Words have consequences. That’s an ongoing lesson I reiterate to my 11-year old daughter on an almost daily basis. Someone should try to get that message across to those who think it’s ok to use gun imagery or violent rhetoric in their political discourse.
I took some heat from the right this weekend after tweeting “Sarah Palin has blood on her hands today.” They accused me of “politicizing” a tragedy.
Call it what you will… all I was doing was pointing out that words have consequences. If you publish a map with gun sites as targets over Congressional districts with instructions to “Reload, not retreat” you shouldn’t be surprised when one of the Congressmen targeted in that map winds up with a bullet through her brain.
I’m not saying that Jared Loughner was following Sarah Palin’s instructions when he shot Congresswoman Giffords, or that he was listening to Michelle Bachmann’s instructions to show up “armed and dangerous,” or Sharron Angles’ “2nd amendment remedies,” or Allen West’s directives to “make them scared to come out of their homes,” or Joyce Kaufman’s pronouncement proclaiming that “if ballots don’t work, bullets will” — but those, and other vitriolic statements inciting violence certainly did nothing to help quell the rising rage against people of a different political persuasion.
My friend Howie Klein who blogs at Down With Tyranny this morning asks “Is It Fair to Blame Palin, Beck and Other Violent Rightists for Inciting Murder?” and reminds us of these quotes:
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)
These people decided to cast their votes on the Lord’s day. He is taking notes and paying attention. We foot our heels on him as our fore fathers did. We will wait and see his deliverance. But you and I, we will solemnly resolve here to do everything in our power to restore freedom and to send that cart of socialists down to where they belong in the river down there. We will see freedom once more restored, and Washington, DC taken apart so that it no longer is a threat on American freedom and liberty.
Sharron Angle, Nevada Republican/Tea Party candidate
You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.
I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. this isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. Where do we go…
I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people– we the people– are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.
John Boehner (R-OH)
Boehner says there will be major political consequences for pro-life Democrats who break from the Stupak bloc. “Take
[Rep.] Steve Driehaus, for example,” he says. “He may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.”Catherine Crabill, failed GOP candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates
We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box. But that’s the beauty of our Second Amendment right.
Brad Goehring, candidate (R-CA)
If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to “thin” the herd.
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS)
We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.
Rep. Wally Herger (R-CA)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I wanna say that I’m a proud right-wing terrorist. …
HERGER: Amen. God bless you. There’s a great American.
Mike Huckabee (R-AR)
Every member of Congress knows in his gut what’s in the people’s interest and what’s in K Street’s interest. If you think your real boss is some smug guy sitting in a corner office with his Gucci loafers up on a mahogany desk and not those folks back home, those folks who voted for you, who gave you 25 or 50 hard-earned bucks, who put up the yard signs and made calls for you, then you deserve to lose. Shame on you, Mr. Congressman. You shouldn’t just be fired, you ought to be tarred and feathered as the original tea partiers would have done. That’s my view and I welcome yours.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA)
If I could start a country with a bunch of people it would be the folks standing out here the last few days. Let’s hope we don’t have to do that. Let’s beat that other side to a pulp. Let’s take them out, let’s chase them down. There’s going to be a reckoning!
Rep. Allen West, (R-FL)
Talking about his opponent, Congressman Ron Klein, “Let me tell you what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That’s the only way that you’re going to win. That’s the only way you’re going to get these people’s attention.”
Despite what Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been saying– “I think that when the rhetoric about hatrid, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates and to try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, has impact on people especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with” (already under attack from far right extremist Jon Kyl and even more deranged reactionary closet queen Trent Franks)– and even despite what Fox News is reporting, delusional right-wingers– let along the culprits at Fox— refuse to take any responsibility for the mayhem and insist that the anti-Semitic Tea Party terrorist was either “just crazy” or a leftist.
The madness must stop. The calls to violence must end.
And accuse me of politicizing a tragedy if you want, but I’ve heard nothing along the lines of what I’ve posted here from elected officials or pundits on the left. If you think I’m wrong, prove it.
This morning, I was joined by Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars for our weekly Fools on the Hill segment:
Obviously, the sad events in Tucson overtook any and all other political discussion.
But before we go into the clips, I think it’s important to understand where I am—and Crooks & Liars – coming from.
The alleged gunman Jared Loughner, by all accounts, has mental issues. At risk of pulling a Frist, I’d hazard a guess from all we’ve learned in the last couple of days, that Loughner looks to be a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia emerging in his late teens/early 20s.
The rush by news media to put Loughner somewhere on the partisan spectrum is somewhat understandable, given that it was an obviously politically-motivated act. But I don’t think that Jared Loughner’s mental acuity was in any shape to form a coherent political ideology. And honestly, I don’t care what his voter registration card said. He shot a Democratic congressman, killed a Republican federal judge, a Democratic congressional aide, a pastor, two senior women and a child. There’s not partisan aspect to that. Based on his YouTube videos, Loughner was making some fairly fringe-y connections in his mind between the government and control of currency, grammar, literacy and constitutionality. Classmates of his at the community college have been quoted as saying that they feared for their safety based on his outbursts. Bottom line, this was just not a stable person and there’s no telling what actually set him off to act as he did.
That said, the fact that ten months ago Sarah Palin published a map with crosshairs over Gabrielle Giffords’ district is hard to dismiss as unimportant. But to be absolutely clear, I do not believe that Sarah Palin is to blame for Loughner. We have no evidence that Loughner was even aware of Palin’s crosshairs map. And truthfully, Palin is neither the only nor the worst perpetrator of violent rhetoric, so I don’t want to make the mistake of pinning this on Palin. That makes it too easy to dismiss this as trying to shut her down.
What I think must stop is not angry rhetoric or heated rhetoric. What must stop is the eliminationist rhetoric. Disagree, argue, yell, I don’t care. Insult someone’s intelligence and question their parentage. Disagreeing Is not the problem. The problem lies with this mentality where you are allowed to wish for or open advocate the death of someone who does not share your point of view. And unfortunately, that attitude is almost entirely the purview of the right.
The media, of course, are going to miss the nuance of this stance. They are far too invested in the false equivalencies of “both sides” doing it to be honest about the difference between Olbermann saying melodramatically “Have you no decency, sir?” and Beck’s “I want to poison Nancy Pelosi”. As long as they can point to a Code Pink protestor with a “War Criminal” sign, then it’s okay for a “We Came Unarmed…This Time” sign at a tea party protest.
But this is unimportant to George Will on ABC This Week. He’s eager to paint this solely as the work of an unhinged lone wolf, something George Stephanopoulos quickly agrees to. (ABC vid. Start at 1:00—go to 3:03 or so). Dick Armey, the godfather of the tea party movement, says it’s up to the politicians to police themselves but Americans have their agendas to pursue. Considering that many of these tea party protestors and candidates have regularly infused their agenda with violent, eliminationist talk, I’m not sure where the civility of which Armey speaks is.
Speaking of violent, eliminationist talk, Rep. Trent Franks was on State of the Union. He’s a curious choice to talk about Giffords’ shooting. Not because he’s a Republican. But because in an environment where we worry about inciting rhetoric, Franks called Obama an “enemy of humanity”
Obama’s first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers’ money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries…there’s almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. We shouldn’t be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can’t do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity
With that kind of hyperbole, you’d think he wouldn’t find Sheriff Dupnik’s comment that Arizona has become a Mecca for bigotry and prejudice so extreme, but he does, and rejects entirely Dupnik’s statement.
And Rand Paul was on Fox News Sunday. Showing himself to be of completely original thought, Paul goes for the cliché “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” …because you know, somehow restricting even slightly the ability to buy a gun wouldn’t have made any difference in this case at all. Just because someone got kicked out of college until he got a psych eval, should we not allow him to purchase a semi-automatic weapon with an extended magazine clip?
And finally, there’s Patricia Maisch. Maisch is the person who tackled gunman Jared Loughner and grabbed the magazine as he was trying to reload the gun. She said something that you will probably never hear on Fox News again:
I think…that Sheriff Dupnik said it best, that the extreme right, reporters, radio and tv have added to this problem and I’m just hoping that that will change because of this. That’s my hope is that the Republicans will stop naming bills in very hateful things like the “job-killing” whatever the rest of that bill is. I think they’ve just gone over the top. I think the extreme right has gone too far.
