Here we go again.
It’s now a major secondary story in the Giffords shooting: who or what’s to blame for the carnage?
I think it’s simplistic to ask that question. Like figuring out the one, specific cause of a car crash – odds are a few things went wrong. Perhaps if the driver wasn’t speeding he wouldn’t have lost traction. If he had seen the car coming at the give-way sign he might have braked early and not swerved violently before losing traction. If a third car hadn’t been the next next lane there might not have been a clip that caused him to spin. If the tree hadn’t been right where it was, he probably would have driven away. So … what’s to blame for the crash?
Trying to boil it down to something that singular and simplistic is disingenuous. It means you can say that if heated rhetoric wasn’t 100% responsible, then it was irrelevant. That’s obviously not sustainable.
Obviously this guy is a nut. But it’s ALWAYS the nuts. A sane person wouldn’t have done something like this at all … but it also might never have occured to a nut without 24/7 anger and divisiveness on TV. We’ll have to wait to find out what gave him the idea.
Even if he comes out and says “I did entirely for glenn beck because he convinced me that liberals want to destroy america”, then the fact will still remain: he’s nuts. But on the other hand …
The anti-gun contingent sprang to action almost immediately,
Hardly surprising. They don’t like guns. Guns kill people, and it really annoys them that guns are so easily obtained for that purpose with nice big magazines to sustain fire rates.
as did the anti-Palin faction and a particular loud-mouthed Democratic sheriff,
Actually, I think you’re giving the loud-mouthed sheriff a bad rap. He has blamed heated rhetoric and bigotry – to the best of my knowledge he HASN’T blamed one side of politics or the other, let alone any individual’s rhetoric or bigotry. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. He’s also quite obviously not just talking about this one incident in isolation. The fact that everyone (especially the right) assumes he’s talking about the right (and palin in particular) … well, that’s just interesting.
in marked contrast to the pleas from the MSM and the left for verbal restraint in speculating about the motives of the Fort Hood killer.
Agreed.
Almost all the blaming in the Giffords shooting comes from the left against the right. And this despite the fact that Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat, could just as likely have been a political target of either side, since she stands roughly in the middle.
It’s possible.
It would be easier to judge the finger-pointers as impartial if they were equally incensed against rhetoric and images from the left as from the right.
It’s not just “rhetoric”. It’s a particular kind of rhetoric, and it’s coming in very large part from the mainstream. Bush copped a fair bit of stick, but he didn’t cop abuse on the floor of congress. Dan rather had to resign over bush’s service record – but glenn beck claims that the president is a racist and murdoch think’s he’s doing a great job. The left also doesn’t rely anywhere near as much on evocations of gun violence.
A few online retailers have just had to remove merchandise which show things like a cross-hairs over a bullet-riddled red-white-and-blue donkey and a tagline of “liberal huting license – no bag limits”. THAT is something the right pretty much has to itself. By comparison, the left comes up with “regime change begins at home” and giant papier mache heads. Moonbats accuse others of bloodshed. Wingnuts imply the threat of bloodshed. That’s just impression.
For example, when campaigner Obama advised supporters to bring a gun to the fight if the opposition brought a knife, wouldn’t he have been to blame, too, for upping the ante?
Is that what he did? Show me the transcript. Not just that one sentence, but what came before and after. I got the impression from what IS available that it was a joke about the temperament of crowd he was speaking to, not “advice” to go shoot somebody, or even carry a gun. But I have posted a couple of times alread that I think it was he-man garbage. It was inappropriate. But it was way down the scale from “second amendment remedy” and “take harry reid out”. At least acknowledge that.
But political points aside, what is the possible role of heated political rhetoric, be it on the left or the right, in motivating violent acts such as Loughner’s? It’s entirely unknown, but there’s no particular reason to believe such speech is especially influential.
So why do we worry about hate preachers on either side of politics? Why do we worry about muslim firebrands influencing the minds of the young, marginal and slightly messed-up? Why was nixon so worried about timothy leary? Why was mccarthy so worried about communists in the movie business? Why were lord haw-haw and tokyo rose prosecuted? The history of the civil rights movement suggests that words really CAN have an impact. Whether or not they did in this case, we’ll have to wait and see.
But in the meantime, why is the right working so hard to argue the case that there’s no reason to “take it down a notch”? Obviously a lot of people genuinely think so – over 200,000 of them turned up at a rally in washington to make that very point. It’s NOT just the right who copped it that day. So how about it? Why’s it such a problem for the right to just agree that things are getting ridiculous and tone it down a bit?
At the very least, it would be treating voters with some respect.
