I'm guessing that this diary won't exactly make me Mr. Popular, but c'est la vie.
A few months ago, in the wake of the oil spill and the Gaza flotilla, I made a decision. No longer would I use news websites and blogs as my main source for news. Instead, I subscribed to The Economist and Time, both published once a week with policies requiring the printing of corrections when they make assertions that later are proven factually inaccurate. My logic was simple: Too often, using sources from the world of the 24/7 "breaking news" cycle led me to accept as true stories that later proved to be incomplete or downright false. In most cases, news is not so urgent that I absolutely MUST read about it right away. I can wait a few days to read about it in a source that has no incentive to rush stories to press.
I broke that rule this past weekend for the horrific tragedy in Tucson. My dad was born in Tucson. I’ve always been a big fan of Giffords. More than that, I've worked for two different federal judges, so the death of Chief Judge Roll hit especially close to home. I needed to know who was responsible for this crime and why he did it.
The "who" became clear pretty quickly. The culprit was Jared Lee Loughner, just 22 years old. But even before the "who" became clear, I had a pretty good idea of "why." The vitriol from the Tea Party right has been building since before the 2008 election, months before the "Tea Party" started getting organized. Everyone knows now about Sarah Palin's crosshairs-ridden "Take a Stand" map. Of the 20 members of Congress on that list, 18 were defeated by election day. Only Giffords and Nick Rahall remained. After Giffords was shot, I found myself praying that Rahall had been given extra security. I just knew that a right-wing extremist was responsible.
Reading the New York Times editorial and Krugman's op-ed started to cement my thinking. I wasn't the only one who saw the dangers that the right-wing hate machine had created. Like Krugman, I had been somberly expecting something like this to happen.
But after reading Krugman's piece, I noticed one specific omission - he never mentions the shooter by name nor does he tie the shooter to the Tea Party, GOP, or politics generally. That's probably because no one has any real sense of what Loughner's motivations were. As Krugman acknowledges, the shooter clearly was mentally unbalanced:
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.
On my second reading, that quote jumped out at me. I found myself thinking "well, why not? Why shouldn't we let the police, FBI, and other professional investigators try to determine his motives before we categorize the shooting as politically-motivated?"
As I said, I've worked for two federal judges. I'm applying to public defender's offices for my first post-clerkship job. My initial inclination whenever a defendant appears is to reserve judgment on motives and culpability until after I see evidence specific to the case.
I'll admit that my first reaction when this was reported was that it was likely a Tea Party fanatic who saw it as his/her duty to knock off one the remaining two crosshairs-targets from Palin's disturbing map. But so far, no evidence has come in to back that up. Honestly, I have not yet read anything that indicates his goal was more to kill Giffords then it was to find a large crowd of people and run up a body count (if he just wanted to target her, why do it in such a public place?). Certainly, I've seen nothing that indicates he even SAW the Palin map or that he targeted Giffords because of her political views - it certainly seems as though he was mad at the system rather than any particular party, and maybe he would have shot his congressperson even if s/he had been a Republican. The clues as to his political leanings appear to veer illogically to each extreme (Mein Kampf might be on the Tea Party reading list, but Marx and Engels aren't). In all, he seems as much (if not more) like Klebold/Harris/Cho than like McVeigh/Nichols.
In the words of Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my mind, blaming a massacre on anyone but the perpetrator is an extraordinary claim, and certainly implicating an entire political movement is an extraordinary claim - that's essentially accusing people who were not present at the shooting and probably never met the shooter of being accessories to murder.
My point isn't to say that the right wing hate machine isn't dangerous (which it is) or that we shouldn't slam the GOP and the astroturfing Tea Party for their hate speech (which we should). Heck, I'm not even saying that the shooting was NOT politically motivated - for my money, I bet we turn up evidence that proves that it was. At the very least, I suspect that when the picture comes into focus, it'll be fair to say that even though Loughner might not have chosen to assassinate Giffords because of her political views per se, the right-wing hate machine influenced his decision to shoot a person who was a public official and a Democrat. But even when the evidence of broader culpability is strong, we run a huge risk by even appearing as if we're trying to score political points off of a tragedy. Here, the evidence is not exactly overwhelming at this point.
There's tons of evidence that GOPers engage in hate speech and that such hate speech has the potential to incite violence. There's lots of evidence that Giffords was a particular "target" for the Tea Party. That is what most of the diaries, editorials, and op-eds on this piece have pointed out. The crosshairs "map" that Palin used angered me. But do we even know that Loughner had seen that map? The increase in threats against members of Congress is more than troubling, as Krugman notes. But does the increase in drug-related killings on the Texas/Mexican border mean that every killing in El Paso must have been connected to the drug trade? A self-styled political leader scrubbing her Facebook page of critical posts regarding the shooting while leaving disgusting non-critical posts up is both bizarre and damning. How does the fact that Palin is scrubbing critical comments from her Facebook page regarding Giffords a "smoking gun" with respect to Loughner?
As of now, there is very little evidence that this particular crime is connected in more than the most tenuous of fashions to the hate speech of others. I have seen nothing that indicates why he might have chosen Giffords as a target.
All this is making me regret breaking my "read it in a weekly magazine" rule for news stories. I am starting to think I have jumped the gun. If evidence emerges that Loughner was aware of Palin's map or otherwise targeted Giffords because of her political leanings, then I will (re-)add my voice to the chorus of people holding right wing hate speech responsible for this crime. But until then, I have a simple question - what is the harm in reserving judgment until the investigation of Loughner is complete?