January, 2011 archive

On the Media devoted two segments to political rhetoric in last week’s show. You can find both of them at the show’s website.

The one I found particularly interesting was this one:

There’s been no evidence to link today’s toxic political environment with Jared Loughner’s decision to use his gun last weekend. But the question persists: what has the aggressive rhetoric — peddled by mainstream candidates and media outlets and not just militant fringe groups — done to our society? The New Yorker’s George Packer says the particular motivations for Loughner’s rampage aren’t the point.

A nugget from the transcript (emphasis added):

GEORGE PACKER: The key part of this is where it’s coming from. It’s coming from leaders in the right wing political movement and their media heroes.

Let me just say one thing about Sarah Palin and the crosshairs campaign literature. By itself I wouldn’t think that that’s a particularly incendiary document. It’s first the context in which it appears, which is continual use of that kind of language of guns, of war.

And second, in retrospect, it just seems indecent. This woman was shot. Isn’t it regrettable someone once put a crosshairs on her district?

Now, these are people who, as Orwell once wrote, are playing with fire without knowing that it’s hot. They don’t seem to understand the toxicity of what they’ve created.

Follow the link above to listen or listen here (mp3):

Excerpt (no doubt the birthers are foaming over this):

. . . before we are Democrats or Republicans, we are Americans.

It does not honor Martin Luther King, Jr., to use his name in PR for violence.

Additional reading at Facing South.

Michael Weiss, writing at the Guardian, compares Teabaggery to the “Great Awakening” and other movements in American history, arguing that it is, by its nature, ephemeral and contains the seeds of its own dissolution.

In doing so, he indulges in a false equivalency (I think that’s the buzz word of the moment).

Several of the examples that he cites as “liberal-left” reaction to Bush League politics–“comparisons of the chief executive with Hitler, conspiracy theories about the furtive ‘truth’ of 9/11, the publication of a novel by a well-regarded author which envisaged Bush’s assassination as being in the public interest”–were never considered anything but the fringiest of the fringe by anyone except their adherents (see the excerpt below). Indeed, “truther” is a term of derision outside of truther circles.

To ascribe them to the “liberal-left” en masse is malpractice in punditry of the highest order, akin to equating mild health insurance reform with government ownership of the means of production (which is the definition of “socialism,” by the way). It’s a manifestation of the punditocracy’s belief that they haven’t pundited properly unless for every either they make up an or.

With that proviso, though, his column is worth a read. A nugget:

Perhaps because the Tea Party is still in existence, its antagonists have been slow to note its rhetorical and substantive symmetries with the liberal-left’s response to the Bush presidency. (Apologists for the Tea Party who do note these symmetries do so with the straight face of self-justification – irony not being a strong suit of a movement that asks the government to take its “hands off my Medicare”.) The latter trafficked in comparisons of the chief executive with Hitler, conspiracy theories about the furtive “truth” of 9/11, the publication of a novel by a well-regarded author which envisaged Bush’s assassination as being in the public interest and hysterical claims that the United States had, by acts of international folly, forfeited its primacy (in?–ed.) world affairs. The former traffics in comparisons of the chief executive with Hitler (or Stalin), conspiracy theories about the furtive origins of his birth, delusional pseudo-histories about every American war from the revolutionary to the cold that are designed to serve the Tea Party’s interest, and hysterical claims that the United States has, by acts of international folly, forfeited its primacy in world affairs.

What defenders of the Tea Party have failed to understand is that this movement, like every creedal passion before it, is liable to extinction by its own hand.

(snip

Humdrum history impends again. If Whittaker Chambers could remark of the sleepy and nostalgic right of the 1950s, which pinned its hope on dismantling the New Deal, that it was a “literary whimsy” masquerading as a politics, then surely the Tea Party is something more ephemeral for these caffeinated and amnesiac times: a Twitter feed in search of an ideology.

Extreme but accurate sarcasm.

Via Raw Story.