Blood Libel : What The "Left" Said
In part one, I examine how the meme spread. Here, I examine what prompted the use of the phrase and then close with a critique of Sarah Palin's framing.
- Adam Graham, who was the Montana State Coordinator for the Alan Keyes campaign in 2000 and a candidate for the Republican nomination for the Idaho State House in 2004, published his essay on January 9, 2011, the day after the tragedy.
- In my opinion, if you are going to make a claim based on "x" happening, you should be able to provide an example of "x" having happened. Graham doesn't do this. No where in this column does Graham cite a specific instance of "someone on the left" saying that the Tea Party "is responsible" for the tragedy in Arizona.Instead, Graham asserts that Bill Clinton "placed the blame on Rush Limbaugh and talk radio for the Oklahoma City Bombing" -- but his corroborating link is to Falwell and Robertson on their 9-11 claims.And he places all responsibility for political partisanship responses to the tragedy on "the left" (emphasis added):Many untold hours and pages of print will be spend responding to irresponsible charges and inferences made by people on the left who were so eager to score political points that they couldn't even bother to wait for the facts. The result of this is that many will respond to this tragedy not as human beings, but as political partisans.
- So who might Graham have read to cause him to make that sweeping generalization?First at bat: Gary Hart, who penned a short piece on Saturday for The Huffington Post. I am not a regular reader of the Huffington Post.
Candidates are "targeted". An opponent is "in the crosshairs". Liberals have to be "eliminated". Opponents are "enemies". This kind of language eminates largely from those who claim to defend American democracy against those who would destroy it, who are evil, and who want to "take away our freedoms".- The reference is veiled but directed towards "the right."
- Today we have seen the results of this rhetoric. Those with a megaphone, whether provided by public office or a media outlet, have responsibilities. They cannot avoid the consequences of their blatant efforts to inflame, anger, and outrage. We all know that there are unstable and potentially dangerous people among us. To repeatedly appeal to their basest instincts is to invite and welcome their predictable violence.
- Hart wrote this on Saturday afternoon before much was known about the shooter. This paragraph is speculation presented as fact, correlation boosted to causation.And it's a pointed attack when you consider that he sits on the board of a Partnership for a Secure America, which has as its mission "recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy."How prominent is Hart (he's 74) in Democratic leadership? He is a former Presidential candidate, but what is his prominence in the party today?
- Next up, Keith Olbermann, who is not a politician but is, instead, a pundit.At 10:13:25 PM ET on Saturday, he issued a "Special Comment" that addressed the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords.I do not read (or listen to) Olbermann.The only reason I read this transcript was as research for this story, and I fully expected him to be over-the-top. He wasn't; I was pleasantly surprised.
- He began by calling for an end to violence-tinged rhetoric:We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently.He then called out a series of politicians for specific instances of rhetoric imbued with violence, beginning with Sarah Palin:
- In addition to Palin, Olbermann called out* Jesse Kelly (who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Giffords that included a fundraiser centered on "firing machine guns")* Rep. Allen West (FL-R, "told his supporters that they should make his opponent afraid to come out of his home")* Nevada state politician Sharron Angle ("second amendment solutions")* Glenn Beck ("who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore) and* Bill O'Reilly ("who blithely repeated 'Tiller the Killer' until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers").
- The only "general" criticism he had was of the Tea Party:If the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party.
- No where does Olbermann assert that any one person or group was "responsible" for the Tucson shooting. Neither is he saying that "the left" is off the hook:And if those of us considered to be "on the left" do not re-dedicate ourselves to our vigilance to eliminate all our own suggestions of violence - how ever inadvertent they might have been then we too deserve the repudiation of the more sober and peaceful of our politicians and our viewers and our networks.
- And his closing is a powerful challenge:Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence.
- These are the two most prominent pieces I found. I thought the Hart accusation was out-of-bounds; but I don't think it rises to the level of "blood libel."I thought the Olbermann essay surprisingly well-argued and clearly not a candidate for "woe is me" responses.
- Paul Krugman is another "voice of the left." On his blog, he made this note about his Sunday column for the New York Times:
- What else did Krugman write? He asserted that political hatred took an upturn during the Clinton Administration, prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, and that he feared we are in a similar climate today. Then he cited data, like an April 2009 report from The Department of Homeland Security which "warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence." He cites other data: threats against members of Congress are on the rise.Krugman makes it clear that he thinks the shooter was not politically motivated:It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.But he does believe that words matter: "there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement."
- Krugman's characterization of media pundits on the right is not flattering, but is is a mischaracterization? I don't think so.This quote isn't very flattering, either: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.”Krugman's op-ed is directed more closely at media personalities than politicians.
- Now for the Glenn Reynolds op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Like Graham, he uses the "blood libel" metaphor. He's a lawyer, an academic and a writer: he knew full well what he was doing. Had he read Jon Henke's tweets? Certainly, they know one another (here's one example).
- And, like Graham, Reynolds makes an unsubstantiated claim, that the Tea Party is responsible for the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords.[P]undits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular.My earlier criticism of the Graham essay applies to Reynolds as well.
- Like Olbermann and Krugman, Reynolds calls out a series of people by name and action. Like Krugman, Reynolds focuses not on politicians but media and consultants:* Democrat Mark Penn, former adviser to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and Burson-Marsteller CEO, put his foot in his mouth on the Chris Matthews show last November. The comments on this ThinkProgress clip are universally negative, ie, he's not speaking to the "base" of ThinkProgress readership.* Then Presidential candidate Obama, June 2008 in Philadelphia:"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun". The Wall Street Journal, reporting on this at the time, noted the verbal play on the adage, "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight." And this appears to have been an isolated incident (otherwise Reynolds would have used something more recent).* "Last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill." Local politician, national media person but nothing in this CBS story. Here's what Bloomberg said, which isn't what Reynolds wrote:Bloomberg told Couric he thought the suspect acted alone: "Homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything."Do you see Tea Party anywhere in that quote?
