Political invective

[tahnan]

I know I need to stop obsessing. And I know that I'm probably not saying much that you haven't seen. But this is just too egregious to let go.

I do not blame Sarah Palin for Saturday's shooting in Tucson. I recognize that we don't understand the shooter's motivations, and that it's possible (if not in fact probable) that mental illness played a role here; no political commentator is responsible for this.

But I point you to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Saturday (link is to both video and transcript), in which he called on commentators across the political spectrum to repudiate any past comments that might have suggested, even inadvertently, a call to violence. He in fact apologized for a comment he himself made, noting that no one is immune to this sort of thing and everyone must take responsibility.

When a spokesperson for Sarah Palin says, of this map (to which Palin pointed with a tweet saying "Don't retreat - instead RELOAD!),

we never, ever, ever intended it to be gunsights. It was simply crosshairs like you see on maps.... It's a surveyor's symbol.

that spokesperson is engaging in, in a very technical sense, bullshit. I repeat that I do not in any way think that Palin caused this shooting; I'm not even willing to say at this point that she influenced the shooter. But a responsible adult would, in the wake of a political shooting, acknowledge and apologize for violent rhetoric. Or would, at the very very least, keep a low profile or avoid the topic. Coming out and defending the use of the word "reload" and a map with crosshairs on it is just plain reprehensible, and it disgusts me.

EDIT: Let me add a few more points, though I am about to head to the Diesel. First, I must stress that, like Olbermann, I see this as a problem across the political spectrum. I don't for a moment think that offensive political invective began in 2009. See this collection of "Bush = Hitler" allusions, and I know I was guilty of at least some of it (I'm sure I must have repeated the "Bush isn't like Hitler—Hitler was elected" joke). I, too, apologize for anything like that that I've said, and I know I intend to be careful in the future.

Second, I've seen a lot of unconvincing statements from the right about how we shouldn't be talking about the political rhetoric—one from Slate, saying in essence "I've used gun metaphors all my life, and I've never shot a politician; rhetoric isn't the problem", one from the WSJ saying that bringing up the topic is either asserting a connection between the rhetoric and the shooting, which would be a lie, or not asserting any connection, in which case it's just using a tragedy to score partisan points.

I don't have time to respond as fully as I could. I'll say, quickly, that I really don't think this should be partisan, and that in the wake of any tragedy there's discussion about the situation. Whether or not the rhetoric caused this, I think it's an appropriate time to use (yes, use) the shooting as a starting point to think about the tone of political rhetoric in this country. And, walking out the door, I have no time to do anything with the argument from Slate other than roll my eyes and dismiss it as a basic fallacy ("X has no harmful effect on me; thus, it has no harmful effect").

Now, off to work and to try not to think about it.

Comments

[yomikoma]

She referred to them as "bullseye icons" herself:

http://twitter.com/#!/SarahPalinUSA/status/29677744457

[rhu]

"Bullseye" is an old surveying term. When they were dividing up the Real America into states, surveyors (who were Real Americans with Real American balls) would pluck the eye out of a charging bull and then use it as a boundary marker.

Liberal bleeding-heart East Coast elites used stones because they considered bullseye-plucking to be "cruelty to animals."