcome to it. Because it’s not for you to say what you do and do not stand for — we’ll be the judge of that. And here’s what we know about you:
You’re racists. You’re anti-Semites. You’re homophobes. You hate progress. You hate when people (i.e., us) have fun doing things you don’t like or, worse, doing things that deep down inside you really do like but don’t have the guts to actually do. You hate Metallica, Miles Davis, Mozart, and Marx. You think we’re something out of Petronius, licentious Roman poetasters, juvenile-delinquent voluptuaries peeling grapes while Alaric and Odovacar wait outside the gates. Meanwhile, you play the role of a disapproving, mocking Juvenal, satirizing our pagan ways.
In short, you’re the curmudgeons and killjoys in favor of restrictions and rules that prevent us from fully exercising our Gaia-given panoply of rights, which are pretty much anything we say they are, especially if you’re against them.
You seethe with anger over the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama II, still believe along with the racist Framers that black people are only worth three-fifths of white people, and that women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, unless they’re in the delivery room. On the slightest pretext you will reach for your guns, especially in a toxic atmosphere like this one, and, like that right-wing assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, you will commit any atrocity — even if it means “disguising” yourself as a Marxist and pro-Castro agitator just to fool us. There’s no end to your devilry.
So is it any wonder we immediately assume that you personally are responsible for everything bad that occurs in the world, you and Sarah Palin? Your very existence can only be an encouragement to nutballs, crazies, weirdos, and jackasses everywhere either to pick up a gun and start shooting, or to think about picking up a gun and start shooting, which to us is exactly the same thing. Like the somnambulists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, we’ve drilled down so far into our dreams that reality and fantasy are indistinguishable, and we figure that if credentialed Ivy Leaguers like ourselves can’t tell the difference, why should you Dogtooth State Teachers College johnnies be any different?
Forget all that stuff we were saying about knives and gunfights and enemies and hanging Joe Lieberman in effigy, killing Henry Hyde, etc.; that was just our typical, high-spirited use of metaphor. Putting aside all the smashed plate-glass windows, the “Days of Rage,” and the photoshopped pictures of %$#@BUSH#$@! as the love child of Dracula and Hitler; we’re just a bunch of pot-smoking, fun-loving pacifist draft-dodgers at heart. This violence thing — we don’t really mean it, and you know it.
You, on the other hand, could be sitting on the sofa in your living room in your jammies, watching Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with your dozens of dogs and children, slurping a Shave Ice and snuggling with the old ball and chain you’ve been irrationally tethered to for the past 20 years, and we would know — we would just know — that under the cushions you’ve got an AK-Uzi with 47 rounds in it, locked and loaded and on full automatic, or whatever, and you’re just itching to use it on us or one of our protected minority groups, all of whom you loathe because, after all, you are nothing if not haters.
Which is why I’m beaming. Because we lovers finally stood up to you swaggering bullies, who dominate every conversation even if there’s only one of you in the room against a dozen of us. We unleashed “The End Is Near” Krugman, foam-flecked Chris Matthews, dyspeptic Bill Maher, and every other arrow in our quiver to pin you against the wall, fill you full of lead, eviscerate you, decapitate you, burn your houses to the ground, rape your women, loot your treasure, and send your children into slavery. Like Sherman marching through Georgia, we sent our caissons rolling along, brought down the hammer and targeted you for —
Whoops! Got carried away with my martial metaphors there!
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter if the Tucson shooter was a garden-variety nut, allegedly apolitical (no one in our world is apolitical), fueled by anger against Representative Giffords, women, English grammar, the gold standard, and the educational system. He had a Glock, and that’s all the proof we need.
Come on, admit it: In your hearts, you know he’s Right.
David Kahane
Friday, January 14, 2011
One of the tropes you wingnuts try to pin on us all the time is this: You just can’t help yourselves. By which you mean that, when a good Emanuelian crisis comes along and it simply cannot go to waste because it fits the narrative (two legs, good; four legs, Republican swine), we invariably expose ourselves as the sneering, sadistic little cultural sappers we are.
And you know what? You’re right!
Like many of us stalwart men of the Progressive-Media-Entertainment Complex, I have never been so beamish. As the president explained so eloquently Wednesday night, what happened in Tucson was a tragedy and all, but watching the wild-eyed Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, pin the Glock on the elephant in the pages of the New York Times was simply wonderful. Based on nothing more than the loud voices coming through the fillings in his teeth, our bearded, pot-bellied superhero leapt into action the day after the Tucson shootings and started pointing the finger of blame where it always belongs: at Sarah Palin and the “climate of hate” she has brought down from Mystery, Alaska, to torment us here in the Lower 48. Naturally, a few of you protested that there was no actual evidence that the hated succubus who haunts our fever dreams and saps our purity of essence had anything to do with the gunman. Nor did any of the other right-wing crazies on our (symbolic!) hit lists — and you Limbaugh-loving teabaggers know who you are.
It’s true that Obama said: “But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”
But so what if he did? In the fantasy world in which we dwell, the only thing that counts is what’s inside our heads, and in our heads is where Sarah Palin lives and where she willfully continues to insert herself into the national conversation. Raised on relativism, psychiatry, and sociology; on values instead of morals; on transactional relationships instead of “absolute truths”; on heavy-metal music, atheism, and abortion on demand — we long ago slipped the moorings of empiricism and have ascended to the rarefied heights of Cockaigne and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Black is white, up is down, in is out — this is our world and you’re not welcome to it. Because it’s not for you to say what you do and do not stand for — we’ll be the judge of that. And here’s what we know about you:
You’re racists. You’re anti-Semites. You’re homophobes. You hate progress. You hate when people (i.e., us) have fun doing things you don’t like or, worse, doing things that deep down inside you really do like but don’t have the guts to actually do. You hate Metallica, Miles Davis, Mozart, and Marx. You think we’re something out of Petronius, licentious Roman poetasters, juvenile-delinquent voluptuaries peeling grapes while Alaric and Odovacar wait outside the gates. Meanwhile, you play the role of a disapproving, mocking Juvenal, satirizing our pagan ways.
In short, you’re the curmudgeons and killjoys in favor of restrictions and rules that prevent us from fully exercising our Gaia-given panoply of rights, which are pretty much anything we say they are, especially if you’re against them.
You seethe with anger over the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama II, still believe along with the racist Framers that black people are only worth three-fifths of white people, and that women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, unless they’re in the delivery room. On the slightest pretext you will reach for your guns, especially in a toxic atmosphere like this one, and, like that right-wing assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, you will commit any atrocity — even if it means “disguising” yourself as a Marxist and pro-Castro agitator just to fool us. There’s no end to your devilry.
So is it any wonder we immediately assume that you personally are responsible for everything bad that occurs in the world, you and Sarah Palin? Your very existence can only be an encouragement to nutballs, crazies, weirdos, and jackasses everywhere either to pick up a gun and start shooting, or to think about picking up a gun and start shooting, which to us is exactly the same thing. Like the somnambulists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, we’ve drilled down so far into our dreams that reality and fantasy are indistinguishable, and we figure that if credentialed Ivy Leaguers like ourselves can’t tell the difference, why should you Dogtooth State Teachers College johnnies be any different?
Forget all that stuff we were saying about knives and gunfights and enemies and hanging Joe Lieberman in effigy, killing Henry Hyde, etc.; that was just our typical, high-spirited use of metaphor. Putting aside all the smashed plate-glass windows, the “Days of Rage,” and the photoshopped pictures of %$#@BUSH#$@! as the love child of Dracula and Hitler; we’re just a bunch of pot-smoking, fun-loving pacifist draft-dodgers at heart. This violence thing — we don’t really mean it, and you know it.
You, on the other hand, could be sitting on the sofa in your living room in your jammies, watching Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with your dozens of dogs and children, slurping a Shave Ice and snuggling with the old ball and chain you’ve been irrationally tethered to for the past 20 years, and we would know — we would just know — that under the cushions you’ve got an AK-Uzi with 47 rounds in it, locked and loaded and on full automatic, or whatever, and you’re just itching to use it on us or one of our protected minority groups, all of whom you loathe because, after all, you are nothing if not haters.
Which is why I’m beaming. Because we lovers finally stood up to you swaggering bullies, who dominate every conversation even if there’s only one of you in the room against a dozen of us. We unleashed “The End Is Near” Krugman, foam-flecked Chris Matthews, dyspeptic Bill Maher, and every other arrow in our quiver to pin you against the wall, fill you full of lead, eviscerate you, decapitate you, burn your houses to the ground, rape your women, loot your treasure, and send your children into slavery. Like Sherman marching through Georgia, we sent our caissons rolling along, brought down the hammer and targeted you for —
Whoops! Got carried away with my martial metaphors there!
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter if the Tucson shooter was a garden-variety nut, allegedly apolitical (no one in our world is apolitical), fueled by anger against Representative Giffords, women, English grammar, the gold standard, and the educational system. He had a Glock, and that’s all the proof we need.
Come on, admit it: In your hearts, you know he’s Right.
Tucson and the Failure of the Political Class
It’s not the rhetoric that’s to blame. The problem is a more serious one.
Conrad Black
Thursday, January 13, 2011
A very mild-mannered and civilized friend remarked to me today that if he encountered anyone else on the Fifth and Park Avenue social circuit who blamed the Tucson shootings on the Tea Party, he would resort to violence. The stampede to blame this terrible incident on a political movement that appears to represent more people than the traditional Republican and Democratic parties is horrifying, though perhaps not surprising. The attempt of Paul Krugman (New York Times, January 10) to blame this shooting on what one saw “just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies” in the 2008 election campaign is the lowest and deepest excavation on public taste the Times has conducted since the 1985 headline about President Reagan’s planned visit to Bitburg, Germany: “Reagan Likens Nazi War Dead to Concentration Camp Victims.”
Krugman recounts that, as of last spring, “threats on congressmen were already up by 300 percent.” He continues: “Let’s not make a false pretense of balance.” (The identity of the author sets the mind at ease on that score.) The “eliminationist rhetoric,” you see, is “coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.” (He was presumably referring to incitements to violence and not remedies for irregularity.) Surging toward the finish line, Nobel laureate Krugman does the liberal pundit’s equivalent of the circus triple flip without the safety net: “The purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the GOP establishment.” Completing the aerobatics, he cites a former Bush speechwriter who concluded: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” I am not the most natural rescue party for Rupert Murdoch, but he is innocent of all of this and so are his commentators. They exploited the public’s discontent with the nauseating sanctimony and bias of the national media’s liberal monotone, and Fox and the talk-radio lions took away the audience. The liberal media establishment sowed, and they reaped.
Not since the liberal establishment tried to blame the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the far right, which necessitated a trashing of the theory that the (disgruntled Communist) Oswald acted alone and a rapprochement with the Oliver Stone exegesis — that it was a vast conspiracy of thousands on the right from Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, to the Texas oil establishment, and down into the bowels of the Dallas Police Department — has an act of violence provoked such a fiercely partisan and utterly fatuous rush to judgment. This is a much more malignant version, from a much less exalted source, of the Nixon-Agnew effort in the midterm elections of 1970 to blame mob violence, and particularly the throwing of rocks at Nixon’s car in San Jose near the end of the campaign, on the Democratic establishment — accusing them of pandering to those “who hold a peace placard in one hand and a bomb or a brick in the other.”
We learn from Krugman that it’s “really up to GOP leaders [to] take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric,” since this is what causes violence against political figures, although, he concedes, “the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled.” More to the point, and on the same page, was the estimable Ross Douthat’s citation of “the Democratic operative” who proposed “to deftly pin this on the tea partiers.” There was nothing deft about Krugman’s effort, and he dug under the Tea Party to detonate his explosives under the party of Lincoln, TR, Ike, and Reagan.
Apart from its sleaziness and absurdity, Krugman’s argument misses a key point. The problem isn’t eliminationist rhetoric on the right. No commentator with regular access to significant numbers of Americans of any media or political perspective calls for physical assault on any domestic political opponent. If Krugman thinks otherwise, he should put his money where his mouth is, since he is an economist, and see how much quality psychiatric attention he can get under Obamacare to deal with his hallucinations. Attempting to hang any act of psychotic violence like the Tucson shootings on people like John McCain and Sarah Palin is a more grievous and potentially dangerous assault on the right of all people to undisturbed lives than anything that emanates from those whom Krugman shamefully accuses of inciting violence.
But Krugman has, obviously without knowing it, stumbled into a true and worrisome fact of contemporary American life: There are more frequent threats on the persons of public officials than in earlier times. The reason for this is not the one adduced in Krugman’s demented partisan explanation, but rather the fact that the political class in general is serving the country so poorly. As I have written in this space before, it has failed on almost every major issue of the last 20 years except welfare reform and, up to a point, counterterrorism. This is not a partisan or ideological matter; it is not regional, and certainly is not sectarian. The political class outsourced scores of millions of jobs while admitting 15 or more million unskilled, under-documented foreigners and ignored the implications of this conduct. It allowed the country to rack up $800 billion annual current-account deficits for years with no end nor any remedial action in sight. It urged, legislated, and ordered the issuance of trillions of dollars of worthless debt, supposedly to promote family homeownership — though the real beneficiaries were less frequent subjects of Norman Rockwell illustrations — and the political class floundered badly and waffles yet, over what to do about it.
The political class has done nothing to alleviate a dependence on foreign oil that makes the U.S. a co-combatant on each side of the War on Terror because of its contribution to the wealth of petroleum-exporting states that finance Muslim extremism. The political class has mired almost the entire conventional-ground-forces military capability of the United States in an unremitting area among ungrateful people for almost a decade at a cost of trillions of dollars, over 5,000 American servicemen’s lives, and tens of thousands of American casualties. The political class has presided over a shocking deterioration of the education standards of the country, done nothing to address the excessive cost and uneven availability of medical care, and the descent of the justice system into a racket in which the whole system of checks and balances is threatened by a rogue prosecutocracy that mindlessly or maliciously prosecutes whomever it wishes and has so deformed the Bill of Rights that it is successful 95 percent of the time. (There are 47 million Americans with a criminal record, and the U.S. has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous and advanced democracies such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.) The decline of the influence and prestige and economic and moral strength of the United States in the world in the last 20 years has been precipitous. The politicians have failed, the system is failing, the people don’t like it, and, at some point, some of the crazy ones become violent.
The Democrats, presumably including the omni-whining Krugman, are right to denounce the reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives as juvenile theatrics, because most legislators of both parties and all levels of government have allowed the Constitution to be deformed and abused. The answer to misgovernment is not violence and all responsible people should do everything possible to discourage any consideration of violence. But the political class has failed, and abrupt tidal changes of office-holders — 1992, 1994, 2002, 2008, and probably 2010 – aren’t improving standards of public service. If the system isn’t working changing the rhetoric won’t help, any more than dismissing Krugman as a Times columnist would. The rate of violent crime is generally declining. Deranged people need treatment, and the whole country needs better government. It’s conceptually quite simple.
Conrad Black
Thursday, January 13, 2011
A very mild-mannered and civilized friend remarked to me today that if he encountered anyone else on the Fifth and Park Avenue social circuit who blamed the Tucson shootings on the Tea Party, he would resort to violence. The stampede to blame this terrible incident on a political movement that appears to represent more people than the traditional Republican and Democratic parties is horrifying, though perhaps not surprising. The attempt of Paul Krugman (New York Times, January 10) to blame this shooting on what one saw “just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies” in the 2008 election campaign is the lowest and deepest excavation on public taste the Times has conducted since the 1985 headline about President Reagan’s planned visit to Bitburg, Germany: “Reagan Likens Nazi War Dead to Concentration Camp Victims.”
Krugman recounts that, as of last spring, “threats on congressmen were already up by 300 percent.” He continues: “Let’s not make a false pretense of balance.” (The identity of the author sets the mind at ease on that score.) The “eliminationist rhetoric,” you see, is “coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.” (He was presumably referring to incitements to violence and not remedies for irregularity.) Surging toward the finish line, Nobel laureate Krugman does the liberal pundit’s equivalent of the circus triple flip without the safety net: “The purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the GOP establishment.” Completing the aerobatics, he cites a former Bush speechwriter who concluded: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” I am not the most natural rescue party for Rupert Murdoch, but he is innocent of all of this and so are his commentators. They exploited the public’s discontent with the nauseating sanctimony and bias of the national media’s liberal monotone, and Fox and the talk-radio lions took away the audience. The liberal media establishment sowed, and they reaped.
Not since the liberal establishment tried to blame the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the far right, which necessitated a trashing of the theory that the (disgruntled Communist) Oswald acted alone and a rapprochement with the Oliver Stone exegesis — that it was a vast conspiracy of thousands on the right from Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, to the Texas oil establishment, and down into the bowels of the Dallas Police Department — has an act of violence provoked such a fiercely partisan and utterly fatuous rush to judgment. This is a much more malignant version, from a much less exalted source, of the Nixon-Agnew effort in the midterm elections of 1970 to blame mob violence, and particularly the throwing of rocks at Nixon’s car in San Jose near the end of the campaign, on the Democratic establishment — accusing them of pandering to those “who hold a peace placard in one hand and a bomb or a brick in the other.”
We learn from Krugman that it’s “really up to GOP leaders [to] take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric,” since this is what causes violence against political figures, although, he concedes, “the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled.” More to the point, and on the same page, was the estimable Ross Douthat’s citation of “the Democratic operative” who proposed “to deftly pin this on the tea partiers.” There was nothing deft about Krugman’s effort, and he dug under the Tea Party to detonate his explosives under the party of Lincoln, TR, Ike, and Reagan.
Apart from its sleaziness and absurdity, Krugman’s argument misses a key point. The problem isn’t eliminationist rhetoric on the right. No commentator with regular access to significant numbers of Americans of any media or political perspective calls for physical assault on any domestic political opponent. If Krugman thinks otherwise, he should put his money where his mouth is, since he is an economist, and see how much quality psychiatric attention he can get under Obamacare to deal with his hallucinations. Attempting to hang any act of psychotic violence like the Tucson shootings on people like John McCain and Sarah Palin is a more grievous and potentially dangerous assault on the right of all people to undisturbed lives than anything that emanates from those whom Krugman shamefully accuses of inciting violence.
But Krugman has, obviously without knowing it, stumbled into a true and worrisome fact of contemporary American life: There are more frequent threats on the persons of public officials than in earlier times. The reason for this is not the one adduced in Krugman’s demented partisan explanation, but rather the fact that the political class in general is serving the country so poorly. As I have written in this space before, it has failed on almost every major issue of the last 20 years except welfare reform and, up to a point, counterterrorism. This is not a partisan or ideological matter; it is not regional, and certainly is not sectarian. The political class outsourced scores of millions of jobs while admitting 15 or more million unskilled, under-documented foreigners and ignored the implications of this conduct. It allowed the country to rack up $800 billion annual current-account deficits for years with no end nor any remedial action in sight. It urged, legislated, and ordered the issuance of trillions of dollars of worthless debt, supposedly to promote family homeownership — though the real beneficiaries were less frequent subjects of Norman Rockwell illustrations — and the political class floundered badly and waffles yet, over what to do about it.
The political class has done nothing to alleviate a dependence on foreign oil that makes the U.S. a co-combatant on each side of the War on Terror because of its contribution to the wealth of petroleum-exporting states that finance Muslim extremism. The political class has mired almost the entire conventional-ground-forces military capability of the United States in an unremitting area among ungrateful people for almost a decade at a cost of trillions of dollars, over 5,000 American servicemen’s lives, and tens of thousands of American casualties. The political class has presided over a shocking deterioration of the education standards of the country, done nothing to address the excessive cost and uneven availability of medical care, and the descent of the justice system into a racket in which the whole system of checks and balances is threatened by a rogue prosecutocracy that mindlessly or maliciously prosecutes whomever it wishes and has so deformed the Bill of Rights that it is successful 95 percent of the time. (There are 47 million Americans with a criminal record, and the U.S. has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous and advanced democracies such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.) The decline of the influence and prestige and economic and moral strength of the United States in the world in the last 20 years has been precipitous. The politicians have failed, the system is failing, the people don’t like it, and, at some point, some of the crazy ones become violent.
The Democrats, presumably including the omni-whining Krugman, are right to denounce the reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives as juvenile theatrics, because most legislators of both parties and all levels of government have allowed the Constitution to be deformed and abused. The answer to misgovernment is not violence and all responsible people should do everything possible to discourage any consideration of violence. But the political class has failed, and abrupt tidal changes of office-holders — 1992, 1994, 2002, 2008, and probably 2010 – aren’t improving standards of public service. If the system isn’t working changing the rhetoric won’t help, any more than dismissing Krugman as a Times columnist would. The rate of violent crime is generally declining. Deranged people need treatment, and the whole country needs better government. It’s conceptually quite simple.
How Much Is the Life of a U.S.Soldier Worth?
By Douglas MacKinnon
Thursday, January 13, 2011
What is the life of a U.S. soldier worth compared to that of a Member of Congress? Apparently much less in the eyes of some in the mainstream media if we go by two tragic news-making examples.
The first, this past weekend’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-AZ, and the murder of innocent civilians around her. The second is the killing of 12 brave soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, TX, in 2009.
While many in the media have insidiously created false reasons for the shooting of Giffords to further their far-left agenda, they did all in their power in 2009 to demand that no one jump to conclusions regarding the motives of that shooter.
Compare the broadcast network, cable network, and newspaper coverage of the terrorist shooting at Fort Hood with the Tucson attack: There is no comparison.
Several hours into the tragedy in Tucson, there was wall-to-wall coverage, with network anchors flying to Arizona to breathlessly report from the scene.
In contrast, coverage was limited, tentative and cautious in the extreme concerning whether the Fort Hood shooter was a Muslim terrorist.
It’s easy to forget that 12 soldiers (including one who was pregnant) and one Army civilian were killed at Fort Hood.
Today, Giffords - an incredibly dedicated and decent public servant - lays wounded in a Arizona hospital, while six others who stood near her, were murdered.
Yet, the news coverage of her wounding far eclipses the killings at Fort Hood. Why?
Unfortunately, no mystery here. It was clear to all that the Fort Hood shooting was terrorism and that the shooter was a Muslim fanatic.
That is a reality that flies directly into the politically correct propaganda of the far-left that irresponsibly dismisses the threat or even existence of homegrown Muslim terrorists.
This dangerous cover-up was illustrated earlier this week when Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in recounting recent fatal mass shootings in the United States, referred to the terrorist at Fort Hood only as “an Army psychiatrist.”
No mention that he was a Muslim-American by the name of Maj. Nidal Hasan. No mention that he was a man who had been in email communications with Yemen based, American-born, terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki.
No mention that after the horrific terrorist attack at Fort Hood, al-Awlaki declared Hasan a “hero” and said, “fighting against the U.S. Army is an Islamic duty.”
So, even though just last month, Attorney General Eric Holder said the growing number of American citizens joining terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda “…keeps me up at night,” Maddow and others in the mainstream media would still prefer to sweep the news of homegrown radicals like Hasan and his connections to Anwar al-Awlaki – who Holder said “would be on the same list with Bin Laden” - under the rug.
Why? To better marshal their forces in Arizona to invent theories as to why the “far-right” is responsible for the unhinged actions of a single demented individual.
While that is certainly bad news for our national security and those in search of honest journalism, somewhere in Yemen, American-born Anwar al-Awlaki is smiling as he plans his next attack.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
What is the life of a U.S. soldier worth compared to that of a Member of Congress? Apparently much less in the eyes of some in the mainstream media if we go by two tragic news-making examples.
The first, this past weekend’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-AZ, and the murder of innocent civilians around her. The second is the killing of 12 brave soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, TX, in 2009.
While many in the media have insidiously created false reasons for the shooting of Giffords to further their far-left agenda, they did all in their power in 2009 to demand that no one jump to conclusions regarding the motives of that shooter.
Compare the broadcast network, cable network, and newspaper coverage of the terrorist shooting at Fort Hood with the Tucson attack: There is no comparison.
Several hours into the tragedy in Tucson, there was wall-to-wall coverage, with network anchors flying to Arizona to breathlessly report from the scene.
In contrast, coverage was limited, tentative and cautious in the extreme concerning whether the Fort Hood shooter was a Muslim terrorist.
It’s easy to forget that 12 soldiers (including one who was pregnant) and one Army civilian were killed at Fort Hood.
Today, Giffords - an incredibly dedicated and decent public servant - lays wounded in a Arizona hospital, while six others who stood near her, were murdered.
Yet, the news coverage of her wounding far eclipses the killings at Fort Hood. Why?
Unfortunately, no mystery here. It was clear to all that the Fort Hood shooting was terrorism and that the shooter was a Muslim fanatic.
That is a reality that flies directly into the politically correct propaganda of the far-left that irresponsibly dismisses the threat or even existence of homegrown Muslim terrorists.
This dangerous cover-up was illustrated earlier this week when Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in recounting recent fatal mass shootings in the United States, referred to the terrorist at Fort Hood only as “an Army psychiatrist.”
No mention that he was a Muslim-American by the name of Maj. Nidal Hasan. No mention that he was a man who had been in email communications with Yemen based, American-born, terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki.
No mention that after the horrific terrorist attack at Fort Hood, al-Awlaki declared Hasan a “hero” and said, “fighting against the U.S. Army is an Islamic duty.”
So, even though just last month, Attorney General Eric Holder said the growing number of American citizens joining terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda “…keeps me up at night,” Maddow and others in the mainstream media would still prefer to sweep the news of homegrown radicals like Hasan and his connections to Anwar al-Awlaki – who Holder said “would be on the same list with Bin Laden” - under the rug.
Why? To better marshal their forces in Arizona to invent theories as to why the “far-right” is responsible for the unhinged actions of a single demented individual.
While that is certainly bad news for our national security and those in search of honest journalism, somewhere in Yemen, American-born Anwar al-Awlaki is smiling as he plans his next attack.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Why the Left Bears Responsibility for the Arizona Shootings
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Last week, mentally disturbed youth Jared Lee Loughner shot 20 people at a rally in Tucson, Ariz., including congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). The left, led by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, immediately capitalized on the bloody murders, stating without evidence that Loughner had been inspired by the "the anger, the hatred, the bigotry" of our current political climate. Over the course of the following days, Dupnik and his allies blamed talk radio, conservatives who spread "mistrust of government," Sarah Palin, Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle and Rush Limbaugh.
There is enough blame to go around for this shooting spree. Unfortunately for Dupnik and his allies, that blame lies almost exclusively with the left.
We don't know much about Jared Lee Loughner. We know that he is a fan of "Mein Kampf" and "The Communist Manifesto," and that one of Loughner's high school classmates remembered him as a "left-wing ... pothead, quite liberal." We understand that he is interested in the occult (he had a skull shrine in his backyard), that he is fascinated by grammar, and that he loves "conscience dreaming" -- presumably a misspelling of "conscious dreaming," a mental state sometimes enjoyed by drug users.
More than that, we know that he is loony. According to Sheriff Dupnik himself, Loughner has been in trouble with the law repeatedly; he was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. And more tellingly, "there had been earlier contact between Loughner and law enforcement after he had made death threats." Dupnik's office knew that Loughner was expelled from the junior college for frightening behavior -- his classmates said he exhibited "kind of hysterical laughing, kind of creepy ... his hands and his parts of his body were shaking and trembling like he was under the influence of drugs or something like that." Some feared for their lives.
Let's leave aside Loughner's ideology -- we cannot assume that his leftist leanings were either rational or thoroughgoing, since he was clearly mentally ill. Let's focus instead on the two institutions that are supposed to prevent incidents like this: law enforcement and the mental health establishment.
Law enforcement falls under Sheriff Dupnik's domain. Dupnik still has not answered why his office ignored the threats, why they failed to investigate properly, and why Loughner was allowed to roam free and buy a firearm. Even at the most basic level, Dupnik has not explained why Tucson is so crime-ridden altogether.
More importantly, Dupnik blew it on this case, in large part because he appears not to understand the nature of madness. Dupnik believes that true mental instability does not exist. Apparently, all acts of madness must be attributed to others' influence. Not coincidentally, this is the leftist view of mental illness -- the left feels that, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls" (it's no coincidence that another of Loughner's favorite books was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," where all the inmates are the sane).
Unfortunately, the leftist view of mental illness has real-world consequences. From the 1950s onward, the left dictated that the severely mentally ill be deinstitutionalized, set loose on the streets of America. Jimmy Carter's Commission on Mental Health suggested that the mentally ill retain "the greatest degree of freedom, self-determination, autonomy, dignity, and integrity of body, mind, and spirit for the individual while he or she participates in treatment or receives services." That sounds nice, but in practice, it has meant skyrocketing homelessness, crime and worse life quality for the most mentally ill. It has meant an inability or unwillingness to institutionalize those like Jared Loughner.
The left has blamed society for Jared Loughner. Ironically, they're correct -- but it's the society created by the left that is responsible, not the vaguely and idiotically defined "violent rhetoric society" of which they complain. Soft thinking has consequences.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Last week, mentally disturbed youth Jared Lee Loughner shot 20 people at a rally in Tucson, Ariz., including congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). The left, led by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, immediately capitalized on the bloody murders, stating without evidence that Loughner had been inspired by the "the anger, the hatred, the bigotry" of our current political climate. Over the course of the following days, Dupnik and his allies blamed talk radio, conservatives who spread "mistrust of government," Sarah Palin, Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle and Rush Limbaugh.
There is enough blame to go around for this shooting spree. Unfortunately for Dupnik and his allies, that blame lies almost exclusively with the left.
We don't know much about Jared Lee Loughner. We know that he is a fan of "Mein Kampf" and "The Communist Manifesto," and that one of Loughner's high school classmates remembered him as a "left-wing ... pothead, quite liberal." We understand that he is interested in the occult (he had a skull shrine in his backyard), that he is fascinated by grammar, and that he loves "conscience dreaming" -- presumably a misspelling of "conscious dreaming," a mental state sometimes enjoyed by drug users.
More than that, we know that he is loony. According to Sheriff Dupnik himself, Loughner has been in trouble with the law repeatedly; he was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. And more tellingly, "there had been earlier contact between Loughner and law enforcement after he had made death threats." Dupnik's office knew that Loughner was expelled from the junior college for frightening behavior -- his classmates said he exhibited "kind of hysterical laughing, kind of creepy ... his hands and his parts of his body were shaking and trembling like he was under the influence of drugs or something like that." Some feared for their lives.
Let's leave aside Loughner's ideology -- we cannot assume that his leftist leanings were either rational or thoroughgoing, since he was clearly mentally ill. Let's focus instead on the two institutions that are supposed to prevent incidents like this: law enforcement and the mental health establishment.
Law enforcement falls under Sheriff Dupnik's domain. Dupnik still has not answered why his office ignored the threats, why they failed to investigate properly, and why Loughner was allowed to roam free and buy a firearm. Even at the most basic level, Dupnik has not explained why Tucson is so crime-ridden altogether.
More importantly, Dupnik blew it on this case, in large part because he appears not to understand the nature of madness. Dupnik believes that true mental instability does not exist. Apparently, all acts of madness must be attributed to others' influence. Not coincidentally, this is the leftist view of mental illness -- the left feels that, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls" (it's no coincidence that another of Loughner's favorite books was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," where all the inmates are the sane).
Unfortunately, the leftist view of mental illness has real-world consequences. From the 1950s onward, the left dictated that the severely mentally ill be deinstitutionalized, set loose on the streets of America. Jimmy Carter's Commission on Mental Health suggested that the mentally ill retain "the greatest degree of freedom, self-determination, autonomy, dignity, and integrity of body, mind, and spirit for the individual while he or she participates in treatment or receives services." That sounds nice, but in practice, it has meant skyrocketing homelessness, crime and worse life quality for the most mentally ill. It has meant an inability or unwillingness to institutionalize those like Jared Loughner.
The left has blamed society for Jared Loughner. Ironically, they're correct -- but it's the society created by the left that is responsible, not the vaguely and idiotically defined "violent rhetoric society" of which they complain. Soft thinking has consequences.
A Fool With a Badge is Still a Fool
By Michael Reagan
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
When a would-be assassin shot my Dad, President Ronald Reagan, nobody questioned the fact that the shooter was certifiably nuts.
Authorities recognized that fact and put him in a mental institution as his obvious disturbed mental state demanded.
Now we have another attempted killing of a public official, Arizona's widely admired Rep. Gabby Giffords, and just about everybody recognizes the fact that the shooter, one Jared Loughner, is crazy as a loon.
Moreover, the fact that Loughner is probably nutty as a fruitcake, and perhaps dangerously so, could not have escaped the attention of local law enforcement authorities such as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who already had Loughner in his sights yet failed to do anything to prevent Loughner's obviously foreseeable skilling spree.
Yet we don't hear a word of repentance for his failure to foresee what transpired in Tucson last Saturday. Not a word, mainly because Sheriff Dupnik is too busy attacking Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives to turn his rhetoric loose on the shooter.
In Dubnik's twisted logic, Loughner may be a murderer but somehow or other it's all Rush's fault for his unforgivable habit of calling a spade a spade and referring to liberals as being mentally disjointed as the majority of them are.
This kind of ridiculous response to a tragedy is becoming what the French would call de riguer -- the liberal's order of the day when one of their failures to recognize reality results in people getting killed.
As my more plainspoken friends would put it, Dupnik shoulda seen it coming, and he's now trying to obfuscate that fact by striking out at people who had not a single thing to do with Loughner's deadly actions.
"All I can tell you is that teachers and fellow students were concerned about his bizarre behavior in class to the point where some of him (sic) were physically afraid of him," Dupnik admitted to ABC News.
"He was acting in very weird fashion to the point where they had several incidents with him to the point where law enforcement at Pima College got involved and they decided to expel him. And they did."
That should have alerted the Sheriff and compelled him to keep a close eye on the Loughner. Tragically, it didn't, so the killer was free to slaughter some of the Sheriff's constituents without interference from Dupnik.
The Sheriff is now busy trying to distract the public from recognizing his failure to protect his own member of Congress, a highly respected federal judge on his way home from daily Mass, and other innocent people from being attacked by a man he had to know was dangerous, especially when he was allowed to get within point-blank range of the congresswoman.
So in the strange world of Sheriff Dupnik, Rush Limbaugh's use of his freedom of speech in warning against the destructive policies of liberalism is "irresponsible," while his own poisoned rhetoric is permissible.
Incredibly, Dupnik has suggested that Uncle Sam put a gag on Americans by setting up a Goebbels-like "kind of commission" that would apparently "deal with civility and make recommendations on how to get it back."
That's apparently his view of what freedom of speech means -- freedom to have it regulated by Big Brother. Yet he insists he has nothing against what he called "heated arguments."
There's one consolation for having to put up with the rants and ravings of possibly senile public officials, and that is the fact that this guy is an elected official and the public can dump him if he stands for re-election. At that time they will have an opportunity to replace him with a new sheriff more like his colleague, fellow Arizona lawman Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
When a would-be assassin shot my Dad, President Ronald Reagan, nobody questioned the fact that the shooter was certifiably nuts.
Authorities recognized that fact and put him in a mental institution as his obvious disturbed mental state demanded.
Now we have another attempted killing of a public official, Arizona's widely admired Rep. Gabby Giffords, and just about everybody recognizes the fact that the shooter, one Jared Loughner, is crazy as a loon.
Moreover, the fact that Loughner is probably nutty as a fruitcake, and perhaps dangerously so, could not have escaped the attention of local law enforcement authorities such as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who already had Loughner in his sights yet failed to do anything to prevent Loughner's obviously foreseeable skilling spree.
Yet we don't hear a word of repentance for his failure to foresee what transpired in Tucson last Saturday. Not a word, mainly because Sheriff Dupnik is too busy attacking Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives to turn his rhetoric loose on the shooter.
In Dubnik's twisted logic, Loughner may be a murderer but somehow or other it's all Rush's fault for his unforgivable habit of calling a spade a spade and referring to liberals as being mentally disjointed as the majority of them are.
This kind of ridiculous response to a tragedy is becoming what the French would call de riguer -- the liberal's order of the day when one of their failures to recognize reality results in people getting killed.
As my more plainspoken friends would put it, Dupnik shoulda seen it coming, and he's now trying to obfuscate that fact by striking out at people who had not a single thing to do with Loughner's deadly actions.
"All I can tell you is that teachers and fellow students were concerned about his bizarre behavior in class to the point where some of him (sic) were physically afraid of him," Dupnik admitted to ABC News.
"He was acting in very weird fashion to the point where they had several incidents with him to the point where law enforcement at Pima College got involved and they decided to expel him. And they did."
That should have alerted the Sheriff and compelled him to keep a close eye on the Loughner. Tragically, it didn't, so the killer was free to slaughter some of the Sheriff's constituents without interference from Dupnik.
The Sheriff is now busy trying to distract the public from recognizing his failure to protect his own member of Congress, a highly respected federal judge on his way home from daily Mass, and other innocent people from being attacked by a man he had to know was dangerous, especially when he was allowed to get within point-blank range of the congresswoman.
So in the strange world of Sheriff Dupnik, Rush Limbaugh's use of his freedom of speech in warning against the destructive policies of liberalism is "irresponsible," while his own poisoned rhetoric is permissible.
Incredibly, Dupnik has suggested that Uncle Sam put a gag on Americans by setting up a Goebbels-like "kind of commission" that would apparently "deal with civility and make recommendations on how to get it back."
That's apparently his view of what freedom of speech means -- freedom to have it regulated by Big Brother. Yet he insists he has nothing against what he called "heated arguments."
There's one consolation for having to put up with the rants and ravings of possibly senile public officials, and that is the fact that this guy is an elected official and the public can dump him if he stands for re-election. At that time they will have an opportunity to replace him with a new sheriff more like his colleague, fellow Arizona lawman Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
A Time for Congressional Calm
National Review Online
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Blaming the Tucson massacre on Sarah Palin is absurd; blaming it on U.S. gun laws is merely misguided.
We’re not surprised that liberals are using this horrific bloodbath as proof that America needs tougher curbs on firearms and ammunition. We just wish they would keep their facts straight.
Here’s what we know about accused killer Jared Lee Loughner: He purchased his weapon, a Glock 19 pistol, after undergoing a routine background check. While Loughner had repeatedly shown signs of mental illness, he was not listed in the FBI database of those Americans ineligible to buy guns. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that he certainly should have been treated for major psychiatric disorders. But on the day he entered a Sportsman’s Warehouse to acquire his Glock, Loughner had no formal history of insanity or schizophrenia. After several run-ins with campus police, he had withdrawn from Pima Community College (PCC) rather than seek medical clearance from a mental-health professional.
He never was treated, much less declared mentally incompetent under the law. On paper, then, Loughner did not seem an obvious threat to public safety. While Arizona has famously permissive gun statutes, the Tucson killer would have been able to buy his weapon in states with much tighter laws.
Besides denouncing Arizona, gun controllers are also condemning George W. Bush and Capitol Hill Republicans, who allowed the Clinton assault-weapons ban (AWB) to expire seven years ago. “The type of magazine used by Mr. Loughner was once banned in the United States,” says the Washington Post editorial page, echoing many others. “But that brief era of sanity came to an end in 2004, when Congress refused to renew the assault-weapons ban passed in the summer of 1994.”
This argument is misleading at best and outright false at worst. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has noted, the AWB merely prohibited “the manufacture or importation of new magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds” (our emphasis). Existing 31-round magazines were still available for purchase. The AWB outlawed their creation, but it did not ban their sale or possession. At no time during the ban were such magazines difficult to come by. Let us repeat that: Even if the AWB had been extended in 2004, Jared Lee Loughner would have been able to legally purchase a 31-round clip.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.) and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D., N.Y.) are now preparing legislation to forbid the sale of such clips. Meanwhile, Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) is sponsoring a measure to criminalize the conscious possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of federal lawmakers and other officials. These are predictable responses to a terrible tragedy, but we doubt that either bill would do much to prevent the next Tucson. Violent psychotics intent on committing mass murder will always pose a huge danger to society, regardless of whether they can legally buy 31-round magazines or legally bring a weapon near a politician.
Indeed, if the ghastly events in Arizona are to prompt a “national conversation” about anything, let it be a conversation about the mentally ill, and about how we treat those who reject the treatment they desperately need. The gun-control proposals being floated in Washington would do very little to boost public safety. At the same time, they would curtail the Second Amendment freedoms of peaceful, law-abiding citizens — the type of citizens who tackled Loughner in the midst of his rampage and thereby saved many lives. Knee-jerk legislation is rarely a good idea. The current moment is no exception.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Blaming the Tucson massacre on Sarah Palin is absurd; blaming it on U.S. gun laws is merely misguided.
We’re not surprised that liberals are using this horrific bloodbath as proof that America needs tougher curbs on firearms and ammunition. We just wish they would keep their facts straight.
Here’s what we know about accused killer Jared Lee Loughner: He purchased his weapon, a Glock 19 pistol, after undergoing a routine background check. While Loughner had repeatedly shown signs of mental illness, he was not listed in the FBI database of those Americans ineligible to buy guns. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that he certainly should have been treated for major psychiatric disorders. But on the day he entered a Sportsman’s Warehouse to acquire his Glock, Loughner had no formal history of insanity or schizophrenia. After several run-ins with campus police, he had withdrawn from Pima Community College (PCC) rather than seek medical clearance from a mental-health professional.
He never was treated, much less declared mentally incompetent under the law. On paper, then, Loughner did not seem an obvious threat to public safety. While Arizona has famously permissive gun statutes, the Tucson killer would have been able to buy his weapon in states with much tighter laws.
Besides denouncing Arizona, gun controllers are also condemning George W. Bush and Capitol Hill Republicans, who allowed the Clinton assault-weapons ban (AWB) to expire seven years ago. “The type of magazine used by Mr. Loughner was once banned in the United States,” says the Washington Post editorial page, echoing many others. “But that brief era of sanity came to an end in 2004, when Congress refused to renew the assault-weapons ban passed in the summer of 1994.”
This argument is misleading at best and outright false at worst. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has noted, the AWB merely prohibited “the manufacture or importation of new magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds” (our emphasis). Existing 31-round magazines were still available for purchase. The AWB outlawed their creation, but it did not ban their sale or possession. At no time during the ban were such magazines difficult to come by. Let us repeat that: Even if the AWB had been extended in 2004, Jared Lee Loughner would have been able to legally purchase a 31-round clip.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.) and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D., N.Y.) are now preparing legislation to forbid the sale of such clips. Meanwhile, Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) is sponsoring a measure to criminalize the conscious possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of federal lawmakers and other officials. These are predictable responses to a terrible tragedy, but we doubt that either bill would do much to prevent the next Tucson. Violent psychotics intent on committing mass murder will always pose a huge danger to society, regardless of whether they can legally buy 31-round magazines or legally bring a weapon near a politician.
Indeed, if the ghastly events in Arizona are to prompt a “national conversation” about anything, let it be a conversation about the mentally ill, and about how we treat those who reject the treatment they desperately need. The gun-control proposals being floated in Washington would do very little to boost public safety. At the same time, they would curtail the Second Amendment freedoms of peaceful, law-abiding citizens — the type of citizens who tackled Loughner in the midst of his rampage and thereby saved many lives. Knee-jerk legislation is rarely a good idea. The current moment is no exception.
Climate of Hate
If you can’t find a Tea Party connection to Jared Loughner, the right-wing climate of hate will have to do.
Allen C. Guelzo
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Once the shock of the Giffords assassination attempt had worn off, the next-most-amazing thing we beheld was the unembarrassed gloating with which the American Left, in its many forms, pointed a pompous and hysterical finger at “the Tea Party” or “the Right” or “talk-show hosts” (although the accusers clearly don’t have Terry Gross in mind). Less than 24 hours after the shooting that nearly killed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, we had heard from The New Yorker’s George Packer, the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, and the sheriff of Pima County, all solemnly intoning their belief that Jared Loughner had been in some way led to his crime by a lethal cabal of Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin, and the Republican party. Even Patricia Maisch, one of the three citizens who subdued Loughner, could not end her interview with Shepard Smith on Fox News without confidently — and gratuitously — blaming the whole incident on “extreme right-wing reporters.”
This collective j’accuse has now become a story of its own, and largely because, after the passage of another 24 hours, nothing at all had emerged from the mass of data on Jared Loughner that linked the assassin with tea parties or talk shows of any persuasion. Nor did Gabby Giffords turn out to be a particularly likely target if the shooter really were some incoherent brown-shirted dupe of Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Rush Limbaugh. (Beck’s only public comment on Giffords had been to praise her criticism of the present immigration mess). It was, instead, the Daily Kos that had to airbrush from its website a complaint that Giffords had let down the Democratic side in Congress and could be considered “dead” to the interests of the Left (metaphorically dead, I presume, but bloody metaphors are forgiven when uttered by the Left).
In effect, the denouncers of “hate” had been roaring ahead entirely on hate fuel of their own. By the time we had passed the 48-hour mark, the absence of any connections between Loughner and any co-dependents on the Right hung the accusers in midair, spinning their wheels like Wile E. Coyote. That, however, only signaled a shift from blaming conservatives to blaming a “climate” of opinion in which homicidal rampages are encouraged to happen spontaneously, like oily rags self-combusting. This “climate” turns out to have only one kind of weather, formed solely by the updraft of, as Packer phrased it, “conservative leaders, activists, and media figures” who “have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents.”
The fundamental problem with this ornate political prurience is that assassination in American history has pretty regularly been the blessèd resort of the Left. Start with Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered the very conservative William McKinley; turn next to Harry Orchard, the union bomber who blew up Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905; turn again to Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marxist who murdered JFK (but whom Oliver Stone tried mightily to redefine as a clandestine conservative); add in Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who tried to attack Gerald Ford in 1975 on behalf of “clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation,” and Sara Jane Moore, who fired a .38 revolver at Ford a few weeks after Fromme’s abortive attack because the “government had declared war on the left”; and then top it off with John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan who claimed Lee Harvey Oswald as his role model, and you begin to get some sense of how closely the profile of the gun-toting lunatic assassin suits the Left’s enragés. When the Left talks about violence from the Right, the only name it seems able to come up with is that of Timothy McVeigh.
I also seem to remember that the “climate” of nastiness that is supposed to have fostered the Giffords assassination attempt did not spring from the head of the Tea Party. It began long, long ago, sometime between Lyndon Johnson’s anti-Goldwater atom-bomb ads and the election of Richard Nixon, and then accelerated with the election of Ronald Reagan (whom Sam Donaldson badgered at press conferences in a manner unthought-of in the previous history of the Washington press corps). I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when Reagan was gunned down, and I awoke the next day to find an op-ed column in The Daily Pennsylvanian, written by one Dom Manno, a DP staffer, gloating over the shooting and regretting only that the president had survived. Mr. Manno had to be taken in hand by the Secret Service for a brief lesson about the consequences of encouraging assassins, but the lesson Manno’s column taught me was about the serene sense of immunity he had felt in wishing a conservative president dead. The Left, in other words, never notices when it turns politics or journalism into a free-fire zone. It is only when one of its own gets hit in the process that the nastiness becomes unspeakable — but it is still never the Left’s fault for having manufactured the ammunition in the first place.
If we are living now in a time of unprecedented political “vitriol” — and I believe we are, and very much to the detriment of democracy itself — it is a brand of vitriol that was sprayed with relentless generosity on George W. Bush, who was caricatured by The Nation, day by day during his presidency, as a morphed version of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. And it was only yesterday that the Left’s president referred to Republicans as “enemies,” while the Speaker of the Left snarled at her critics as Nazis with swastikas.
Still, the rule of the Left is that nothing committed by the Left is a sin, whether it’s poisoning the political “climate” for the last forty years, or accusing “the Tea Party” and “the Right” of poisoning it when they strike back in kind. This is hypocrisy on a grand-mal scale. But what blinds the Left to this hypocrisy is the fundamental operating conviction of the Left that all governments are really about power, and that conservatives’ talk of liberty is either a dimwitted relic of the 18th century or else a camouflage for other brands of power; hence, when the Left turns on the acid hose, it is merely doing what the pursuit of power has shown can and must be done on behalf of progressive policies. Hypocrisy occurs only when conservatives try to pick up the hose themselves, since that betrays the Unbearable Secret of the Right, that conservatives are really interested only in power, too.
When conservatives speak of liberty, what they should be speaking of is restraint — the self-restraint of the virtuous republican citizen who, like Washington, turns his back on the blandishments of power; the prudential restraint that spoke of ending a civil war with malice toward none and charity for all; the structural restraint of a Constitution that compels the components of government to occupy themselves with each other so that ordinary citizens may live a life unmolested by the powerful. That sense of restraint has not always governed conservative rhetoric. We are fooling ourselves if we think that Barack Obama was entirely wrong when he spoke of a landscape pockmarked with Miniver Cheevys, drunk on rage or race or guns, dreaming dreams of violent shortcuts to celebrity or power. His mistake has been to imagine that these exist only on the right. Now, when the overreach of the Krugmans and the Packers has become coldly clear, is a good time for conservatives to remind themselves of the interdependence of liberty and restraint. The Right, at least, has a better principle at its core.
Allen C. Guelzo
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Once the shock of the Giffords assassination attempt had worn off, the next-most-amazing thing we beheld was the unembarrassed gloating with which the American Left, in its many forms, pointed a pompous and hysterical finger at “the Tea Party” or “the Right” or “talk-show hosts” (although the accusers clearly don’t have Terry Gross in mind). Less than 24 hours after the shooting that nearly killed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, we had heard from The New Yorker’s George Packer, the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, and the sheriff of Pima County, all solemnly intoning their belief that Jared Loughner had been in some way led to his crime by a lethal cabal of Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin, and the Republican party. Even Patricia Maisch, one of the three citizens who subdued Loughner, could not end her interview with Shepard Smith on Fox News without confidently — and gratuitously — blaming the whole incident on “extreme right-wing reporters.”
This collective j’accuse has now become a story of its own, and largely because, after the passage of another 24 hours, nothing at all had emerged from the mass of data on Jared Loughner that linked the assassin with tea parties or talk shows of any persuasion. Nor did Gabby Giffords turn out to be a particularly likely target if the shooter really were some incoherent brown-shirted dupe of Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Rush Limbaugh. (Beck’s only public comment on Giffords had been to praise her criticism of the present immigration mess). It was, instead, the Daily Kos that had to airbrush from its website a complaint that Giffords had let down the Democratic side in Congress and could be considered “dead” to the interests of the Left (metaphorically dead, I presume, but bloody metaphors are forgiven when uttered by the Left).
In effect, the denouncers of “hate” had been roaring ahead entirely on hate fuel of their own. By the time we had passed the 48-hour mark, the absence of any connections between Loughner and any co-dependents on the Right hung the accusers in midair, spinning their wheels like Wile E. Coyote. That, however, only signaled a shift from blaming conservatives to blaming a “climate” of opinion in which homicidal rampages are encouraged to happen spontaneously, like oily rags self-combusting. This “climate” turns out to have only one kind of weather, formed solely by the updraft of, as Packer phrased it, “conservative leaders, activists, and media figures” who “have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents.”
The fundamental problem with this ornate political prurience is that assassination in American history has pretty regularly been the blessèd resort of the Left. Start with Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered the very conservative William McKinley; turn next to Harry Orchard, the union bomber who blew up Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905; turn again to Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marxist who murdered JFK (but whom Oliver Stone tried mightily to redefine as a clandestine conservative); add in Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who tried to attack Gerald Ford in 1975 on behalf of “clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation,” and Sara Jane Moore, who fired a .38 revolver at Ford a few weeks after Fromme’s abortive attack because the “government had declared war on the left”; and then top it off with John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan who claimed Lee Harvey Oswald as his role model, and you begin to get some sense of how closely the profile of the gun-toting lunatic assassin suits the Left’s enragés. When the Left talks about violence from the Right, the only name it seems able to come up with is that of Timothy McVeigh.
I also seem to remember that the “climate” of nastiness that is supposed to have fostered the Giffords assassination attempt did not spring from the head of the Tea Party. It began long, long ago, sometime between Lyndon Johnson’s anti-Goldwater atom-bomb ads and the election of Richard Nixon, and then accelerated with the election of Ronald Reagan (whom Sam Donaldson badgered at press conferences in a manner unthought-of in the previous history of the Washington press corps). I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when Reagan was gunned down, and I awoke the next day to find an op-ed column in The Daily Pennsylvanian, written by one Dom Manno, a DP staffer, gloating over the shooting and regretting only that the president had survived. Mr. Manno had to be taken in hand by the Secret Service for a brief lesson about the consequences of encouraging assassins, but the lesson Manno’s column taught me was about the serene sense of immunity he had felt in wishing a conservative president dead. The Left, in other words, never notices when it turns politics or journalism into a free-fire zone. It is only when one of its own gets hit in the process that the nastiness becomes unspeakable — but it is still never the Left’s fault for having manufactured the ammunition in the first place.
If we are living now in a time of unprecedented political “vitriol” — and I believe we are, and very much to the detriment of democracy itself — it is a brand of vitriol that was sprayed with relentless generosity on George W. Bush, who was caricatured by The Nation, day by day during his presidency, as a morphed version of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. And it was only yesterday that the Left’s president referred to Republicans as “enemies,” while the Speaker of the Left snarled at her critics as Nazis with swastikas.
Still, the rule of the Left is that nothing committed by the Left is a sin, whether it’s poisoning the political “climate” for the last forty years, or accusing “the Tea Party” and “the Right” of poisoning it when they strike back in kind. This is hypocrisy on a grand-mal scale. But what blinds the Left to this hypocrisy is the fundamental operating conviction of the Left that all governments are really about power, and that conservatives’ talk of liberty is either a dimwitted relic of the 18th century or else a camouflage for other brands of power; hence, when the Left turns on the acid hose, it is merely doing what the pursuit of power has shown can and must be done on behalf of progressive policies. Hypocrisy occurs only when conservatives try to pick up the hose themselves, since that betrays the Unbearable Secret of the Right, that conservatives are really interested only in power, too.
When conservatives speak of liberty, what they should be speaking of is restraint — the self-restraint of the virtuous republican citizen who, like Washington, turns his back on the blandishments of power; the prudential restraint that spoke of ending a civil war with malice toward none and charity for all; the structural restraint of a Constitution that compels the components of government to occupy themselves with each other so that ordinary citizens may live a life unmolested by the powerful. That sense of restraint has not always governed conservative rhetoric. We are fooling ourselves if we think that Barack Obama was entirely wrong when he spoke of a landscape pockmarked with Miniver Cheevys, drunk on rage or race or guns, dreaming dreams of violent shortcuts to celebrity or power. His mistake has been to imagine that these exist only on the right. Now, when the overreach of the Krugmans and the Packers has become coldly clear, is a good time for conservatives to remind themselves of the interdependence of liberty and restraint. The Right, at least, has a better principle at its core.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Massacre, Followed by Libel
The origins of Jared Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Paul Krugman’s?
Charles Krauthammer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Washington – The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents, and sundry other liberal bêtes noires.
The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.
As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos, and other ravings — and in all the testimony from people who knew him — there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.
Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff, and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. “His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world,” said the teacher of Loughner’s philosophy class at Pima Community College.
“He was very disconnected from reality,” said classmate Lydian Ali.
“You know how it is when you talk to someone who’s mentally ill and they’re just not there?” said neighbor Jason Johnson. “It was like he was in his own world.”
His ravings, said one high-school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,” reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warned of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.
This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder — ideas disconnected from one another, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that — as she e-mailed friends and family — she expected to see his picture on TV after he had perpetrated a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class, “I sit by the door with my purse handy,” she wrote, so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords back to at least 2007, when he attended a townhall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who began an article thus: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”
Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.
Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest. That’s why the language persists. That’s why we speak without any self-consciousness of such things as “battleground states” and “targeting” opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest — “campaign” — is an appropriation from warfare.
When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at [it]” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.
Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel’s little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd — unless you’re the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.
The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?
Charles Krauthammer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Washington – The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents, and sundry other liberal bêtes noires.
The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.
As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos, and other ravings — and in all the testimony from people who knew him — there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.
Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff, and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. “His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world,” said the teacher of Loughner’s philosophy class at Pima Community College.
“He was very disconnected from reality,” said classmate Lydian Ali.
“You know how it is when you talk to someone who’s mentally ill and they’re just not there?” said neighbor Jason Johnson. “It was like he was in his own world.”
His ravings, said one high-school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,” reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warned of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.
This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder — ideas disconnected from one another, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that — as she e-mailed friends and family — she expected to see his picture on TV after he had perpetrated a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class, “I sit by the door with my purse handy,” she wrote, so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords back to at least 2007, when he attended a townhall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who began an article thus: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”
Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.
Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest. That’s why the language persists. That’s why we speak without any self-consciousness of such things as “battleground states” and “targeting” opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest — “campaign” — is an appropriation from warfare.
When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at [it]” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.
Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel’s little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd — unless you’re the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.
The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?
The Worst Sheriff in America
We have seen this kind of political Keystone Koppery before — notably in the Beltway sniper attacks of 2002.
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
There are many heroes who showed indomitable courage and grace under fire during this weekend’s horrific Tucson massacre. Blowhard Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was not one of them.
If the White House has any sense, President Obama will stay far away from the demagogic Dupnik and his media entourage when he visits Arizona on Wednesday to memorialize the victims. Indeed, if the White House is truly committed to unifying the country, it will explicitly disavow Dupnik’s vulture-like exploitation of the shooting rampage.
Within hours of the bloody spree, Dupnik mounted more grandstands than a NASCAR tour champion. A vocal opponent of SB-1070, the popular state law cracking down on illegal immigration, Dupnik immediately blamed Arizona for becoming a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
To date, there is no public evidence that accused shooter Jared Loughner was in any way motivated by the national rancor over illegal immigration and the Arizona law (though open-borders extremists, from the Justice Department on down, most certainly wish it were so). When Loughner complained about non–English speakers, his nonsensical diatribes were aimed at illiterates in general — not illegal aliens — and “grammar control” by the government.
No matter. Dupnik vehemently singled out “people in the radio business and some people in the TV business” like Rush Limbaugh for creating the New York Times–patented “Climate of Hate.” Sounding more like an MSNBC groupie (which, surprise, he confesses to be) than a responsible law-enforcement official, Dupnik baselessly suggested that the shooting was part of a larger conspiracy and railed against “vitriol” from limited-government activists who are stoking “anger against elected officials.”
Dupnik’s mouth has done more to stoke self-inflicted ire against elected government clowns than anything the Right could muster against him. Had the hyper-partisan Democrat been more in tune with his job than with the media airwaves, the murderous, maniacal gunman might have been stopped.
As Dupnik himself has now admitted, Loughner leveled death threats against others that were investigated by law enforcement — and then apparently shrugged off. Locals note that Loughner’s mother worked for the county and may have had some pull. Pima County College campus police reported five serious confrontations with the mentally unstable young man before he was kicked out of the school, which he decried as an unconstitutional “torture facility.” Classmates said they feared for their lives. His friends say he was a pothead, a 9/11 Truther, and a UFO conspiracy-theorist so kooky that even flying-objects adherents spurned him.
Despite zero evidence that Rush Limbaugh, cable news, the Tea Party movement, or immigration-enforcement activists had anything to do with Loughner’s warped attack, the shameless Dupnik shows no signs of shutting up.
The worst sheriff in America is walking in the footsteps of another infamous law-enforcement official who put fame, ambition, and ideology above public safety: the disgraced Montgomery County (Md.) police chief Charles Moose, the publicity-hungry Keystone Cop who grossly bungled the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002.
Like Dupnik, Moose let politically correct assumptions drive his investigation and his incessant press conferences. He insisted on hunting the wrong vehicle while the snipers’ Chevy Caprice (which had been spotted by several witnesses, and whose license plate had been checked by police at least ten times during the shooting spree) got away. The hapless Moose clung to the notion that white militants in a nonexistent white box truck were to blame — leading to a string of unnecessary murders as the real shooters escaped capture for several deadly weeks. No matter. Moose cashed in on his notoriety, inked a fat book deal, and beat a hasty retreat to Hawaii.
Dupnik is now following the same irresponsible path. But decent Americans understand that he and his civilian counterparts have traveled a smear too far. Despite desperate attempts by the progressive Left to pin the massacre on the “harsh tone” of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech, and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.
At the risk of being accused of inciting violence, you might say they’ve done gone and shot themselves in the foot.
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
There are many heroes who showed indomitable courage and grace under fire during this weekend’s horrific Tucson massacre. Blowhard Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was not one of them.
If the White House has any sense, President Obama will stay far away from the demagogic Dupnik and his media entourage when he visits Arizona on Wednesday to memorialize the victims. Indeed, if the White House is truly committed to unifying the country, it will explicitly disavow Dupnik’s vulture-like exploitation of the shooting rampage.
Within hours of the bloody spree, Dupnik mounted more grandstands than a NASCAR tour champion. A vocal opponent of SB-1070, the popular state law cracking down on illegal immigration, Dupnik immediately blamed Arizona for becoming a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
To date, there is no public evidence that accused shooter Jared Loughner was in any way motivated by the national rancor over illegal immigration and the Arizona law (though open-borders extremists, from the Justice Department on down, most certainly wish it were so). When Loughner complained about non–English speakers, his nonsensical diatribes were aimed at illiterates in general — not illegal aliens — and “grammar control” by the government.
No matter. Dupnik vehemently singled out “people in the radio business and some people in the TV business” like Rush Limbaugh for creating the New York Times–patented “Climate of Hate.” Sounding more like an MSNBC groupie (which, surprise, he confesses to be) than a responsible law-enforcement official, Dupnik baselessly suggested that the shooting was part of a larger conspiracy and railed against “vitriol” from limited-government activists who are stoking “anger against elected officials.”
Dupnik’s mouth has done more to stoke self-inflicted ire against elected government clowns than anything the Right could muster against him. Had the hyper-partisan Democrat been more in tune with his job than with the media airwaves, the murderous, maniacal gunman might have been stopped.
As Dupnik himself has now admitted, Loughner leveled death threats against others that were investigated by law enforcement — and then apparently shrugged off. Locals note that Loughner’s mother worked for the county and may have had some pull. Pima County College campus police reported five serious confrontations with the mentally unstable young man before he was kicked out of the school, which he decried as an unconstitutional “torture facility.” Classmates said they feared for their lives. His friends say he was a pothead, a 9/11 Truther, and a UFO conspiracy-theorist so kooky that even flying-objects adherents spurned him.
Despite zero evidence that Rush Limbaugh, cable news, the Tea Party movement, or immigration-enforcement activists had anything to do with Loughner’s warped attack, the shameless Dupnik shows no signs of shutting up.
The worst sheriff in America is walking in the footsteps of another infamous law-enforcement official who put fame, ambition, and ideology above public safety: the disgraced Montgomery County (Md.) police chief Charles Moose, the publicity-hungry Keystone Cop who grossly bungled the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002.
Like Dupnik, Moose let politically correct assumptions drive his investigation and his incessant press conferences. He insisted on hunting the wrong vehicle while the snipers’ Chevy Caprice (which had been spotted by several witnesses, and whose license plate had been checked by police at least ten times during the shooting spree) got away. The hapless Moose clung to the notion that white militants in a nonexistent white box truck were to blame — leading to a string of unnecessary murders as the real shooters escaped capture for several deadly weeks. No matter. Moose cashed in on his notoriety, inked a fat book deal, and beat a hasty retreat to Hawaii.
Dupnik is now following the same irresponsible path. But decent Americans understand that he and his civilian counterparts have traveled a smear too far. Despite desperate attempts by the progressive Left to pin the massacre on the “harsh tone” of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech, and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.
At the risk of being accused of inciting violence, you might say they’ve done gone and shot themselves in the foot.
The Exploitative Rhetoric of Tragedy
If rhetoric is to blame, then what shall we do about it?
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
In the wake of the horrendous shooting rampage in Tucson, why isn’t anyone talking about banning Mein Kampf? Or The Communist Manifesto? Or for that matter, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth?
After all, unlike Sarah Palin’s absurdly infamous Facebook map with crosshairs on congressional districts that some pundits have blamed for the violence, we have some evidence — suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s own words — that these books were a direct influence on him.
And to listen to partisan ghouls such as Keith Olbermann exploiting this horrific crime, any rhetoric or writing or images that contributed to it must be stopped, and those who don’t accept blame and then repent (specifically Palin) must be “dismissed from politics.”
Note: It’s apparent from evidence found by the authorities and from interviews with the alleged killer’s friends and acquaintances that Loughner has fixated on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords since 2007, long before anyone heard of the “tea parties” or, in most cases, Palin. Moreover, his grievance with Giffords appears to be unrelated to any coherent — or even incoherent — ideological platform. Rather, it drew on the bilious stew of resentments this young man cultivated as he lost his grip on reality.
Indeed, according to a fascinating interview in Mother Jones with one of Loughner’s close friends, this twisted soul was apparently an ardent believer in “lucid dreaming” in which he could control an alternate “‘Matrix’-style” reality.
Something similar seems to be taking hold in more respectable quarters. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insists he wasn’t surprised this happened because he saw it coming, even though the facts in this dimension don’t support his premonitions.
But rather than beat up on those who’ve migrated from the reality-based community, it might be worthwhile to take them at their word.
If these people seriously believe that the tea parties and Palin’s “lock and load” rhetoric are to blame, then what shall we do about it?
It’s hard to find a serious answer to this question. For most of these ideological ambulance chasers, it seems enough to lay the blame at Republican or right-wing feet in an effort to anathematize ideas they don’t like.
But that’s shortsighted. Misplaced panics like this have a momentum and logic all their own. Already, Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa.) has drafted legislation to ban the use of symbols (crosshairs on a map, for instance) or language (“lock and load!”) that could foster violence. “The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down,” he told CNN.
That opens the bidding. The question is, where will it end?
If the alleged shooter had been inspired by a movie or TV show — as any number of murderers have been over the years — would those blaming the tea parties join with social conservatives in blaming Hollywood? Would they celebrate new laws to “shut down” such fare?
Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, claimed to be inspired in part by Catcher in the Rye. Should that be banned? Or if not banned, should we “dismiss” from public life anyone who doesn’t denounce J. D. Salinger?
When the subject of censorship or the “chilling” of free expression comes up in other contexts, the very idea that books, movies, or TV can be blamed for the actions of the criminal or the deranged is met with unbridled scorn. I actually disagree with that. If books can inspire us positively, surely they can inspire us negatively, too. But we understand that we don’t blame books for the rare demons who feed on them.
No doubt this will cause eye-rolling among those who simply want to keep the focus on demonizing conservatives and never bother to think ahead about the consequences of their misplaced hysteria. One noble exception is Slate’s Jack Shafer, who probably goes farther than I would when he writes, “Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business or the press that I would trust with that power.”
Meanwhile, many proud liberals, not to mention dedicated journalists, see no problem with fueling a mass panic over our “political discourse.” The fact that liberal rhetoric and images are often just as “extreme” is irrelevant. Also irrelevant is any violence that might be linked to such rhetoric. And the fact that the shooting suspect’s motivations may lie in a reality of his own design? That’s irrelevant too.
These critics’ aim is simply to exploit this horror as an opportunity to yell “shut up” at their political opponents.
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
In the wake of the horrendous shooting rampage in Tucson, why isn’t anyone talking about banning Mein Kampf? Or The Communist Manifesto? Or for that matter, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth?
After all, unlike Sarah Palin’s absurdly infamous Facebook map with crosshairs on congressional districts that some pundits have blamed for the violence, we have some evidence — suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s own words — that these books were a direct influence on him.
And to listen to partisan ghouls such as Keith Olbermann exploiting this horrific crime, any rhetoric or writing or images that contributed to it must be stopped, and those who don’t accept blame and then repent (specifically Palin) must be “dismissed from politics.”
Note: It’s apparent from evidence found by the authorities and from interviews with the alleged killer’s friends and acquaintances that Loughner has fixated on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords since 2007, long before anyone heard of the “tea parties” or, in most cases, Palin. Moreover, his grievance with Giffords appears to be unrelated to any coherent — or even incoherent — ideological platform. Rather, it drew on the bilious stew of resentments this young man cultivated as he lost his grip on reality.
Indeed, according to a fascinating interview in Mother Jones with one of Loughner’s close friends, this twisted soul was apparently an ardent believer in “lucid dreaming” in which he could control an alternate “‘Matrix’-style” reality.
Something similar seems to be taking hold in more respectable quarters. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insists he wasn’t surprised this happened because he saw it coming, even though the facts in this dimension don’t support his premonitions.
But rather than beat up on those who’ve migrated from the reality-based community, it might be worthwhile to take them at their word.
If these people seriously believe that the tea parties and Palin’s “lock and load” rhetoric are to blame, then what shall we do about it?
It’s hard to find a serious answer to this question. For most of these ideological ambulance chasers, it seems enough to lay the blame at Republican or right-wing feet in an effort to anathematize ideas they don’t like.
But that’s shortsighted. Misplaced panics like this have a momentum and logic all their own. Already, Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa.) has drafted legislation to ban the use of symbols (crosshairs on a map, for instance) or language (“lock and load!”) that could foster violence. “The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down,” he told CNN.
That opens the bidding. The question is, where will it end?
If the alleged shooter had been inspired by a movie or TV show — as any number of murderers have been over the years — would those blaming the tea parties join with social conservatives in blaming Hollywood? Would they celebrate new laws to “shut down” such fare?
Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, claimed to be inspired in part by Catcher in the Rye. Should that be banned? Or if not banned, should we “dismiss” from public life anyone who doesn’t denounce J. D. Salinger?
When the subject of censorship or the “chilling” of free expression comes up in other contexts, the very idea that books, movies, or TV can be blamed for the actions of the criminal or the deranged is met with unbridled scorn. I actually disagree with that. If books can inspire us positively, surely they can inspire us negatively, too. But we understand that we don’t blame books for the rare demons who feed on them.
No doubt this will cause eye-rolling among those who simply want to keep the focus on demonizing conservatives and never bother to think ahead about the consequences of their misplaced hysteria. One noble exception is Slate’s Jack Shafer, who probably goes farther than I would when he writes, “Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business or the press that I would trust with that power.”
Meanwhile, many proud liberals, not to mention dedicated journalists, see no problem with fueling a mass panic over our “political discourse.” The fact that liberal rhetoric and images are often just as “extreme” is irrelevant. Also irrelevant is any violence that might be linked to such rhetoric. And the fact that the shooting suspect’s motivations may lie in a reality of his own design? That’s irrelevant too.
These critics’ aim is simply to exploit this horror as an opportunity to yell “shut up” at their political opponents.
A Horrid Crime, a Dishonest Debate
The same Left that embraces terrorist Bill Ayers seeks a tactical victory in Tucson.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
On June 5, 1968, a deranged 25-year-old Jordanian named Sirhan Sirhan slithered through a crowd toward Sen. Robert Kennedy as the Democratic presidential candidate basked in the glow of his California presidential primary triumph. Sirhan shot and killed Kennedy, wounding several others. The ensuing investigation showed that Sirhan was a raging anti-Semite who’d become fixated on Senator Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel.
Two people profoundly impressed by the assassination were the terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In 1974, they dedicated their own communist manifesto, Prairie Fire, to Sirhan, hailing him — among a cast of violent radicals — as a courageous political prisoner. In the book itself, they and the rest of the Weathermen went on to identify themselves proudly as “communist women and communist men underground in the United States” who were determined to lead a violent leftist revolution — a “fight [to] seize power and build the new society.” Their rhetoric, their heedless dehumanization of those they maligned as ideological “enemies,” was coupled with acts of horrific violence, including a plot to mass-murder U.S. soldiers in Fort Dix, a plot that went awry when the nail bomb accidentally exploded during construction, killing some of the terrorists.
This history is one the modern Left, in which Ayers and Dohrn remain icons, would rather you’d forget today. Today, instead, is for politicizing the wanton savagery of another deranged radical, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, who stunned the nation by slithering through a Tucson crowd and unleashing a 31-shot fusillade, gravely wounding his primary target, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. In the spree, Loughner also killed six people: nine-year-old Christina Green; three elderly Arizonans, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin Stoddard, and Phyllis Schneck; John M. Roll, Arizona’s chief federal district judge; and Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Representative Giffords. Two other legislative aides, Pamela Simon and Ron Barber, were wounded.
Already, we have learned a great deal about the assassin. He is a deeply disturbed pot-head. In order to give meaning to the addling emptiness of his life, he turned to the anti-Semitic rants of Adolph Hitler, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the occult, and what appears to have been an obsession with Representative Giffords, a Jewish congresswoman and supporter of Israel. Some acquaintances and schoolmates who’d endured his tirades over the years predicted he’d come to an end just like this.
Nevertheless, the instantaneous reaction of the hard Left, President Obama’s base, was to politicize the Tucson atrocity as a natural, an inevitable, result of conservative ideology, enthusiasm for immigration-law enforcement and gun ownership by law-abiding Americans, and dissent from Obama’s policies — Giffords, a centrist Democrat (indeed, a former Republican) having supported Obamacare and amnesty for illegal aliens.
The atrocity has called on us to indulge a double fantasy. First, that it is worth the time and effort to engage Obama’s base in a debate about the root cause of the shootings, and specifically about whether what the Left frames as an atmosphere of toxic rhetoric (translation: the Tea Party, talk radio, and Fox News) is to blame. Second, that without such a debate, we wouldn’t and couldn’t know why this atrocity happened.
To grasp the absurdity of the first point, one need only remember the reaction to terrorist attacks by two jihadists: Maj. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people and wounded numerous others in the Fort Hood massacre, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to explode a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. There could not have been a more committed effort to deny that Islamist ideology and its hateful rhetoric had anything whatsoever to do with these events.
Very simply: The Left likes Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist critique of America, while it seethes with contempt for the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and any person or institution that can serve as a symbol of conservatism or bourgeois American life. Consequently, any heinous act that can be contorted, however counterfactually, into a condemnation of the Right will be exploited for that purpose. Conversely, there is to be quick rationalization for, and then studious suppression of, any shameful episode that is too clearly traceable to a leftist cause célèbre — Islam, a movie pining for George W. Bush’s assassination, ghoulish wishes that Clarence Thomas or Dick Cheney will meet swift and painful deaths, or Senate Democrats’ comparing U.S. troops to Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot, or terrorists.
There is no point debating any of this. Two years ago, we were still being told dissent was the highest form of patriotism; now it’s the root cause of murderous rampage. Modern leftists are tacticians. They’ve convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause, obviating the need to be consistent or faithful to facts in any single episode. For them, it’s all about how the episode can be spun to help the cause. That’s worth understanding, but not debating.
Second, can we forget that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s atrocities transformed them into icons of the modern Left — respected “educators” still passionate about “social justice”? Barack Obama didn’t say, “I’ll have nothing to do with unrepentant terrorists who dedicate books to deranged assassins.” He chose to hold his political coming-out party in their living room and cultivated relationships with them, just as he cultivated a relationship with other hate-mongering radicals.
It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism. What vitriolic thing would someone need to say to you, whether the vitriol could be cast as right-wing or left-wing, that would get you to pick up a gun and start spraying bullets at people with whom you disagreed, however vigorously, about some political or social issue? It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.
If wanton violence has a cause other than mental illness, it is a culture that lionizes the savages. That culture is not the culture of the Tea Partiers so despised by the Left. Many Tea Partiers are part of what until recently was called “the Christian Right,” an amorphous group of Americans, not all of whom are actually Christians, tied together by their shared acceptance of basic Judeo-Christian principles, such as equality and the sanctity of life (even the lives of their ideological opponents). They love liberty, because in their hands it is guided by virtue. It leads to the good life and the good society, not to dissipation and anarchy. Many of them pray for President Obama despite their revulsion at most of his policies. All of them consider him their president and would rally behind him if the good of the nation demanded it. Their dissent does not diminish their patriotism.
For our opinion elites, though, they are a punch line or, when disaster strikes, a punching bag. Those elites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.
And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
On June 5, 1968, a deranged 25-year-old Jordanian named Sirhan Sirhan slithered through a crowd toward Sen. Robert Kennedy as the Democratic presidential candidate basked in the glow of his California presidential primary triumph. Sirhan shot and killed Kennedy, wounding several others. The ensuing investigation showed that Sirhan was a raging anti-Semite who’d become fixated on Senator Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel.
Two people profoundly impressed by the assassination were the terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In 1974, they dedicated their own communist manifesto, Prairie Fire, to Sirhan, hailing him — among a cast of violent radicals — as a courageous political prisoner. In the book itself, they and the rest of the Weathermen went on to identify themselves proudly as “communist women and communist men underground in the United States” who were determined to lead a violent leftist revolution — a “fight [to] seize power and build the new society.” Their rhetoric, their heedless dehumanization of those they maligned as ideological “enemies,” was coupled with acts of horrific violence, including a plot to mass-murder U.S. soldiers in Fort Dix, a plot that went awry when the nail bomb accidentally exploded during construction, killing some of the terrorists.
This history is one the modern Left, in which Ayers and Dohrn remain icons, would rather you’d forget today. Today, instead, is for politicizing the wanton savagery of another deranged radical, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, who stunned the nation by slithering through a Tucson crowd and unleashing a 31-shot fusillade, gravely wounding his primary target, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. In the spree, Loughner also killed six people: nine-year-old Christina Green; three elderly Arizonans, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin Stoddard, and Phyllis Schneck; John M. Roll, Arizona’s chief federal district judge; and Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Representative Giffords. Two other legislative aides, Pamela Simon and Ron Barber, were wounded.
Already, we have learned a great deal about the assassin. He is a deeply disturbed pot-head. In order to give meaning to the addling emptiness of his life, he turned to the anti-Semitic rants of Adolph Hitler, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the occult, and what appears to have been an obsession with Representative Giffords, a Jewish congresswoman and supporter of Israel. Some acquaintances and schoolmates who’d endured his tirades over the years predicted he’d come to an end just like this.
Nevertheless, the instantaneous reaction of the hard Left, President Obama’s base, was to politicize the Tucson atrocity as a natural, an inevitable, result of conservative ideology, enthusiasm for immigration-law enforcement and gun ownership by law-abiding Americans, and dissent from Obama’s policies — Giffords, a centrist Democrat (indeed, a former Republican) having supported Obamacare and amnesty for illegal aliens.
The atrocity has called on us to indulge a double fantasy. First, that it is worth the time and effort to engage Obama’s base in a debate about the root cause of the shootings, and specifically about whether what the Left frames as an atmosphere of toxic rhetoric (translation: the Tea Party, talk radio, and Fox News) is to blame. Second, that without such a debate, we wouldn’t and couldn’t know why this atrocity happened.
To grasp the absurdity of the first point, one need only remember the reaction to terrorist attacks by two jihadists: Maj. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people and wounded numerous others in the Fort Hood massacre, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to explode a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. There could not have been a more committed effort to deny that Islamist ideology and its hateful rhetoric had anything whatsoever to do with these events.
Very simply: The Left likes Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist critique of America, while it seethes with contempt for the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and any person or institution that can serve as a symbol of conservatism or bourgeois American life. Consequently, any heinous act that can be contorted, however counterfactually, into a condemnation of the Right will be exploited for that purpose. Conversely, there is to be quick rationalization for, and then studious suppression of, any shameful episode that is too clearly traceable to a leftist cause célèbre — Islam, a movie pining for George W. Bush’s assassination, ghoulish wishes that Clarence Thomas or Dick Cheney will meet swift and painful deaths, or Senate Democrats’ comparing U.S. troops to Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot, or terrorists.
There is no point debating any of this. Two years ago, we were still being told dissent was the highest form of patriotism; now it’s the root cause of murderous rampage. Modern leftists are tacticians. They’ve convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause, obviating the need to be consistent or faithful to facts in any single episode. For them, it’s all about how the episode can be spun to help the cause. That’s worth understanding, but not debating.
Second, can we forget that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s atrocities transformed them into icons of the modern Left — respected “educators” still passionate about “social justice”? Barack Obama didn’t say, “I’ll have nothing to do with unrepentant terrorists who dedicate books to deranged assassins.” He chose to hold his political coming-out party in their living room and cultivated relationships with them, just as he cultivated a relationship with other hate-mongering radicals.
It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism. What vitriolic thing would someone need to say to you, whether the vitriol could be cast as right-wing or left-wing, that would get you to pick up a gun and start spraying bullets at people with whom you disagreed, however vigorously, about some political or social issue? It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.
If wanton violence has a cause other than mental illness, it is a culture that lionizes the savages. That culture is not the culture of the Tea Partiers so despised by the Left. Many Tea Partiers are part of what until recently was called “the Christian Right,” an amorphous group of Americans, not all of whom are actually Christians, tied together by their shared acceptance of basic Judeo-Christian principles, such as equality and the sanctity of life (even the lives of their ideological opponents). They love liberty, because in their hands it is guided by virtue. It leads to the good life and the good society, not to dissipation and anarchy. Many of them pray for President Obama despite their revulsion at most of his policies. All of them consider him their president and would rally behind him if the good of the nation demanded it. Their dissent does not diminish their patriotism.
For our opinion elites, though, they are a punch line or, when disaster strikes, a punching bag. Those elites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.
And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.
The Abuse of Tucson
A tragedy is being exploited for a fresh slur against the Tea Party.
Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Almost instantaneously the horrific shooting in Tucson, Ariz., became the occasion for partisan hatred.
It’s one thing to charge your opponents with increasing the debt or serving the interests of the rich; it’s quite another to say they are accomplices to mass murder. In the ostensible (and always worthy) cause of civility, prominent liberals rushed to blame conservatives, and especially Sarah Palin, for the mayhem in Tucson.
Palin’s offense was posting a map on Facebook with a bull’s-eye marking the districts of 20 Democrats she wished to see defeated. On the list was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the target of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. To connect Palin’s map to Loughner’s criminal act requires a massive leap that her detractors executed with ease, since they feel they have warrant to say anything about her without regard to evidence, logic, or — ahem — civility.
Palin’s martial imagery wasn’t just innocuous, it was a tattered cliché. American politics runs on metaphors drawn from war, and has at least since the 19th century. What journalist didn’t write about “targeted” districts or candidates in the last midterm election? Why do we say “campaign” and “rank and file,” or refer to “battles” and “war rooms”? None of this has ever before been taken as an incitement to violence. Then again, never before was it a club with which to bludgeon the hated Sarah Palin, while nattering on about how our politics should be less venomous.
All indications are that Loughner is a pitiable, sick young man whose rampage defies reason. He is anti-government the way schizophrenics who believe the government is controlling their minds are anti-government — think of the pre-treatment John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, not the Milton Friedman of Free to Choose. You could rummage through the detritus of his diseased mind and, with enough ingenuity and malice, use it to discredit any number of causes.
Was postmodernism responsible for his obsession with how the rules of language determine thought? Is monetarism to blame for his mad obsession with currency? Should secularists begin soul-searching, given his militant atheism? All of these connections have as much plausibility as the notion that he took deadly marching orders from a Sarah Palin Facebook posting (which there’s no evidence he ever saw).
Loughner may have been obsessed with Representative Giffords as much as three years ago, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin, before the Tea Party, before the rise of our alleged “climate of hate” in response to Pres. Barack Obama’s election. Loughner attended an August 2007 town-hall meeting and left angered at her inability to answer a nonsensical question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
Loughner’s profile fits that of the Virginia Tech shooter — a disturbed individual whose strange behavior frightened his classmates and his friends. The chances are his case will be another in the sad annals of the untreated mentally ill doing harm to themselves and others. Except ghoulish political opportunists have latched on to this crime.
The political use of Tucson is the latest blast against a Tea Party that the Left will never consider legitimate. First it was astroturf, then it was racist, now it is murderous. It’s hard to see what could be next in this progression. Perhaps Palin really intended her targeted congressional districts to be wiped out in their entirety in an act of genocide? By calling conservative rhetoric “eliminationist,” the Left is already on the cusp of this escalation.
It is a time for deep breaths all around. The Tucson shooter shattered lives and, in targeting a public official, attacked our democracy. The stories of the victims are unbearably sad, and of those of the heroes unbelievably inspiring. In its horror — another mass shooting — and in its uplift — the pluck of the grievously wounded Giffords, the miracles of modern medicine, the kindness and courage of strangers — it’s an event that should be larger than tawdry partisanship and unsupported finger-pointing.
Our new era of civility is off to a rocky start.
Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Almost instantaneously the horrific shooting in Tucson, Ariz., became the occasion for partisan hatred.
It’s one thing to charge your opponents with increasing the debt or serving the interests of the rich; it’s quite another to say they are accomplices to mass murder. In the ostensible (and always worthy) cause of civility, prominent liberals rushed to blame conservatives, and especially Sarah Palin, for the mayhem in Tucson.
Palin’s offense was posting a map on Facebook with a bull’s-eye marking the districts of 20 Democrats she wished to see defeated. On the list was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the target of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. To connect Palin’s map to Loughner’s criminal act requires a massive leap that her detractors executed with ease, since they feel they have warrant to say anything about her without regard to evidence, logic, or — ahem — civility.
Palin’s martial imagery wasn’t just innocuous, it was a tattered cliché. American politics runs on metaphors drawn from war, and has at least since the 19th century. What journalist didn’t write about “targeted” districts or candidates in the last midterm election? Why do we say “campaign” and “rank and file,” or refer to “battles” and “war rooms”? None of this has ever before been taken as an incitement to violence. Then again, never before was it a club with which to bludgeon the hated Sarah Palin, while nattering on about how our politics should be less venomous.
All indications are that Loughner is a pitiable, sick young man whose rampage defies reason. He is anti-government the way schizophrenics who believe the government is controlling their minds are anti-government — think of the pre-treatment John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, not the Milton Friedman of Free to Choose. You could rummage through the detritus of his diseased mind and, with enough ingenuity and malice, use it to discredit any number of causes.
Was postmodernism responsible for his obsession with how the rules of language determine thought? Is monetarism to blame for his mad obsession with currency? Should secularists begin soul-searching, given his militant atheism? All of these connections have as much plausibility as the notion that he took deadly marching orders from a Sarah Palin Facebook posting (which there’s no evidence he ever saw).
Loughner may have been obsessed with Representative Giffords as much as three years ago, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin, before the Tea Party, before the rise of our alleged “climate of hate” in response to Pres. Barack Obama’s election. Loughner attended an August 2007 town-hall meeting and left angered at her inability to answer a nonsensical question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
Loughner’s profile fits that of the Virginia Tech shooter — a disturbed individual whose strange behavior frightened his classmates and his friends. The chances are his case will be another in the sad annals of the untreated mentally ill doing harm to themselves and others. Except ghoulish political opportunists have latched on to this crime.
The political use of Tucson is the latest blast against a Tea Party that the Left will never consider legitimate. First it was astroturf, then it was racist, now it is murderous. It’s hard to see what could be next in this progression. Perhaps Palin really intended her targeted congressional districts to be wiped out in their entirety in an act of genocide? By calling conservative rhetoric “eliminationist,” the Left is already on the cusp of this escalation.
It is a time for deep breaths all around. The Tucson shooter shattered lives and, in targeting a public official, attacked our democracy. The stories of the victims are unbearably sad, and of those of the heroes unbelievably inspiring. In its horror — another mass shooting — and in its uplift — the pluck of the grievously wounded Giffords, the miracles of modern medicine, the kindness and courage of strangers — it’s an event that should be larger than tawdry partisanship and unsupported finger-pointing.
Our new era of civility is off to a rocky start.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Contemptible Opportunists in Giffords Shooting Obscure Actual Problem
By Mona Charen
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
It doesn't require actual violence for the left in America to malign the right as bloodthirsty. So fertile are their imaginations -- or so flexible their ethical constraints -- that even the most orderly and irenic gathering can be twisted into something sinister. Throughout the spring and summer of 2009, as peaceful tea party protesters, clutching their copies of the Constitution, demonstrated against what they regarded as government overreach, the left erupted with bug-eyed warnings that the movement was inciting violence and extremism.
Actual violence isn't necessary for the left's campaign to slander the right, but it is useful. Former President Clinton, with the help of the left-leaning press, cynically pinned responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing on "talk radio." Because conservative talk shows expressed hostility to big government, he argued, they were creating a "climate of hate" that inspired Timothy McVeigh.
Strangely, the left never perceived a link between the rhetoric of Al Gore and the violence of environmental extremist "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, or say, the anti-free trade stance of American labor unions with anti-globalization riots that have accompanied all of the IMF and World Bank meetings of the past several years.
Last year, liberal politicians and commentators urged the nation to refrain from jumping to conclusions when Maj. Nidal Hasan, shouting "Allahu Akbar," gunned down 45 fellow soldiers (killing 13). But when it suits their preferred narrative, liberals jump most eagerly, and it must be said, contemptibly, to conclusions.
When an obviously deranged killer (of no coherent political persuasion) gunned down a dozen people over the weekend in Tucson, Ariz., liberals in the press permitted no space for civility or decency. The temptation metaphorically to dip their hands in the blood of Gabrielle Giffords was overpowering. Even as the victims were being rushed to the hospital, commentators from The New York Times, CNN, and other outlets were suggesting that conservative, anti-government attitudes were responsible for the bloodshed. Sarah Palin came in for extra licks.
Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR's "On Point," was explicit in blaming conservatives. "It's a Democratic congresswoman who's been shot through the head!" he protested when a guest (this columnist) suggested that both liberals and conservatives of course condemn violence.
Well, yes. And it's a tragedy. But would it be any different if a Republican had been shot? Ronald Reagan was nearly killed by a similarly mentally ill gunman. Did anyone suggest that liberals or Democrats encouraged or inspired John Hinckley?
The "tone" of our politics has become so inflamed, they lament. But they really don't mean "our" politics; they mean conservatism. There was no hand-wringing by liberals during the past decade when leftist protesters routinely shouted for George W. Bush's blood (see Binscorner.com). Look, the world would be a better place if everyone toned down the vitriol -- but it wouldn't make a particle of difference when it comes to gun violence.
And that's what is being obscured by this focus on political rhetoric. We do have a serious problem with gun violence. We have a particular problem with unbalanced people who decide to shoot up a school or shopping mall or political event to achieve -- however fleetingly -- fame. Some part of the blame for this sickness must be laid at the feet of the media, whose blanket coverage of such events encourages the lunatics.
Another part of the blame may belong to an entertainment culture that glorifies and glamorizes gun violence. Every society has mentally ill people. But the way paranoid schizophrenics and other mentally impaired people choose to behave is influenced by culture.
Neither of those aspects of our society is likely to change. But a third feature -- our legal framework for handling those who resist treatment -- can and should change. Widespread deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, along with laws that require a showing of dangerousness before a person can be involuntarily subjected to treatment, make it exceedingly difficult to stop a crazed gunman before his murderous spree.
In the Tucson case, as in the Virginia Tech case, others noticed the gunmen's oddity in advance but were unable to force them to get treatment. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, assisted outpatient treatment laws, if enforced, can radically reduce the number of hospitalizations, incarcerations, and violent episodes among those required to participate.
A misplaced respect for personal autonomy -- the right to reject treatment -- arguably carries too high a price, particularly now when pharmacological treatment is so benign, and when the kinds of crimes committed by the untreated mentally ill are so heinous.
That's the discussion we should be having.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
It doesn't require actual violence for the left in America to malign the right as bloodthirsty. So fertile are their imaginations -- or so flexible their ethical constraints -- that even the most orderly and irenic gathering can be twisted into something sinister. Throughout the spring and summer of 2009, as peaceful tea party protesters, clutching their copies of the Constitution, demonstrated against what they regarded as government overreach, the left erupted with bug-eyed warnings that the movement was inciting violence and extremism.
Actual violence isn't necessary for the left's campaign to slander the right, but it is useful. Former President Clinton, with the help of the left-leaning press, cynically pinned responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing on "talk radio." Because conservative talk shows expressed hostility to big government, he argued, they were creating a "climate of hate" that inspired Timothy McVeigh.
Strangely, the left never perceived a link between the rhetoric of Al Gore and the violence of environmental extremist "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, or say, the anti-free trade stance of American labor unions with anti-globalization riots that have accompanied all of the IMF and World Bank meetings of the past several years.
Last year, liberal politicians and commentators urged the nation to refrain from jumping to conclusions when Maj. Nidal Hasan, shouting "Allahu Akbar," gunned down 45 fellow soldiers (killing 13). But when it suits their preferred narrative, liberals jump most eagerly, and it must be said, contemptibly, to conclusions.
When an obviously deranged killer (of no coherent political persuasion) gunned down a dozen people over the weekend in Tucson, Ariz., liberals in the press permitted no space for civility or decency. The temptation metaphorically to dip their hands in the blood of Gabrielle Giffords was overpowering. Even as the victims were being rushed to the hospital, commentators from The New York Times, CNN, and other outlets were suggesting that conservative, anti-government attitudes were responsible for the bloodshed. Sarah Palin came in for extra licks.
Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR's "On Point," was explicit in blaming conservatives. "It's a Democratic congresswoman who's been shot through the head!" he protested when a guest (this columnist) suggested that both liberals and conservatives of course condemn violence.
Well, yes. And it's a tragedy. But would it be any different if a Republican had been shot? Ronald Reagan was nearly killed by a similarly mentally ill gunman. Did anyone suggest that liberals or Democrats encouraged or inspired John Hinckley?
The "tone" of our politics has become so inflamed, they lament. But they really don't mean "our" politics; they mean conservatism. There was no hand-wringing by liberals during the past decade when leftist protesters routinely shouted for George W. Bush's blood (see Binscorner.com). Look, the world would be a better place if everyone toned down the vitriol -- but it wouldn't make a particle of difference when it comes to gun violence.
And that's what is being obscured by this focus on political rhetoric. We do have a serious problem with gun violence. We have a particular problem with unbalanced people who decide to shoot up a school or shopping mall or political event to achieve -- however fleetingly -- fame. Some part of the blame for this sickness must be laid at the feet of the media, whose blanket coverage of such events encourages the lunatics.
Another part of the blame may belong to an entertainment culture that glorifies and glamorizes gun violence. Every society has mentally ill people. But the way paranoid schizophrenics and other mentally impaired people choose to behave is influenced by culture.
Neither of those aspects of our society is likely to change. But a third feature -- our legal framework for handling those who resist treatment -- can and should change. Widespread deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, along with laws that require a showing of dangerousness before a person can be involuntarily subjected to treatment, make it exceedingly difficult to stop a crazed gunman before his murderous spree.
In the Tucson case, as in the Virginia Tech case, others noticed the gunmen's oddity in advance but were unable to force them to get treatment. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, assisted outpatient treatment laws, if enforced, can radically reduce the number of hospitalizations, incarcerations, and violent episodes among those required to participate.
A misplaced respect for personal autonomy -- the right to reject treatment -- arguably carries too high a price, particularly now when pharmacological treatment is so benign, and when the kinds of crimes committed by the untreated mentally ill are so heinous.
That's the discussion we should be having.
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