I post the letter in it's entirety below; I admit i'm not so familiar with diary rules to know if this counts as "substantive" and will take it down if requested.
With all due fear of being accused of sending "strongly worded letters", I think it would be great if others wrote similar letters. The false equivalence between violent rhetoric, and pointing out the violence that such rhetoric causes, must be destroyed. If not, this weekends events will only be the beginning.
Hello,
I write in order to request a correction to Matt Bai's recent article, "A Turning Point in the Discourse, But Which Direction?"
In this article, he states,
"Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week."
I do not believe that Mr. Bai properly researched his claim with respect to Daily Kos. Had he, he would have seen the following article:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Which states clearly the situation under which an individual diarist decided to remove a recent post due to viewing it as no longer appropriate after the assassination attempt against Rep. Giffords. This as opposed to the "cross hairs map", which was removed by a public personality of great notoriety, or by people working for said former half-term governor.
In addition, while both the map and the post were inappropriate, it is not appropriate to equate them. One was a political piece, written by a private individual, opposing a political action by a politician. The choice of language, "Dead to Me" was clearly not appropriate in hindsight. However, this action was seen by at most a few thousand people and probably many fewer. No reasonable person could interpret it as a call for violence against the Congresswoman.
The cross hairs map, as well as other statements by Ms. Palin, are another matter. The former governor clearly intended, in all of these cases, to use violent rhetoric in order to inflame the passions of her supporters. Millions of people saw this chart; it is a reasonably forseeable consequence that one of these millions would take the violent rhetoric as a call to violence. Unlike the little-seen DailyKos posting, the potential of Ms. Palin's violent rhetoric to turn into actual violence was noted by many before yesterday's attack, including by this paper and the Congresswoman herself. The fact that the shooter very likely to have been mentally disturbed does not change the facts; there are many mentally disturbed people who are supporters of Ms. Palin.
Freedom of speech is not absolute. One limit that has been consistently held by the Supreme Court is that speech is not protected if it is intended to inflame violence. By any reasonable standard, Ms. Palin's speech has crossed this line.
I appreciate your consideration of this matter, and look forward to a correction, or reason why one is not necessary.
Regards,
XXX