Friday, September 16, 2016

Some Say Trump Is Human Too

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For the first time in 100 years, the very right-wing biggest newspaper in New Hampshire hasn't endorsed the Republican nominee for president. "Voters leaning toward Trump are understandably fed up with the status quo, of which Clinton is a prime example," wrote publisher Joseph McQuaid. "But they kid themselves if they think Trump isn’t pretty much a part of that status quo as well, or that he is in any way qualified to competently lead this nation. The man is a liar, a bully, a buffoon. He denigrates any individual or group that displeases him. He has dishonored military veterans and their families, made fun of the physically frail, and changed political views almost as often as he has changed wives." The paper endorsed the Libertarian.

In his NY Times column yesterday, Nick Kristof tried dealing with the problems the mainstream media has in covering a crackpot like Trump. The night before, one of the DWT regular readers whose ideas and opinions I most respect, e-mailed me about our own Trump coverage. He was pissed off at the way we have chosen to dehumanize Trump, particularly in the way we refer to him as "Trumpanzee," although I tried to dehumanize it by usually using phrases like "Señor Trumpanzee" or "Monsieur Trumpanzee."

As you probably know, I've been a long-time reader of DWT.  I have, until recently, always appreciated its voice and especially yours.

But there's something going on right now that I find deeply, horribly, upsetting, and I thought I should tell you about it.

It's the use of the term "Trumpanzee" to refer to the GOP nominee.

I will grant you he is at least every bit as terrible as you say and think.  But even so, he's still a person. A bad person. A very bad person. But a person.  And to suggest he is in fact an animal, or half animal, is to use the very sort of dehumanizing rhetoric that we on the left (and DWT) have long opposed when deployed by the right. We objected when they did it to Blacks, to the LGBT community, to the left more generally. And we-- and you-- were right to do so.

Why then descend to that level? Why go down there with the Nazis and the right wing fanatics?  We-- you-- need to be better than that.

Even Trump is human. He has human rights like the rest of us. Unfortunately he has chosen to use his humanity in service to terrible ends. But that doesn't make him sub-human or non-human, and we shouldn't suggest that it does.

It's just not funny.

Give it a rest? Please?

We've had far more complaints from animal rights activists and pet lovers who have asked us to stop defaming chimps by attaching them in any way to Mr. Trump. So, we've heard and we're retiring the phrase. Maybe we should go back to Herr Trumpf? Anyway, back to Herr Kristof's column in the Times. He seemed distraught that "by a margin of 15 percentage points, voters thought Donald Trump was 'more honest and trustworthy' than Hillary Clinton." Even someone like me, who has no love for Hillary agrees with him that "this public perception is completely at odds with all evidence... "Clearly," he wrote, "Clinton shades the truth-- yet there’s no comparison with Trump." She may do worse than shade the truth, but if anythingis clear, she is certainly-- and has always been-- the lesser of two evils, even the far lesser. Kristof says he isn't sure journalism-- journalists-- bear responsibility "but this does raise the thorny issue of false equivalence, which has been hotly debated among journalists this campaign. Here’s the question: Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?"
President Obama weighed in this week, saying that “we can’t afford to act as if there’s some equivalence here.”

I’m wary of grand conclusions about false equivalence from 30,000 feet. But at the grass roots of a campaign, I think we can do better at signaling that one side is a clown.


There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.

We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.

...I wonder if journalistic efforts at fairness don’t risk normalizing Trump, without fully acknowledging what an abnormal candidate he is. Historically we in the news media have sometimes fallen into the traps of glib narratives or false equivalencies, and we should try hard to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

We should be guard dogs, not lap dogs, and when the public sees Trump as more honest than Clinton, something has gone wrong.

For my part, I’ve never met a national politician as ill informed, as deceptive, as evasive and as vacuous as Trump. He’s not normal. And somehow that is what our barks need to convey.

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Friday, September 02, 2016

When it comes to Hillary, Paul Waldman notes, a special standard applies as to what "raises questions"

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You can find the piece to which Paul's directing us here.


"If you as a journalist are going to say that something 'raises questions,' and if you know the answer to those questions, you have to say that, too. So in this case, the question the Band email raises is, 'Did an aide to Bill Clinton get a diplomatic passport from Hillary Clinton's staff when she was Secretary of State, something he was not entitled to?' The answer is — and pay attention to make sure you grasp this answer in all its complexity — No."

by Ken

One of the ways in which the Right-Wing Noise Machine has learned to tie the Infotainment Noozemedia in knots is by exploiting the media crutch of "even-handedness" -- based, of course, on utterly false equivalences. And the Noise Machine has been crucifying Hillary Clinton with a steady stream of "news" items and leaks that feed to the Center and Left's appallingly lazy acceptance of the Noise Machine's "larger narrative" that Hillary is, as Paul Waldman puts it in the post of his we're looking at today, "Here’s a tale of two scandals. Guess which one will get more play?" "tainted by scandal, or corrupt, or just sinister in ways people can never quite put their finger on."

By itself this would be damaging enough to any kind of realistic political discourse regarding the election or anything else. However, the problem is wildly compounded by the exact opposite way of looking at things that should raise questions on the Right; the standard has been stretched so preposterously that every day zillions of things that genuinely ought to raise questions don't seem to. Like, for example, the growing smell of the wildly inappropriate connection between the Trump interests and Florida AG Pam Biondi. What it comes down to, Paul notes at the end, is: "Some stories 'raise questions,' and others don't."

As Digby also noted today, Paul has "done such a thorough job" with the story that she was able to forego writing it up herself. I think we'll also just let him tell the story his way.
Here’s a tale of two scandals. Guess which one will get more play?

By Paul Waldman
September 2 at 1:01 PM

Whenever some new piece of information emerges about Hillary Clinton or people close to her, we’re told that it “raises questions” of some kind, which means it’s being shoehorned into a larger narrative that says something fundamental about her: That she’s tainted by scandal, or corrupt, or just sinister in ways people can never quite put their finger on.

Yet somehow, stories about Donald Trump that don’t have to do with the latest appalling thing that came out of his mouth don’t “raise questions” in the same way. They’re here and then they’re gone, obliterated by his own behavior without going deep into question-raising territory.

To see what I mean, let’s look at a couple of stories that have come out in the last 24 hours. We’ll start with the one about Clinton. You may have heard recently about Judicial Watch, which is an organization established in the 1990s to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a mission it continues to this day. Through lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests, they try to obtain information that can be used against the Clintons, and they’re going to be a vital player in Washington politics should Hillary become president. The group’s latest “revelation” can be found in email exchanges between Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, when Clinton was secretary of state.

Here’s how the New York Times reported this story, under the headline “Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Department“:
A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department agreed to try to obtain a special diplomatic passport for an adviser to former President Bill Clinton in 2009, according to emails released Thursday, raising new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access at the department.

The request by the adviser, Douglas J. Band, who started one arm of the Clintons’ charitable foundation, was unusual, and the State Department never issued the passport. Only department employees and others with diplomatic status are eligible for the special passports, which help envoys facilitate travel, officials said.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign said that there was nothing untoward about the request and that it related to an emergency trip that Mr. Clinton took to North Korea in 2009 to negotiate the release of two American journalists. Mrs. Clinton has long denied that donors had any special influence at the State Department.
The first sentence of that story is questionable at best. The top aide, Huma Abedin, did not “agree to try to obtain a special diplomatic passport” for Band. He emailed her asking for it, and she replied, “OK will figure it out.” It’s hard to say whether that constitutes agreeing to anything, and at any rate, Band and the other two Clinton aides who were going to accompany the former president on this mission to North Korea didn’t actually need diplomatic passports for the trip and wouldn’t be allowed to get them anyway, nothing happened. You might have missed it, but there in the second paragraph the story notes that no diplomatic passports were ever issued.

To sum up: An executive at the Clinton Foundation made a request of Hillary Clinton’s aide, and didn’t get what he was asking for. Now maybe there is some real evidence somewhere of corruption at the State Department during Clinton’s time there, but that sure as heck isn’t it.

If you as a journalist are going to say that something “raises questions,” and if you know the answer to those questions, you have to say that, too. So in this case, the question the Band email raises is, “Did an aide to Bill Clinton get a diplomatic passport from Hillary Clinton’s staff when she was Secretary of State, something he was not entitled to?” The answer is — and pay attention to make sure you grasp this answer in all its complexity — No. (If you want a fairer version of this story, here’s the Post’s.)

Now let me point you to another story, one you probably haven’t heard about. Yesterday we learned that Donald Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty over a contribution his foundation made to a PAC affiliated with Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whom you might remember from the Republican convention, where she gave a rousing speech endorsing Trump. Does this story “raise questions”? Does it ever.

Here’s the quick summary: In 2013, Bondi’s office received multiple complaints from Floridians who said they had been cheated out of thousands of dollars by a fraudulent operation called Trump University. While Bondi’s office was looking into the claims to determine if they should join New York State’s lawsuit against Trump University, Bondi called Donald Trump and asked him for a contribution to her PAC.

Now let’s pause for a moment to savor the idea that Bondi, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the state, would solicit a contribution from someone her office was in the process of investigating. She did solicit that contribution, and Donald Trump came through with $25,000.

Or actually, his foundation paid Bondi’s PAC the $25,000, which is an illegal contribution. Trump’s people say this was just a clerical error, and Trump himself reimbursed the foundation — that’s what the IRS fine was about. But days before getting the check, Bondi’s office announced that they were considering whether to go after Trump University, and not long after the check was cashed, they decided to drop the whole thing.

Here are a few questions this story raises: How many Floridians were scammed by Trump University? When Bondi and Trump spoke, did Trump University come up? What was the basis on which Bondi decided not to join New York’s lawsuit? Why didn’t she recuse herself from the decision? Are there any other attorneys general Trump has given money to, and had any of them received complaints about Trump University, the Trump Institute, the Trump Network, or any of Trump’s other get-rich-quick scams that were so successful in separating ordinary people from their money?

Those kinds of questions are what spur more digging and allow news organizations to not just write one story about an issue like this and then consider it done, but return to it again and again. If they decided to, they could get at least as much material out of the issue of Trump’s scams as they do out of Clinton’s alleged corruption at the State Department. But I’m guessing they won’t. Some stories “raise questions,” and others don’t.
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Friday, October 04, 2013

False Equivalency, Kyrsten Sinema And The Problem Of A Hackish Media

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Last year Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ) tried appealing to out-of-district progressives while claiming to be a centrist in AZ-09. Obama beat McCain and Romney in the district; it's not a red district. This week Sinema, one of the Democrats who votes most frequently with the Republican on crucial roll calls, has been claiming that both parties are at fault over the government shut down. "Arizonans are angry and I don't blame them," she said Tuesday. "I am angry. Time has run out and both parties are responsible." Both parties? Really? I thought only lazy or brainless media hacks ever say that. Dan Froomkin covered the disgraceful way the media has made this into an exercise in false equivalency.
U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides-- combined with its obsession with process-- led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.

In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.

Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.

One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics-- and members of the public-- have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."

Blaming everyone-- Congress, both sides, Washington-- is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public-- or their editors-- will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation-- trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties-- is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

We need a more fearless media.
And we need a more fearless Democratic Party and more fearless Democrats in Congress, not more Kyrsten Sinemas-- nor even the Kyrsten Sinema we've got already.

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Monday, January 10, 2011

Is It Fair To Blame Palin, Beck And Other Violent Rightists For Inciting Murder?

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Right-wing terrorist, assassin and mass murderer Jared Loughner


Early Sunday morning author David Swanson, perhaps in response to the mainstream media's and Republican Party's concerted efforts to paint yesterday's incident as a result of violent rhetoric on both sides, posted the above tweet. Earlier, Palin, who spent Saturday frantically scrubbing all her calls to violence from her websites, had a spokesperson, Rebecca Mansour, try to turn her violent and incendiary rhetoric against Giffords and other Democrats on it's head, positioning her as a martyr, one of her favorite poses.
In fact, she said that the "target list" was not intended to allude to guns.

"We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said.

"It's surveyor's symbols," the interviewer Tammy Bruce suggested. Bruce, a Palin supporter, describes herself as "a gay, pro-choice, gun owning, pro-death penalty, Tea Party Independent Conservative. " Her show is promoted as a "chick with a gun and a microphone."

Mansour agreed. She said that the graphic was contracted out to a professional. They approved it quickly without thinking about it. "We never imagined, it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent," she said. Rather, she said, that it was simply "crosshairs that you would see on a map."

There is "nothing irresponsible about our graphic," she said.

She did not, however, mention the "don't retreat, instead- RELOAD!" Palin tweet that went out shortly after the graphic was posted on both her Facebook page and SarahPac's website, directing them to the graphic. The tweet turned quickly into a Palin mantra. Many, even then, urged her to stop using such violent rhetoric. If she heard them, she did not retreat.

Nor did she mention Palin's tweet right after the election gloating how 18 of her 20 House targets were eliminated. Giffords was one of the two who wasn't. And there were lots and lots of retweets. The one below mentions ScopedByLarry. That's how Palin's sociopathic illness goes viral. The term "bullseye," indicates that Palin knew exactly what her scope sites were-- as much as her tweet about re-loading (which no one thought referred to a mechanical pencil).


The push back from the GOP about accepting any of the blame for what happened in Tucson Saturday goes far beyond Sarah Palin's ridiculous amateurish efforts to coverup her own sedition. Paul Broun, a violent John Bircher from rural Georgia routinely incites his audiences towards gun violence and revolution, giving permission to "crazy" angry people to go shoot up the government. At an Open Carry rally in Alexandria, Virginia on April 19 he was a real crowd pleaser exhorting the gathering of gun nuts that "We must declare war against oppression and against Socialism, and you are the people to do that." I guess he meant "declare war" in the sense that doing a good survey is like fighting a war. Media Matters put together a stellar report on Republicans fanning the flames of violence. Here are a few examples from some of the worst crackpot Republican leaders:


Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)

These people decided to cast their votes on the Lord's day. He is taking notes and paying attention. We foot our heels on him as our fore fathers did. We will wait and see his deliverance. But you and I, we will solemnly resolve here to do everything in our power to restore freedom and to send that cart of socialists down to where they belong in the river down there. We will see freedom once more restored, and Washington, DC taken apart so that it no longer is a threat on American freedom and liberty.

Sharron Angle, Nevada Republican/Tea Party candidate

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

Right now I'm a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn't a game. this isn't just a political talk show that's happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I'm going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. Where do we go...

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and the people-- we the people-- are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

John Boehner (R-OH)

Boehner says there will be major political consequences for pro-life Democrats who break from the Stupak bloc. "Take [Rep.] Steve Driehaus, for example," he says. "He may be a dead man. He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town."

Catherine Crabill, failed GOP candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates

We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box. But that's the beauty of our Second Amendment right.

Brad Goehring, candidate (R-CA)

If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for  liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to "thin" the herd.

Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS)

We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.

Rep. Wally Herger (R-CA)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I wanna say that I'm a proud right-wing terrorist. ...

HERGER: Amen. God bless you. There's a great American.

Mike Huckabee (R-AR)

Every member of Congress knows in his gut what's in the people's interest and what's in K Street's interest. If you think your real boss is some smug guy sitting in a corner office with his Gucci loafers up on a mahogany desk and not those folks back home, those folks who voted for you, who gave you 25 or 50 hard-earned bucks, who put up the yard signs and made calls for you, then you deserve to lose. Shame on you, Mr. Congressman. You shouldn't just be fired, you ought to be tarred and feathered as the original tea partiers would have done. That's my view and I welcome yours.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

If I could start a country with a bunch of people it would be the folks standing out here the last few days. Let's hope we don't have to do that. Let's beat that other side to a pulp. Let's take them out, let's chase them down. There's going to be a reckoning!

Rep. Allen West, (R-FL)

Talking about his opponent, Congressman Ron Klein, "Let me tell you what you've got to do. You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That's the only way that you're going to win. That's the only way you're going to get these people's attention."

Despite what Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been saying-- "I think that when the rhetoric about hatrid, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates and to try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, has impact on people especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with" (already under attack from far right extremist Jon Kyl and even more deranged reactionary closet queen Trent Franks)-- and even despite what Fox News is reporting, delusional right-wingers-- let along the culprits at Fox-- refuse to take any responsibility for the mayhem and insist that the anti-Semitic Tea Party terrorist was either "just crazy" or a leftist.
According to a law enforcement memo based on information provided by DHS and obtained by Fox News, Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter of Congressman Gabrielle Giffords, may have been influenced by a pro-white racist organization that publishes an anti-immigration newsletter.

No direct connection, but strong suspicion is being directed at American Renaissance, an organization that Loughner mentioned in some of his internet postings and federal law enforcement officials are investigating Loughner's possible links to the organization. The organization is a monthly publication that promotes a variety of white racial positions.

"The group's ideology is anti government, anti immigration, anti ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti Semitic," according to the memo which goes on to point out that Congressman Giffords is the first Jewish female elected to high office in Arizona. A recent posting on American Renaissance's website on January 7 begins with an article entitled: "Exit poll: Whites are Different." The site goes on to list anti-immigration articles. Investigators are also pursuing Loughner's alleged anti-Semitism.

One thing is certain-- if an American Muslim had posted a map of the country with gun sights on 20 Members of Congress and then started ranting and raving about "reloading," and then seen an assassination attempt against one of those targets (with half a dozen deaths in the process)... well, you tell me, where would that Muslim be about now? Not sitting in his comfy living room counting his pieces of gold in Wasilla.

UPDATE: A Hero... And American False Equivalency

Daniel Hernandez, a gay University of Arizona student who had been an intern in Giffords' office for 5 days, most likely saved her life when, upon hearing the gunfire, ran towards it, found her on the ground and applied pressure to her wound until paramedics arrived. I wonder if deranged gun fanatic Jon Kyl, who was about to be challenged by Giffords for his Senate seat, is asking the INS to investigate Hernandez as a possible candidate for deportation. Hernandez's bravery and selflessness is not the same, is not equivalent, to Jon Kyl's self-serving exploitation. They're fundamentally different. And the role of the left and the right in the creation of a climate that inculcates domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Glenn Beck, Joe Stack, Scott Roeder (and his sponsor, Bill O'Reilly) and, most recently of course, Jared Loughner is very, very different. An editorial in yesterday's NY Times, after a full day of braindead TV talk show hosts getting it all wrong, captured the essence:
Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be mentally ill. His paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.

But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.

Last spring, Capitol security officials said threats against members of Congress had tripled over the previous year, almost all from opponents of health care reform. An effigy of Representative Frank Kratovil Jr., a Maryland Democrat, was hung from a gallows outside his district office. Ms. Giffords’s district office door was smashed after the health vote, possibly by a bullet.

The federal judge who was killed, John Roll, had received hundreds of menacing phone calls and death threats, especially after he allowed a case to proceed against a rancher accused of assaulting 16 Mexicans as they tried to cross his land. This rage, stirred by talk-radio hosts, required marshals to give the judge and his family 24-hour protection for a month. Around the nation, threats to federal judges have soared for a decade.

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

That whirlwind has touched down most forcefully in Arizona, which Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described after the shooting as the capital of “the anger, the hatred and the bigotry that goes on in this country.” Anti-immigrant sentiment in the state, firmly opposed by Ms. Giffords, has reached the point where Latino studies programs that advocate ethnic solidarity have actually been made illegal.

And Krugman was even more eloquent in his own column:
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.

Remember when Bill Frist (R-TN) remotely diagnosed a brain-dead Teri Schiavo as ready for a picnic? Now we have a failed, self-certified ophthalmologist, Rand Paul (R-KY) diagnosing the right-wing terrorist as a paranoid schizophrenic. Most people who have read Loughner's writing would have diagnosed him as having ingested an overdose of Ron Paul.
Paul has a medical degree from Duke University. However, he was trained as an ophthalmologist and not a psychiatrist. Paranoid schizophrenia is a mental disorder.

“I looked at some of the writings of this young man, and from a medical point of view there’s a lot to suggest paranoid schizophrenia and a really sick individual,” Paul said on Fox News Sunday.

And speaking of politicians creating an atmosphere of violence and giving their craziest partisans permission...



And, yes, even a few Republicans understood the dangers inherent in pushing the whole violence thing. This was one of the winning ads in the Alaska Senate campaign that helped voters there step back and realize what Sarah Palin's Teatard Joe Miller really was all about-- something more to do with pre-War Germany than where most of us would like to see our country go (including most Alaskans... even if by a narrow margin).

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