Weighing the Consequences of Political Rhetoric

[babylonsister]

Weighing the Consequences of Political Rhetoric

The alleged shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords may have been mentally ill, but his hallucinatory fantasy world was informed by the real one.


Michelle Goldberg | January 10, 2011 | web only


For the past two years, our political life has been charged with intimations of violence. Tea Party activists have brandished guns at meetings with elected officials. (In 2009, a protester dropped a firearm at one of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' Safeway meet and greets.) Republican politicians have hinted at "Second Amendment solutions," in the words of Senate candidate Sharron Angle, to the intolerable tyranny of the Obama administration. Last summer, a conservative radio host told a Tea Party rally, "If ballots don’t work, bullets will." She was later hired as chief of staff for newly elected Congressman Allen West, though controversy soon forced her resignation. Giffords' Tea Party-backed opponent, Jesse Kelly, held a machine-gun-themed campaign event, whose invitation said, "Get On Target For Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Television hosts like Glenn Beck have been warning of the need for armed resistance to imminent totalitarianism. On his radio show in October, for example, he speculated that the government might seize his children because he's refusing to give them the flu vaccine. "You want to take my kids because of that?" he said. "Meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson."

Already, unstable individuals have taken such words seriously. In June, a heavily armed man named Byron Williams got in a shootout with California police. He was planning, it emerged, to kill leaders of the Tides Foundation -- a social-justice philanthropy and longtime Beck bête noir -- and the American Civil Liberties Union. Williams' mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son watched TV news and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items." The Coalition Against Gun Violence has published a comprehensive time line detailing other such acts. Among the perpetrators are Richard Poplawski, who killed three police officers in April 2009 in a paranoid fit about Obama's anti-gun designs, and John Patrick Bedell, a fanatically anti-government libertarian who shot two police officers outside the Pentagon in March 2010.

So when Jared Lee Loughner allegedly shot Giffords and 18 others on Saturday, it was part of a pattern. Yet among conservatives, there's a frantic effort to deny that there's any political context to this attempted assassination.

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=weighing_the_consequences_of_political_rhetoric

[patrice]

1. Having some FB experiences indicating that people have Consequences and Censorship mixed up. nt

[MindandSoul]

2. EXCELLENT! Thank you!

[patrice]

3. There is apparently a belief that Freedom means No Consequences. nt

[patrice]

4. Thanks very much! That is very useful. nt