Tuscon: Violent Speech, Violent Weapons, And Violent Evasion
The right's response to Jerad Loghner's mass murder in Tuscon falls into one or more of a few categories:
1. Violent rhetoric had nothing to do with it. Loughner was a certifiable lunatic.
2. We never used violent metaphors. Those weren't targets. They were surveyor's marks.
3. Politics is a violent sport. Politicians have always talked about "killing" their opponents.
4. The left is just as bad, if not worse. What about those "Bush Is A Murderer" placards?
5. Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
6. Loughner wasn't a right-winger. If anything, he was an Obama worshipping lefty.
Look, we'll probably never know exactly what the assassin's true motivation was, and from all the available evidence, it would appear that Loughner had a very flexible relationship with reality. At least we've got a better shot (another poor choice of words?) with him than with Lee Harvey Oswald. We can at least ask the questions and take the answers for whatever they may be worth.
Meanwhile, there's little question that his heinous crime was first an assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords, and second, a mass murder attempting to make some kind of statement, even if the statement was insane. It was a political crime, even if the criminal was a lunatic. That makes an analysis of the political milieu in which the crime occurred fair game. There's even less question that the milieu was toxic, and perhaps more toxic in Arizona, with it's "show me your papers" law, it's tent city jails, its marauding Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, its arrogant Governor Jan Brewer, and its militaristic attitude on illegal immigration than anyplace else in America.
The right's response to all this is disingenuous in the extreme. There is a qualitative and quantitative difference in the violent rhetoric of the right versus the left's admitted excesses of protest against George W. Bush in particular. The right's hateful and violent metaphors have mainly emanated from commentators with a national audience, charming souls like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. The left's sentiments were mainly voiced by individual citizens carrying signs and banners. The right has Sarah Palin, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nod in 2012, saying things like "Don't retreat. Reload" and putting targeting reticles on the districts of Democratic candidates including that of Gabrielle Giffords. They've got Sharron Angle talking about "second amendment remedies" and even a staffer in a Florida district campaigning with the words, "if ballots don't work, then bullets will". You've even had the governor of Texas talking about seceding from the Union. The last time that sort of rhetoric took hold, the result was the most violent war in our history.
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