There’s a lot still to be learned about Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged perpetrator of a shooting spree in Arizona yesterday that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically injured, and six people, including a nine-year old girl and Judge John Roll, dead.
Almost immediately the event, both the left and right began placing the blame on the other side. While liberals are pointing to the tone of right-wing discourse, singling out Sarah Palin‘s chart which placed rifle sights on Democratic districts to be targeted in last November’s midterms, conservatives are [[DIFFERENT WORD CHOICE TO AVOID THE DUPLICATION OF ‘POLITICIZING?’ depoliticizing]] the shooting, pointing to signs of Laughner’s possible mental illness and condemning liberals for “politicizing” the incident. I hope we all recognize, as Richard Kim put it so eloquently yesterday, that whatever the details, this was an assault on democracy. A democratic system cannot thrive when public political gatherings become unsafe.
Still, the shooting of a politician and a federal judge is an inherently political event, if not necessarily a partisan one. [[AWK TRANSITION: There were even some early suggestions from conservatives that a Mexican drug cartel might be responsible. Had that been the case, conservatives would be pointing to the incident as proof of the necessity of treating every undocumented immigrant as a potential mass murderer. If the shooter’s named had been Mohammed, no amount of evidence of mental illness would have persuaded conservatives that insanity, rather than Islam, was the cause. The conservative call for individual rather than collective responsibility here is situational.
Prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Rush Limbaugh warned that a “Second American Revolution” was imminent. He reiterated that sentiment last year–and this time around he had help from Glenn Beck, whose apocalyptic warnings of violence only contain [[ AWK reluctance to act as insurance should something actually happen.]] For the past two years, many of the most prominent Republicans have portrayed the president as not merely wrong, but evil–someone actively committed to destroying the country. There are qualitative differences between the way the right viewed Bill Clinton and the way it looks at Barack Obama, but the basic approach is the same: Liberals aren’t merely wrong, they’re a threat to the country that needs to be destroyed.
Conservatives insist that there’s no connection between this shooting and the political rhetoric of the past two years. That may be true. Even if it turns out that Laughner subscribed to right-wing views, he and [[CK: HASN’T THE OTHER MAN BEEN REMOVED? any potential accomplices]] are alone responsible for their crimes.
But the right’s defensiveness–Palin scrubbing her website of possibly incriminating images [[INSERT SECOND EXAMPLE?]]–suggests that it knows that the tone and tenor of right-wing criticism has crossed the line. That defensiveness shouldn’t be mistaken for contrition. Republican politicians and leaders were perfectly willing to fan the flames of their base’s rage when they believed it would get them to the polls, [[AWK FOLLOWING FAN THE FLAMES: or at least stay silent as Limbaugh, Beck and others casually invoked the specter of violent revolution.]] It’s only now that the very same rhetoric might have a political cost that a change in tone may occur. It’s way past time.
