We've all read it. Congresswoman Giffords shot while meeting with constituents. It is not the first attack on democracy and we all fear it won't be the last. The GOP – supported by large parts of the press – is claiming two things. They say there's no correspondence between violent political language on the right and actual political violence. Therefore they have no responsibility. They also say that if there is a responsibility, Democrats are equally to blame. Many even attack Democrats for simply criticizing violent political language. But when you go through what has actually happened, it's clear these that none of these claims are correct. It is just a dangerous blame game from the GOP, a game to avoid their own responsibility. And the press has to stop playing along. Fair and balanced used to be a journalistic goal. Now its a Fox News slogan. Fair and balanced isn't to automatically give both sides equal responsibility. Fair and balanced is to find the truth, whatever it is.
On Saturday evening, the news broke that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been gunned down. I am in Stockholm, and I turn on the TV here. Both the BBC and Swedish TV talk about the violent language of the American right wing. They discuss the rage of the Tea Party, they mention how Congresswomen Giffords was threatened after her vote for Health Care. Then I turn to CNN International to hear the commentator musing about whether the gunman was a disgruntled leftist or a right-winger.
In the days since, I've poured over US news sources. Howard Fineman of Huffington Post wrote Sunday that:
"The deaths there are not about politics, ideology or party. From what we know, Jared Loughman's acts were those of a madman divorced from reality, let alone from public debate." He urged President Obama to speak about ”civility”.
Ross Douthat in a muddled New York Times column seemed to blame only crazies, or both Democrats and Republicans or in the end, no one at all.
”There is no faction in American politics that actually wants its opponents dead”
He boldly claims. So I jump to Drudge. What's his right wing take?
”The Devil Made Him Do It”
Drudge cites a New York Daily News article about a ”sinister shrine” apparently erected by the shooter.
Finally, some relief from idiocy came from the plain-spoken Pima County Sheriff:
"We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
He actually sounded European, and I thought the first rain of Fineman's hoped for civility might be falling on the Sonoran Desert. But not. Senator John Kyl (R) quickly attacked the Sheriff for speculation. A right wing talk radio host called for his resignation.
Then a Politico headline brightened my mood again. A Republican Senator was actually calling for thoughtful introspection, Politico claimed. This brave man apparently said that Republicans should take the shooting of Giffords ”as a cautionary tale”. Who was this man, willing to take on the crazies of his own side? ”Anonymous”. Typical.
Fortunately, Dr. David Brooks of the New York Times had his diagnosis ready three days after the killings: violent schizophrenia with anosognosia. Loughner lived in a world removed from ordinary politics, and the violent political language of the Tea Party and others had no influence on him. Now in fairness to Brooks, he makes some very sensible comments about our need to both address mental illness, and to do something to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. And if that were the point of his column, I would applaud him. But it isn't. The point is to attack anyone who criticizes violent political rhetoric.
”They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness,”
This is what Brooks says about those who want the extreme right to stop talking about killing politicians.
At least Sarah Palin issued a respectful Facebook statement deploring the shooting. She must have belatedly recognized the bad taste of the rifle cross-hairs she had placed over Gabrielle Giffords district some months before. Palin's campaign poster chillingly added,
”We've diagnosed the problem . . . Help us prescribe the solution”
There are different versions of this poster, by the way. The one I quote here is the worst.
So despite her earlier frenzied rhetoric, is Sarah Palin the Republican Party's only hope for a responsible leader? How depressing it that? I don't think cowards should count, so ”Anonymous Republican Senator” is out of the running. Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty certainly didn't rise to the occasion. Instead he went for the Richard Nixon, ”I'm not a crook”, defense.
“There’s no indication at present that those cross hairs, Fox News, any particular commentator or show or set of remarks or person was a motivating factor in his thoughts,”
said Mr. Pawlenty about the shooter. (Translation: We're not killers).
Come on! How hard is it to condemn violent political language? How hard is it to say you shouldn't play around with language about killing a political opponent? Or even hint at it (2nd Amendment solutions etc). That it's just not okay to speak violently. Didn't these people learn anything at all in kindergarten about getting along with the other kids?
The American dilemma seems to be that Republicans and right-wingers defend violent language, even when violence strikes. Then establishment journalists either claim – without evidence – that both sides are to blame. Or they urge the Democrats to remain calm and civil, a la Huffington Post's Howard Fineman. But say nothing at all to the Republicans about what they should do.
In my book, if you defend something, you own it. If you put rifle sights over Gabrielle Giffords – with the words: ”We've diagnosed the problem . . . Help us prescribe the solution”, then you own any violence that happens next. Defend that action, and you own the violence too. In a rational political world, this would be a no-brainer. But it isn't only Jared Loughner that is mentally ill. It's the whole of America's right-wing for believing that violent political language is ok in a democracy. It isn't. And we know they believe that, because they defend it. But rifle cross-hairs drawn on Gabrielle Giffords is not fun and games. Those who defend it have a problem and need help. Go see Dr. Brooks for a diagnosis.
What makes this debate truly absurd, truly an Alice in Wonderland moment, is that we had exactly the same debate less than 12 months ago. Before Sarah Palin turned her political enemies into rifle targets. America isn't just lurching into mass schizophrenia (violent speech = democracy), we've also lost our collective memory.
Am I the only one who remembers Joe Stack and his Kamikaze attack on the IRS last year? I actually was in Austin that February 18th, when Stack flew his Piper Cherokee into a Federal Building occupied by the IRS. He loaded a gasoline bomb into it to increase the lethality. It was an act of political terrorism, by a mentally unstable person who was also part of the extreme right, anti-government tax protester movement. One IRS worker was killed, a wonderful family man we later found out in the obituaries. Helped troubled youth. Mourned by a large extended family and masses of friends.
The Austin paper and local TV news did a wonderful job of covering the tragedy – and of explaining it. But few in the national media even attempted responsible reporting. Then, as now, the debate was about violent language in our politics and its influence on Joe Stack. Republicans were quick to defend the violent language, and most of the national media was in denial about what happened, refusing to even label it a terrorist act. The press, for the most part, gave the Republican Party a pass on their violent speech. Steve King, Republican Congressman from Iowa even defended the violence itself as potentially leading to a greater good.
“It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.”
Read Frank Rich in the New York Times for a recap of those events– and a refreshing whiff of sanity while you're at it. (Can Frank Rich and David Brooks really work in the same building?)
I drove by that Austin IRS building the day after the terrorism. I saw the gaping black wound in the still smoking shell of the building. It was only a stroke of luck that hundreds didn't die, rather than one. As it happened, the County fire departments were training across the street when Stack's plane exploded in the building. The firemen rushed across the highway, and began evacuating employees and they put out the fire. Their response time was under five minutes, they were on the scene before the 911 operators called for help. But the national media missed the story.
They also failed to call Stack a terrorist. But he was. And if the pundits had read his manifesto, they would have understood that is the way he wanted to be seen.
Jared Loughner also wanted to be seen as a terrorist. It's buried in this part of his you tube rant:
”. . . You call me a terrorist. Thus the argument to call me a terrorist is ad hominem.”
I've read through the Loughner you tube videos published on Huffington Post. Strange, yes. Mentally disturbed man? Yes. Political? Very. Derived from extreme-right thinking? Very.
I'm a filmmaker and I've studied the paranoid violent right as part of my work. I've read lots of their filthy drivel – from KKK writings, to Aryan Nations, to White Citizens Council (this is Haley Barbour's crowd). I have read more of this crap than any sane person should read. I come from Mississippi. Unlike Governor Barbour, I've spent my lifetime trying to understand the violent extremism that surrounded my youth. We both grew up during the Civil Rights Movement; I just have a different take on things.
So I'm an informed reader when it comes to deranged right-wing rants. And when I read Loughner's words, a lot of things popped out. He believes in the gold standard. Okay, that's basic Glenn Beck, John Birch Society, libertarian philosophy. You can read a paper on the Cato Institute website about how returning to a gold standard will limit government power and fight inflation. Loughner takes it further, linking the gold standard to national debt.
"No I won't pay debt that not's backed by gold and silver, "
he writes. That's something that is also supported by many in the Tea Party. The Georgia Tea Party, for instance, is behind a State Proposal to require that all debts be repaid in gold or silver. It's called the Constitutional Tender Act.
Loughner also rants about the difference between the United State's [sic] of America's Constitution and something he calls the Second United States Constitution. He means the one with all the amendments.
”I can't trust the current government because of their ratifications . . ."
he says.
It's common among the radical right to believe that all amendments after the 12th were illegal. Especially the 13th: abolishing slavery. The 14th: birthright citizenship. The 15th: Civil Rights. And the 16th: establishing an income tax and the IRS. The rationale behind this is that former Confederate States were forced to ratify the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in order to return to the Union. Many former Confederate soldiers also could not vote at this time. (They did try for a violent overthrow of the government when all was said and done). So this line of thinking claims that these amendments are illegal, and only the original Constitution is valid. That was the philosophy that drove Joe Stack in Austin. And a variation of this seems to motivate Loughner.
I'm not saying that Jared Loughner has read any of the same things I have, or that he is even aware of it. It isn't relevant: these ideas have penetrated the national conscience to such an extent that they can be found everywhere. The John Birch society used to be considered an extremist organization. They attacked Eisenhower as a Communist agent and William F. Buckley Jr. threw them out of the Conservative movement after that. But times have changed. Now the son of William F. Buckley is too liberal to work at the National Review. And the John Birch society in 2009 boasted that their agenda was amazingly similar to "Ron Paul's campaign platform in 2008”. And indeed it is.
And there is another idea loose in the extreme-right zeitgeist, an very dangerous one. It's the lone wolf. This comes from Louis Beam, who was once allied with the the Aryan Nations. He's now dead, but he's one of the most important theoreticians of the violent extreme-right. He called it ”leaderless resistance”. He saw that the Government would crack down on any violent organization and round up all the members. So he advocated abandoning organized resistance altogether. He basically said you know what needs to be done to take down the government, just do it.
Here are his words:
”It is sure that, for the most part, this struggle is rapidly becoming a matter of individual action, each of its participants making a private decision in the quietness of his heart to resist: to resist by any means necessary.”
Few today know anything about Louis Beam, including those of the political right-wing. Certainly no one in the press has heard of him. But his idea of the lone wolf is loose in America. And the Homeland Security department wanted to warn us about it last year. But Republicans claimed they were blaming the right wing for violence and silenced the debate. And the report.
But Joe Stack was a lone wolf in 2010. Richard Poplawski was a lone wolf when he murdered three Philadelphia policemen in April 2009. (He was a right-wing talk radio fan). James W. von Brunn was a lone wolf when he killed a guard at the Washington Holocaust Museum in June 2009. He was a Klansman. All of these men were mentally unstable. And all were extreme right-wingers.
We don't yet know much about Jared lee Loughner. The right-wing is making a lot of his recommended reading list, which included The Communist Manifesto and Alice in Wonderland. They've already slapped the crazy insane label on him. Some are even calling him a crazy liberal. But his reading list also included Mein Kampf. And that gold standard and original Constitution nonsense came from somewhere on the right-wing.
I say to Republicans everywhere. If you don't condemn violent political language when it occurs within your ranks, then you make yourself responsible for the actual violence that follows, whether or not a causal link can be established.
And I say this to the press: For a long time the argument has been, ”Oh both sides are the same”. That makes the press sound neutral and balanced. (Fair and balanced if you are Fox News).
But its not true. For the last thirty years, the political violence has come from the right. And this false balance hasn't worked, it hasn't made our society more sane. Instead the violent rhetoric from the Tea Party and others on the far right has gotten worse and worse. And the actual violence is increasing too. Only by looking coldly and calmly at facts, and assigning blame where blame is due, is there a chance to deal with the problem and curtail further political violence.