Month: January 2011

A reader writes:

I dislike Sarah Palin (almost) as much as you do, but her March Madness post chock full of violent metaphors was written not out of the blue but rather as a sarcastic  response to press/blogospheric criticism that she had gone too far with her “crosshairs” and “don’t retreat, reload” political rhetoric. It’s not just a random post proving that she can’t even talk about sports without discussing over-the-top violence. Rather, she purposefully, and sarcastically, filled the post with as much battle imagery as possible to show that the type of metaphors she had been using in her political rhetoric — and that she was being criticized for in the press and in the blogosphere — are in fact commonplace in sports lingo.

I agree with you that her rhetoric is dangerous and over-the-top, and perhaps even that one of the constants in her worldview is violence. I don’t think this post of hers proves it, though, at least not in the way you suggest. Battle imagery and violent metaphors in relation to sports are commonplace and, in my opinion, largely harmless. If Palin’s post had actually been about sports, then I don’t think it would be worth discussing. But the subtext of her post is that there is no difference between the use of battle imagery in sports talk and in political rhetoric. Plainly, there is. That Palin does not seem to recognize that is, I think, the more disturbing implication of her March Madness post.

Yep, that context matters, and changes things a little. But if anything – for the worse, as my reader explains. The truth is: that kind of language is out on a limb even in the most gung-ho sports-speak, let alone politics. No one, moreover, is going to pull out a gun while playing in a basketball game. American history is littered with examples of people pulling out a gun in politics.

(Photo: Jason Young.)

A possible influence on the bizarre theories of Jared Loughner?

The faster the angry comments appear the faster the Palinites take them down. It's an impressive operation – like watching historical whitewashing in real time.

Behold what a Senator cannot say on the record:

A senior Republican senator, speaking anonymously in order to freely discuss the tragedy, told POLITICO that the Giffords shooting should be taken as a “cautionary tale” by Republicans.

“There is a need for some reflection here – what is too far now?” said the senator. “What was too far when Oklahoma City happened is accepted now. There’s been a desensitizing. These town halls and cable TV and talk radio, everybody’s trying to outdo each other.”

Marvel at this phrase:

"Speaking anonymously in order to freely discuss the tragedy."

We elect them for this?

A former classmate is, sadly, unsurprised:

"We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast…"

"By perpetuating the lie – by even treating it as a legitimate topic of consideration to revisit the accusations of violence and hate the media tried to run with prior to the November election – that the right and the tea party incited this evil act, the left and media may very well incite violence against the right," – Erick Erickson, using the classic Rove technique of simply accusing the other side of the precise thing they accuse you of.

He knew very well what he was doing. The second individual sought has now been deemed irrelevant:

he was a taxi driver who dropped the suspect at the mall where the shooting took place and then entered the supermarket with him when he did not have sufficient change.

Palin can run but she cannot erase the Internet. Which leads to this tweet of the day which just landed in my in-tray:

necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear surveying equipment shall not be infringed.

A reader notes something significant in the assassin's reading list. What unites it is paranoia, a sense of others controlling you, of conspiracy theories and government plots, of illegitimate government and its agents of control:

Loughner had very incoherent, hard to classify beliefs. But they were clearly paranoid and conspiratorial. 

The conspiratorial or paranoid style is very much alive in our political discourse. Naturally, it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. I live in Berkeley where a fraction of people sincerely think 9-11 was an "inside job" pulled off by the "Bush Regime". There's also the ChemTrail crowd that thought the Republican government used planes to dump toxins on liberal areas to make us sick, disrupt pregnancies, and sap our will to resist. Etc., etc., So yeah, that paranoid style is alive on the fringes of the American left.

But with the Right, it's a bit different. The paranoid and conspiratorial style is much more mainstream, especially with Beck and Fox. On Fox, there are shadowy links between Soros, the Tides Foundation, and other liberal causes that aim to bring America down. Obama is at once fascist and a socialist. Don't forget Palin's dark insinuations about Obama's ties with terrorists and HCR's agenda to impose of Death Panels. Of course, you have questions about Obama birth certificate sadly mainstream when Republican representatives and candidates claim it's still an issue.

My own view is that this is a moment for sane conservatives to control their jerking knee and reflect a little on what they have enabled. If politics is warfare, people will die.

"Refudiation free zone here. 20 people are mowed down in a grocery store and Palin thinks she's the victim? Typical. You don't get to spend 3 years blowing a dog whistle and yelling fire in a theater then get to wash your hands of it when it goes bad," – from a commenter on Politico.