Jeff O'Bryant
What other conclusion can one draw? Brooks wasn’t punished so one can only surmise it was indeed the existence of canes in combination with the exercise by Sumner of free speech against what the Senator perceived as a social evil that led to his beating. So ultimately Sumner himself is responsible for his own beating. Apparently, he should have just kept his mouth shut about the evils of slavery and its supporters, thereby not creating a climate of hate.
Now fast forward to over 150 years later. On Jan. 8, 2011 an unemployed, high school- and college-drop out named Jared Loughner murdered six people and wounded 14 others. The reason? Political vitriol. A climate of hate. Guns. Oh, and Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservatives in general.
What other conclusion can one draw? To honestly answer that question, let’s consider Brooks’ culpability again but, this time, without looking through the skewed lens of liberal hate. Brooks survived a vote to kick him out of Congress not because any member thought he somehow wasn’t responsible for his own actions. Such nonsense is a relatively modern phenomenon. He survived the vote because Congress was divided and played partisan politics. Enough members approved of his pro-slavery attitude to prevent his being voted out. Brooks was guilty and should have been punished because it was Brooks and Brooks alone who decided to attack Sumner, formed a plan, and then carried it out. Unless you try to apply what passes for liberal “logic” to the situation, there is simply no way one could believe it was the fault of Sumner himself, Brooks’ cane, or the existence of slavery.
What about Loughner? He decided to attack Gabrielle Giffords, made his plans, and then carried them out. In this situation also, despite many commentators’ apparent desire to cast blame on unrelated parties in hopes of either silencing or discrediting them, the shooter, and only the shooter, is responsible for the acts of Jan. 8. There was no evidence, and there is still no evidence Loughner ever listened to Rush Limbaugh, visited Sarah Palin’s website, was a member of the Tea Party or was even conservative. Again, there was no evidence when the news went wild with blame immediately after the shootings, and there is no evidence now. But who needs evidence when your comments can serve the political agenda to demonize your political enemies? With no evidence whatsoever, one could just as easily make just as ridiculous and libelous an argument that it was the left and their culture of death glorified in the abominable practice of abortion that in some twisted way made, in Loughner’s mind, his own actions justified.
But this is pure nonsense. All Americans have the right to question their leaders, to believe the nation would be better off if only who they voted for had won, and to passionately — though peaceably — debate the issues. Attempting to use this tragedy to muzzle opponents by disparaging their character or attempting to make them guilty by far-fetched association is a detestable practice and unworthy of a people grounded in America’s founding principles. Besides, the notion that the left, so rabidly supportive of abortion (an action where there is indeed an actual termination of life), should criticize anyone for merely using metaphors such as “targeting” your political opponents would be laughable were it not such a vile and calculated smear campaign.
The sole responsibility, unless Loughner had an actual accomplice or other direct help, lies upon the man who pulled the trigger and no one else. But you might not believe that if you listen to the claims of Tucson sheriff Clarence Dupnik, or of Keith Olbermann, or of Paul Krugman. You might think differently reading Jane Fonda’s tweet — the same Jane Fonda who called American POWs professional killers and liars — that flatly stated “Glenn Beck guilty.” You might think Loughner didn’t act alone if you believe the claim of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that Palin’s website, which targeted Giffords’ district, contributed to Loughner’s attack.
Olbermann even had the nerve to list a handful of conservatives politicians by name, the Tea Party in general, Glenn Beck and others and then went on to to downplay the same tactics he claimed the right employed when they were used by the left, saying “if those of us considered to be on the left do not rededicate ourselves to our vigilance to eliminate all our own suggestions of violence, however inadvertent they might have been, however mild they might have been, then we, too, deserve the repudiation of the more sober and peaceful of our politicians and our viewers and our networks.”
Inadvertent? Mild? As inadvertent as the “Abort Sarah Palin” bumper stickers, the “Kill Bush” T-shirts, and the environmentalist ad that depicted a little girl, with a noose around her neck, as a glacier holding her up melts at her feet due to man’s supposed impact on the environment? As mild as the protester’s sign that features Bush’s decapitated head dripping blood, as the “We support our troops when they shoot their officers” ANSWER protest sign, and the flyers found outside the Moran Dean Town Hall in Reston, Va. that depicted Tea Party activists (insultingly called tea-baggers on the flyer) as KKK members hanging President Obama from a noose-shaped tea-bag? If these are considered inadvertent and mild suggestions of violence then what, exactly, does the left consider deliberate and harsh?
But banning free speech or even guns and canes will not protect us. The reality is that there are people in the world like Loughner who are mentally disturbed. The reality is that sometimes people will die in senseless ways or suffer because of another’s actions. The reality is that short of being as prepared as we can be for reality to strike there is often little we can do. I do not suggest negligence. To say what’s going to happen is going to happen and to, for example, send all of the president’s Secret Service agents home would be grossly irresponsible. But, sometimes, terrible things happen. There is no rational way to explain them nor a certain way to defend against them in the future. All one can do is be there for the victims’ family and friends, to help pick up the pieces, and to rationally and responsibly review what happened to see if it is something that can be prevented, or at least made less likely to happen, in the future.
Lashing out to blame those who are not responsible out of a shameless desire to demonize one’s political opponents in the hope it will cower them into silence is inexcusable. At best, it is a detestably unproductive rant and, at worst, a ghoulish contribution to the vitriol these self-righteous commentators claim to be fighting against. In either case, it is base hypocrisy.
After all, did it not occur to all those partisans blaming Fox News, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, or Sarah Palin that certain disturbed individuals shocked or angered by the shootings just might be looking for someone to lash out at themselves? Did that idea really escape the consideration of these pontificating “journalists?” There are people out there watching Keith Olbermann who may not be mentally stable. If, may God forbid it, Sarah Palin is attacked in the coming weeks by a madman yelling “avenge Tucson!” what would the left say to that? Will anyone with one of those “Abort Sarah Palin” bumper stickers scrub it from their car? Or would the concept of mass guilt when it cannot be laid at the feet of the right (however feeble the reasoning to lay it there may be) suddenly go out of fashion?
Make no mistake, even in this case it would still be only the attacker guilty of the crime. And you can be sure that the left-wing media would get at least that much of this imagined story right. Because you can also be sure they would completely neglect to mention their own hate-spewing diatribes in the wake of the Tucson tragedy.
Jeff O’Bryant is the author of “Up into the Hills – A Brief History of Catoosa County” and holds two degrees: a bachelor’s in education and a bachelor’s with honors in history. He can be contacted at jeffobryant@catt.com.
"Reagan and Bush Sr., in their time, more than doubled the size of the budget, more than quadrupled the annual deficit (even with congress approving LESS spending, every year, in the '80s, than was being requested by Reagan), and they more-than-quintupled the total gross national debt."
Actually, they more-than-tripled the annual deficit and more-than-quadrupled the debt.
And to commonjoe, I hereby accept your surrender.
As with most who imbibe the right's narrative, you probably genuinely can't see the difference in the thing I've been condemning and my own comments about Bush. Opposition to Obama based upon his being a Kenyan socialist who wants to set up government panels to kill old people, manage a government takeover of industry, and destroy capitalism and the American way of life--a fantasy in every particular--is, as you see it, no different than opposition to Bush based upon the demonstrable fact that he lied the U.S. into a murderous, entirely unprovoked invasion of another country. That's the very reason I've been arguing that "civility" is not, in and of itself, the issue. A visceral revulsion is a rational--indeed, healthy--response of a responsible citizen to what Bush did in the real world. A visceral revulsion to Obama based upon the sorts of things I just outlined is like a hatred of the moon for being made of green cheese.
One can multiply the Obama fantasy by every Democratic politician or prominent liberal (and by the narrative, even center-right politicians like Obama are "liberals"). Michelle Obama is hated because her trip to India cost $2 billion and even $3 billion for the visit (except that the actual cost was a micro-fraction of that). Barney Frank is hated because he caused the economic meltdown (except for the fact that he played no part in it). ACORN had to be destroyed because it gave advice to a pimp and hooker on how to set up a brothel for underage girls (except for the fact that it didn't). John Kerry was hated because he'd lied about the war-time experiences that got him a chest full of medals (except that he hadn't) and had failed to release his military record (except that he had released it). Al Gore is hated because he claimed to have "invented the internet" (except that he didn't), and for peddling phony climate-change science (except that the science isn't phony).
And so on.
Even after I said you wouldn't deal with what I wrote, you, in fact, did so, so I'm going to decline your efforts at changing the subject by talking about the Obama administration. I have a blog. I've written about it at great length there.
Of course, the above is nonsense. But at least I know that.
I have no reason to actually try and discuss anything with you because I've seen your comments before. You go off on some tangent because of one little line that really has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Further, we're not really even on the same page.... or planet for that matter. And you're critical of Obama?
Okay, here is a test. Lets see if you can produce some long-winded Obama critique. List for me, say, five things you disagree with Obama on and let's go from there. If they are not things like "he's failed to shut the war down, failed to close Gitmo, failed to have already forced us all to buy healthcare, or failed to turn America into a communist state" then we can discuss it. Actually discuss it. So lets see you be truly critical of Obama.
Because someone disagrees with you on some political matters, you've concluded "America would be vastly better off without Liberals." To demonstrate the only kind of people who hold to that breed of belief, one need only change "America," in that sentence, to Germany in the 1930s; change it to the USSR in the same decade; change it to Chile in the '70s; change it to Iraq in the '80s; change it to North Korea today. The one thing to which you can't change it is a single civilized nation at any point in history. That's the point-of-view you've adopted.
"And yes- America would be vastly better off without Liberals. But you'll find no conservative, certainly not me, suggesting we should heard them into concentration camps and kill them."
Your complete lack of self-awareness in writing those two sentences back-to-back mirrors that of O'Bryant above, and is even more extreme. When you spend all day telling people "America would be vastly better off without liberals" (as does the American conservative elite you're parroting, there), it's obviously only a matter of time before someone picks up a gun or a bomb and acts on that, but as abjectly obvious--inescapable, even--as that is, you genuinely don't even recognize it. You can casually employ an endless barrage of eliminationist rhetoric, and I don't doubt, for a moment, that when someone acted on that very rhetoric and committed some atrocity because they took it seriously, you'd sleep like a baby at night. It bespeaks, as I said, a complete lack of self-awareness.
It's also demonstrably false that "you'll find no conservative... suggesting we should heard them [liberals] into concentration camps and kill them," even if one sets aside the fact that this is exactly the solution suggested by the rhetoric I was just addressing. Overt calls for such things (and murder fantasies sometimes pawned off as "jokes") are a matter of routine among the American conservative elite. Just a few examples from my notes:
Michael Reagan (on Howard Dean's opposition to the Iraq war):
"Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"
Michael Savage:
"I say round liberals up and hang em' high."
Rush Limbaugh:
"I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus--living fossils--so we will never forget what these people stood for."
Bob Grant (Limbaugh's mentor):
"I'd like to get every environmentalist, put 'em up against a wall, and shoot 'em."
(Grant has, on more than one occasion, suggested the same thing be done to liberals, to racial minorities, and once said a gay rights parade should be machine-gunned)
Bill O'Reilly:
"Undermining [the Bush administration], you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less."
Ann Coulter:
"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."
Glenn Beck:
I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out."
In his book "The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith, and Military," Michael Savage writes that liberals "are like termites. Case by case, these vermin are eating away at our nation's foundation."
Hold that thought.
Here's Jim David Adkisson, a big fan of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and, most especially, of Savage:
"Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather."
In 2008, Adkisson went into a "liberal" Unitarian church in Knoxville with a shotgun intent on dealing with some of those termites. He shot 9 people. Two of them died.
That brings a little perspective to only one part of the problem I was describing. The narrative offered by the American conservative elite holds the potential for an incredible amount of catastrophic violence.
More mundanely--though probably a lot more importantly--that narrative, the one you've been parroting since entering this thread, destroys democracy itself. It doesn't allow for honest disagreements, only a "good vs. evil" cartoon. It doesn't allow for an agreed-upon set of facts, because it pretends as if one can evaluate whether or not things are "facts" based entirely on questions of partisan utility. It precludes any possibility of rational discussion, and just runs in circles. Right-wing opinions are "facts," therefore everything that even appears to challenge them in any way is "liberal," and inherently untrue (even if it isn't) because liberals are monsters with ill intentions. All they do is lie. Everything they say is a lie. Right-wing opinions are "facts." Round and round.
Though you present them through the nonsensical lens of this narrative, you offer up some issues on which you disagree with, broadly, liberals, but because you've already made a grand show, here, of pre-dismissing anything a liberal like me has to say, it discourages me from even addressing them on their merits.
That's how this poisonous narrative into which you've bought destroys democracy. I'm going to address those issues anyway, but I know, beforehand, that your choice in dealing with them will be to either write off what I say or to fundamentally abandon your entire way of thinking as you've outlined it here. I have no faith you'll make the right call on it.
You offer a broad outline of broad liberal views with which you disagree. Liberals, you say, support "abortion, redistribution of wealth, bigger government, higher spending," etc.
Process all of this:
On abortion, Americans' views aren't firm, and have proven difficult to gauge, because different wording can produce wildly different poll results, much more so than on other issues. In general, the public is just about evenly divided on the subject, with a majority favoring abortion rights, a status quo that has existed for decades. The Republican party platform position--a blanket ban on abortions without exception--polls at only 6%-11%. From my notes, a CBS/New York Times poll in June 2009 asked "in general, do you think the Court's decision [in Roe v. Wade] was a good thing or a bad thing?" 62% said it was a good thing vs. 32% bad. An interesting finding from that same poll is that, while (unsurprisingly) 74% of Democrats said it was a good thing, 40% of Republicans also said it was a good thing vs. 51% bad.
On "redistribution of wealth," one must deal with some details before getting to the heart of the matter. It has been government policy to redistribute income upward since the mid-'70s, and particularly so starting in the '80s. But that isn't what you meant by "redistribution of income." That's the actual redistribution, the kind brought about by right-wing policies. What you mean is the same as the American conservative elite means, namely downward "redistribution." The problem you face is that this simply hasn't happened in the U.S. Wealth concentration, which was flat or declining since the Great Depression, began to rise again in, as I said, the mid-'70s, after various policy changes, and wealth in the U.S. is now more concentrated than at any time since the Gilded Age. Various methods of measuring wealth differ slightly, but they all agree on that. Going by the figures developed by Edward Wolff at New York University (who has worked on this longer than anyone), the top 20% of Americans, as of 2007, own an incredible 85.1% of the wealth in the U.S. When it comes to total financial wealth, the top 20% has an even more incredible 94% of it. It's nearly three times more concentrated now than in the 1970s. That trend, if it isn't arrested, is the end of the U.S. Even though the general public is unaware of the extent of this concentration, the efforts of liberals to arrest it are extremely popular. Fortunately, we just went through a debate on tax cuts during the lame-duck session of congress, and we have some fresh polling data. A Bloomberg poll in Dec. asked respondents if they'd favor or oppose ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. 59% said they favored it. A little later, a CNN/Opinion Research poll on the compromise bill that was passed and signed into law asked if people favored or opposed the extension of the income tax cuts for the wealthy: 62% of respondents opposed it, and the poll threw in an extra question about an estate tax reduction for the wealthy and found that 59% opposed that, as well.
Support for both "bigger government" and "higher spending" are, likewise, not views a conservative should so loudly impute to liberals, particularly not a conservative who raves on about how "the RESULT is what matters." The size of government has gone up under every president for decades, but it has been under Republican, not Democratic, administrations that it has exploded like crazy. Reagan and Bush Sr., in their time, more than doubled the size of the budget, more than quadrupled the annual deficit (even with congress approving LESS spending, every year, in the '80s, than was being requested by Reagan), and they more-than-quintupled the total gross national debt. To compare the most recent 8-year presidencies:
Clinton (Democrat) inerited
$1.4 trillion budget
$255.1 billion annual deficit.
Clinton turned over to Bush (Republican)
$1.8 trillion budget (an increase of just over 25%)
$128 billion annual surplus (a remarkable 150% reduction)
Bush turned over to Obama
$3.5 trillion budget (nearly doubled)
$1.4 trillion annual deficit (turned huge surplus into record deficit)
The gross national debt, under Clinton, rose from $4.41 trillion to $5.8 trillion (roughly 27%). Bush more than doubled that, to $11.9 trillion (the debt as a percentage of GDP actually dropped under Kennedy/Johnson, Carter, and Clinton; on the Republican side, it decreased only in Nixon's earliest years--from there, it increased under Nixon/Ford, and increased exponentially under Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr.)
And what does the public think of "bigger government" and "higher spending"? They're firmly against it. Until, that is, you get to specifics. They're very opposed to foreign aid, which they think takes up a huge portion of the budget (it's actually less than 1% of it) and say they're very opposed to pork projects (also less than 1%), unless you ask them about pork projects from which they benefit, at which point they do an about-face and support them strongly. Ask them if they'll accept cuts in programs that affect them or their families and they're totally opposed to it. They support cuts in the military, and they support raising taxes on the wealthy.
This is the American public. It's a liberal public. On most issues, overwhelmingly so, which gets me to my final point. You trash liberals for an alleged "lack of belief that America (despite her admitted faults) is still better than anywhere else on earth," but politically-speaking, America agrees with the liberals, and not with you. You've already asserted your view of liberals, the monsters who can do nothing but lie. Bashing liberals for failing to be sufficiently jingoistic puts you in the bizarre position of loving America, but hating the Americans.
This is what happens when you let the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest do your thinking for you.
And caricature? While one cannot make a blanket statement about everyone, the following statements are for the most part an accurate description of what most liberals support and or believe in: abortion, redistribution of wealth, bigger government, higher spending, a lack of belief that America (despite her admitted faults) is still better than anywhere else on earth, and that people should not be held accountable for many of their actions. You can call this a caricature just like I can call you brilliant but reality doesn't change. Abortion is evil; this is not an opinion. Theft is wrong; this is not an opinion. Bigger government means less freedom. This, too, is a fact. Greater spending, especially in poor economic times, is foolish. And America is the best place on earth to live. People not held accountable for their actions do not grow, learn, or become better human beings. They continue to take advantage.
You'll quickly argue that Liberalism does not hold any of the above beliefs. You'll attempt to be cleaver and twist each statement around- to try and show that INTENT rather than the RESULT is what matters. But it does not. Period.
And yes- America would be vastly better off without Liberals. But you'll find no conservative, certainly not me, suggesting we should heard them into concentration camps and kill them. That's ignorance on a scale surpassing even the most inane of other liberal lies.
Stopping liberals at the ballot box, since so many of them are utterly unteachable and cannot grasp even basic human concepts, is the only option.
So keep wasting your breath with your tissue of fantasy.
You do, however, help make pretty much all of my own earlier points. Most obviously, you openly admit you see liberals as "real monsters," the defenders of "the most bloodthirsty killers in society," and assert "you cannot believe anything a full-on liberal tells you. Nothing." Because their views are nothing but a build-up of "lie upon lie." It would probably be better if we didn't have those liberals around at all, eh, "commonjoe"?
You're fed this monstrous caricature of liberals every day by the machine I described, and you uncritically accept it and parrot the talking-points you're fed (like the Obama knife comment thing, the congressional Democrats on Iraq WMD thing, the "liberal media" thing, and just about everything else "you" write). Even though allegedly addressing me, you don't address me--you address a caricature of a liberal. I'm more genuinely critical of Obama than any conservative, but you present me as someone who wouldn't say anything to make Obama look bad. You rule out any grounds for an honest discussion or a legitimate disagreement with the usual familiar formula: I'm a liberal > liberals do nothing but lie > everything I say is a lie. We can't even have an agreed-upon set of facts, because they'd come from that fantasy "liberal media," and you apply that same formula to it. And so on. You're a product of the narrative spun by that machine. Multiply you by millions and we have the root of the problem I was describing earlier.
You impute to me a number of sinister motives (you wouldn't be a product of the machine addressing a liberal if you didn't). One of them is that you allege I want "to bring into question Conservative thought itself." If what you've offered is exemplary of conservative "thought," then I join with every sane American in pleading, most strenuously, guilty on that count.
Plus liberals are real monsters - they themselves cannot realize this fact because they think the fluffy crap they sling at everybody is best for everybody. Monsters don't think they are monsters because their ends justify their means. Control what people eat, defend the most bloodthirsty killers in society while fighting tooth and nail for abortion. All these are good things to a Liberal because controlling what people eat helps them be healthier. Allowing a bloodthirsty killer to live gives them a second chance which is good to the liberal. Slaughtering unborn children gives the mother freedom which is good to the liberal. They totally and completely ignore the front end disasters these cause by either ignoring them completely or, with a wishy-washy and meaningless statement, explain them away as not problems. I don't know about you, but the loss of my freedom is a problem The death of the bloodthirsty killers next potential victims is a problem. And the death of a child, unborn though he or she may be, is a problem. But liberals are ready with any reason, ,any excuse,, to explain these away as not problems. And if you think they are problems you're part of the evil, right-wing machine that just doesn't understand. Poor you....
Any argument,, any fact you bring before a liberal will be disputed with more of their outright lies. And all they will do is call you a liar. As to must be stopped at all costs? Wow, this one shooter who IS crazy shots those poor people in AZ and now classicliberal2 claims this giant machine generates a persistent state of outrage. And I thought it was out of control spending, high taxes, and stupid government that generates this outrage. But you cannot believe anything a full-on liberal tells you. Nothing. Their whole outlook builds, lie upon lie, fantasy upon fantasy, until they themselves believe it.
And the right has a "gargantuan" machine? I didn't know Fox was as big as CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times combined. Wow! That's quite a claim. I'm mature enough to admit that the right does try to get you to believe the way it does through numerous media outlets. And I know Fox is only one of those ways. But classicliberal 2 would seem to have you to believe that CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times are not, when combined, a 'gargantuan" machine of their own that spews the left-wing drivel classicliberal2 seems to wallow in himself. Another truth left completely out of classicliberal2's narrative; but putting that in would not make what classicliberal2 is saying sound as plausible, would it?
The column made sense- it blamed nobody but the shooter for the tragedy and called any idiot down who didn't realize the same truth. Classicliberal2's response, however, was nothing but a rant that goes off on numerous tangents that the direct issue at hand had nothing to do with. It was designed to not only perpetuate the lie that the column had already debunked but to bring into question Conservative thought itself. And while it tries to do that, it succeeds only so far as using a tissue of fantasy can go.
Bottom line- what has to stop is liberals lying all the time to try to make the average American believe their nonsense.
Rest assured- there will be a response on this from classicliberal2. If you can stomach it, take it apart piece by piece and it, too will fall apart just as the below does.
While I agree with some of your comments I also disagree with some as well. What liberals and conservatives have FAILED to understand is very simple, extreme right and extreme left is BAD for our country and OUT OF TOUCH with the people of the USA. But the extreme is what funds these career polititions and they are just puppets of the campaign contributors.
There are 7 things that need to be done to fix our country before the radicals on both side destroy this great nation. If even a few of these items were done our country would be in much better condition.
1. Balance the budget. That means defunding the pet projects and having fiscal responsability. Stop borrowing and devaluing the dollar.
2. Fix our ecconomy. This means punish the US companies that export jobs.
3. Health Care. Obama care is a joke in all ways. De-regulate the health system and make it competitive.
4. Term Limits. This one is so deep that it needs its own book.
5. Immigration. Illegal is illegal no matter what.
6. Reform Unemployment. A good system that is far too often abused.
7. Education. Stop cutting education. Stop lowering the bar to make everyone pass.
That said, it's mostly an extraordinarily well-fed myth that people have blamed the right for Loughner's actions. A few, like Krugman, jumped the gun, but your assertion that "the news went wild with blame" could most kindly be characterized as a ludicrous fiction. Krugman's assumption was, for the reasons I just outlined, entirely reasonable, and certainly wasn't the product of some sort of irrational hatred. The same can't be said of a lot of the most prominent right-wing sites on the web, including WorldNetDaily, NewsMax, and Newsbusters (the blog of the Media Research Center), which immediately rushed to assert Loughner was a LEFT-wing nut. There was no foundation for that charge at all. Except irrational hate.
As the smoke has cleared, it looks as though it's going to turn out that politics played no part in Loughner's actions at all. It looks as if he was just a mentally disturbed individual, and someone with that degree of damage can be set off by just about anything. It may be Glenn Beck or it may be a Bugs Bunny cartoon or it may be TAXI DRIVER, as was the case with Hinkley when he shot Reagan. It may just be the voices in his head. Just about anything could theoretically touch him off, and if it isn't a case of someone literally saying to him "go do this," it would be ridiculous--to say nothing of utterly pointless--to blame whatever did touch him off for some atrocity he may commit.
That, however, is no excuse not to have a serious, much-needed national conversation about the right's noxious fantasy narrative of what happens in the U.S., and how it encourages violence.
The American conservative elite offer a narrative. It isn't perfectly homogeneous, there are different gradations, internal contradictions, and so on, but, Big Picture, it's basically the same story. It's offered 24 hours/day, every day. It's directed at personalities, and it is aimed, in almost every particular, at demonizing, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing their enemies. And it's always "enemies," never people with whom they merely disagree--the narrative, in fact, doesn't allow any room for honest disagreement, just ill-intentions--and the enemies are presented as enemies of mankind itself. "Socialism," the frequent charge, is an invocation of Soviet-style totalitarianism, with all that entails, and has also been made a synonym, in the narrative, for "liberalism." The "liberals" are, of course, monsters. For some of the most overt examples of this, look at Glenn Beck's many on-air displays linking up run-of-the-mill liberal politicians, and even center-right ones like Obama (and anyone who isn't far-right is, by the narrative, "liberal") with Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, etc. Tell any reasonable person that the President of the United States is trying to set up death panels aimed at killing old people and they'd reject you as an utter crank. It would be reflexive, in the face of such a ludicrous charge. When, on the other hand, the conservatives were told this, huge numbers of them not only bought it; they believed it strongly enough that angry mobs of them descended on every health-care townhall members of congress were holding, screeching like crazed animals and preempting any rational discussion (a Pew poll at the time showed that an astonishing 47% of Republicans thought the legislation did, indeed, set up these panels, with another 20% choosing "unsure"). That's how they've been conditioned to see "liberals." Barack Obama is opposed not because he supports Policy A, B, or C, but because he is a Kenyan socialist who wants to set up those government panels to kill old people, manage a government takeover of industry, and destroy capitalism and the American way of life. And so on. You offer two examples of this kind of rhetoric yourself in ranting about an imaginary liberal "culture of death glorified in the abominable practice of abortion."
There is this massive right-wing machine that runs on generating a persistent state of outrage among a large segment of the public, and the real problem isn't the lack of civility. It's that this outrage on which it runs--which, again, aims to personally demonize, delegitimize, and dehumanize "enemies"--is based on fantasy. Fiction. A string of lies. Someone who is opposed to Obama because he's a Kenyan socialist isn't opposed to Obama at all--he's opposed to a fantasy of Obama that has been put into his head. The narrative has little connection to basic reality, intentionally aims to disconnect people from that reality, and discourages inquiry that may reconnect them; part of it is that things like legitimate news sources, academia, etc.--those who don't peddle the narrative--aren't to be trusted.
The elite of the right has, as I said, a gargantuan, omnipresent, multi-media machine to spread this narrative, a machine like nothing that has ever existed in human history, and for a huge portion of the population (a distinct minority, but still huge), that narrative is holy writ.
The thing is, if you honestly believe the things the right says about its enemies, it's not only a rational step to act on it; it becomes, at some point, tantamount to outright insanity if one FAILS to act on it. The American conservative elite recognizes this basic fact, as well--it's the very reason they offer up such a narrative. They hope people will become inflamed and show up at the polls. To point out the obvious, though, when you disconnect people from reality then inflame them to that degree, there's no way to control the means by which they act. To state the painfully obvious, if you spend 24-hours/day, every day, telling a credulous group of followers that their enemies are out to destroy them, it's only a matter of time before a lot of them are going to get it in their head that they'd better pick up a gun or a bomb and "save" the country. Most people who imbibe the right's narrative won't, it's true, resort to murder, because to kill someone is a huge step people will naturally resist. The right's rhetoric breaks down that resistance. And, I would add, it has absolutely no value as political discourse.
When it comes to this sort of violence, the real danger we face isn't primarily from mentally disturbed people. It's from people who are "sane"--as sane as one can be and still be what is, today, a "conservative--but who take seriously the right's narrative.
The commentary that has emerged in recent days has focused, almost entirely, on things like Sarah Palin's use of phrases like "don't retreat; reload," and on defeated senatorial candidate Sharron Angle's suggestion that "Second Amendment remedies" could be a response if the right person--read: her--didn't win an election, and on Republicans' use of a map that put crosshairs on the districts of congressmen they are "targeting." This is totally misguided criticism. The problem isn't with things like this (most of which are of little consequence, and are relatively innocuous). It's with the context in which things like this are offered. It isn't with scattered comments involving allusions to violence. It's with the right's overall narrative that encourages violence.
On the day of the memorial for the actual victims, Sarah the Martyr dragged herself out of her Alaskan bunker, mounted her cross to claim the mantle of victimhood for herself, and said rhetoric absolutely can not be the cause of anyone's actions, while, at the same time, asserting that the rhetoric being used against her could incite violence against her. This is the same curious approach that allowed her, during the 2008 campaign, to assert that she had free speech rights, but that those who criticized her were violating those rights. In your own column, you--without irony--bash liberals for "a shameless desire to demonize one's political opponents" in the same column in which you accuse them of embracing a "culture of death." It's a perfect example of the sort of cognitive dissonance that has allowed democratic discourse to degenerate to such a disturbing degree.
It also has to be said, most forcefully, that what I've outlined here is a problem of the right, not of the left. There is no liberal equivalent. This is a narrative the conservatives have created, and one they weave every day, and there isn't anything on the left like it, in either virulence, scope, or scale. Efforts to scrape together some sort of liberal examples to counter that assertion, such as yours above, always end up, like yours, focusing on some bumper sticker, some shirt, some guy somewhere who tore up a Bush/Cheney sign,[*] while, on the other side, something like the monstrous "death panels" lie was, for MONTHS, being repeated across right-wing talk radio, by all the big tv personalities, by the righty op-ed writers and conservative "journalists," and by the highest elected officials in the Republican party (the lead GOP negotiator on health care, Charles Grassley, was going around spouting it).
This has to stop. If this business in Arizona brings some attention to it, then that's something good that can come out of the atrocity. I don't think it WILL get any real attention, but there's a lot more at stake, here, than just the potential for violence. The right's behavior is viciously undermining public discourse, and that's the death of a democratic society.
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[*] Or they just include unkind things liberals have said about conservatives, without regard for the accuracy of defensibility of those things.