Hold on, Tom Tomorrow isn't suggesting that all those "isolated events" aren't entirely isolated, is he?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

What a wondrous piece of machinery is the right-wing mind!

On a related note, I have to give The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg credit for rising, in his "Comment" last week, "Words and Deeds" (January 24), at least partly above the current "isolated event" and "they all do it" conventional wisdoms. Yes, he devotes the now-obligatory long, long paragraphs to insisting that, unlike the case of Jerusalem in 1995 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an extreme right-wing Jewish settler egged on by the right-wing religious establishment, "In 2011 in Tucson, there was no such close, let alone causal, connection."

But. having satisfied that obligation, Hertzberg continued, fairly unexpectedly in the present climate:

[I]t is also the truth that, when the news broke of the Tucson shootings, no one's first thought was that some unhinged leftist was responsible. From the outset, commentators of all persuasions assumed something like the opposite -- assumed it openly if their instant impulse was accusatory, implicitly if it was defensive. And no wonder. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (who, miraculously, survived) is a Democrat. Last March, after she voted for the health-care law, someone shattered the plate-glass door of her Tucson office. Her Republican opponent in the November election, whose campaign poster showed him cradling an assault rifle, held a gun-themed fund-raiser. ("Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.") Giffords herself expressed concern about the political use of violent imagery. "For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list," she told an interviewer. "But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there's consequences to that action."

These things took place amid a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives -- not just from professional radio and television propagandists but also from too many Republican officeholders and candidates for office. The portrayal of the national government as a sinister tyranny and President Obama and his party as equivalent to Communists and Nazis -- as alien usurpers bent on destroying the country and the Constitution -- spawned a rhetoric of what a Nevada candidate for the Senate approvingly referred to as "Second Amendment remedies." During the same period, there has been a sharp, sustained rise in death threats against the President and against (mostly Democratic) legislators. And there have been real victims: according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, at least fifteen people had already been killed by practitioners of "insurrectionist" violence since the middle of 2008.

These realities, and not the malevolence of liberal opportunists, were why, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, the "national conversation" focussed on the nation's poisonous political and rhetorical climate. That conversation, which was worth having before, is not less worth having now because the connection between the crime and the climate is so murky -- and it may well turn out to be more productive.

He went on to swathe President Obama's Tucson speech in encomia, but that you've heard from any number of sources, and if you choose to believe it will make a dime's worth of difference, well, more power to you.

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