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Creative Commons License
From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pineviewfarm.net.
From Pine View Farm

On the Other Hand, There Is No Other Hand 2

In response to the shootings in Tucson, persons (including me, not that anyone other than my three or four regular reader will notice) have called out the rightwing’s habit of demonizing and dehumanizing those with whom they disagree.

The right has responded with the classic which we all remember from our teen-aged years,

But everybody does it.

As your mother pointed out when you tried that, “No, everybody is not doing it” and “Even if they were, that doesn’t make it right.” (I’ll leave out the part about, “If everybody was driving cars off a cliff, . . . .”)

Stephen Budiansky considers the “have cake, eat it too” elements of the rightwing’s rationalizations. A nugget:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete’s foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the “liberal 1960s,” the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn’t the sunspot cycle.

Dick Polman considers:

Could these shootings have happened “anywhere,” as the apologists insist? In theory, yeah. But they didn’t occur anywhere. They happened in a swing district, in a turbulent, gun-loving state, to a moderate Democrat who as we speak is resting in a medically-induced coma. Given the kind of place that Giffords represents, and her party affiliation, this incident has its own cruel logic. As Giffords herself said on TV last March, referring to the rhetoric and violence, “When people do that, you’ve got to realize there are consequences.”

So, no, this is not a shock. Rather, it’s the inevitable side effect of our toxic stew, runneth over. Sooner or later, some whacko out there was going to drink too much.

Budiansky link via Andrew Sullivan.

Share
January 11, 2011 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Republican Hypocrisy |

2 comments

  1. Duffy

    January 11, 2011 at 3:31 pm

    While your point about overheated and inflammatory rhetoric is valid it does not apply here.  The shooter is clearly mentally ill and has had many run ins with law enforcement before.
    People who are as deranged as this man is would find a reason to attack even if there were none.
     
    The real issue here that we should be focusing on is whether he was properly served by mental health officials, his family and law enforcement.
    All the rest is blamestorming.

     
  2. Frank

    January 11, 2011 at 3:35 pm

    In football, that would be called a “misdirection play.”

    It leaps from assumptions about what may have been going on in his head (his mental state) to assumptions about the action he took (stalking and shooting a politician). It was clearly not a random attack.

    A compelling argument exists that the dehumanizing and demonizing a class of persons, of referring to political opponents as “enemies,” “anti-American,” “traitors,” and so on increases the likelihood that that class of persons will be attacked. The dehumanizing and demonizing becomes a justification for the aggression.

    You might want to read this.

    And you cannot misdirect away the hate-full rhetoric of the right. It’s on tape, on video, and in print for all to see.

     
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