Jonah Goldberg is right about 'blood libel'

I should have said this a few days ago, when my friend Glenn Reynolds introduced the term to this debate. But I think that the use of this particular term in this context isn’t ideal. Historically, the term is almost invariably used to describe anti-Semitic myths about how Jews use blood — usually from children — in their rituals. I agree entirely with Glenn’s, and now Palin’s, larger point. But I’m not sure either of them intended to redefine the phrase, or that they should have.

via nationalreview.com

Today in Philadelphia police ickiness

Philadelphia Police officer was arrested today on charges of drinking and driving on the job, police said.

Officer William Haviland, 42, a seven-year veteran of the force, was suspended in November for 30 days with the intent to dismiss, said Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

via philly.com

Today in Glenn Beck screen shots

I do wonder how many people quote Martin Luther King while dressed up as a faux facist.

beck.png.png on Aviary.

A pox on both their houses?

My post yesterday on the rhetoric of violence brought some pushback from some of my conservative friends -- as I expected. I don't want to be some lily-livered simp who doesn't have the courage of his own convictions, but I'm not interested in clinging to my convictions despite all relevant evidence, either.

My core argument revolved around this set of propositions:

 

* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.

* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.

 

And I concluded: "We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it."

Of course, some responses are more substantive than others. Here's Emaw, from my old Kansas stomping grounds:

This is one of the best rationalizations for your own prejudice I've read yet. Good job!

This one got under my skin the quickest, until I realized that Emaw hadn't bothered to make an argument for why I'm wrong. 

More substantively came this response from namefromthepast, a high school friend of mine whose anonymity I'll respect. He posted this link of anti-Bush death threats, and commented: "Just a little reminder. Confusing how you quite innocently nearly skipped over the moonbat left and their history of violence and threats of violence. " 

And no doubt, those pictures are ugly, stupid stuff. I repudiate it--and I repudiate other lefty hints of violence that a conservative friend privately relayed to me. There are undoubtedly idiots throughout the political spectrum. I make no excuses, and I condemn them fully and wholeheartedly.

But I look at this -- and at Michelle Malkin's very, very long list of liberals who crossed lines, both rhetorical and otherwise -- and I have a couple of thoughts: 

* All of the links in Malkin's post go back to years of posts she's done, documenting "the left's" outrages. Everybody tries to police the lines of acceptable discourse and action, and for conservatives to suggest that liberals are somehow uniquely cynical in this effort is, well, cynical. (There. Nyah-nyah-nyah! You guys do it too! That's how we're playing this, right? That makes it ok, right?)  

* But ok, so I was wrong to say that the rhetoric of violence occurs "exclusively on the right." Clearly, that was an overstatement.

A more accurate way of saying it is that the rhetoric of violence -- language that seems to indicate a desire for action, instead of just colorful use of metaphors -- is embraced more fully by thought leaders, candidates and elected officials on the right. 

Steve Benen:

I realize major media outlets feel contractually obligated to embrace the false equivalency, but folks should know better. Remember the Senate candidate who recommended "Second Amendment remedies"? How about the congressional candidate who fired shots at a silhouette with his opponent's initials on it? Or maybe the congressional candidate who declared, "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"? Or how about the congressional candidate who said he considered the violent overthrow of the United States to government an "option" and added that political violence is "on the table"?

All four of these examples came from 2010 -- and all came from Republican candidates for federal elected office. And this doesn't even get into Republican activists and media personalities.

Salon's Alex Pareene adds similar examples from Red State blogger (and CNN contributor) Erick Erickson and Fox News' Dick Morris, among others. I've tried to limit myself to examples where commentators seem to me to have strayed beyond the bounds of metaphor into concrete calls for or musings about the possibilities of political violence.

Now: I don't know if we just went through an unusual cycle where grassroots-slash-fringey Tea Partiers managed to obtain high-profile candidacies that they wouldn't normally, and thus bring fringe views-slash-rhetoric to the table, or if this really is the elite of the GOP and and prominent allied commenters signalling to the rest of the party what kind of norms are acceptable in discourse. But it's there, and it's happening.

And in my view, it's bad. Do both sides do it? Undoubtedly.

Do both sides' elites do it to the same degree? Not from what I can tell; this really does look to me like it is primarily (though not exclusively, perhaps) a practice of the right.

But I might be wrong. Perhaps it's simply a function of who is in power and who feels disempowered as a result.

For what it's worth, I don't blame the actions of Mr. Loughner on this rhetoric. He's crazy. I still wish a lot of commentators would have (ahem) held their fire before launching this debate. They didn't.  My purpose here is to explain why I find the rhetoric coming from across the aisle so alarming. That's all. Perhaps it is merely rationalizing my own prejudice, but my prejudice in this case isn't against conservatives, but against those who employ the threat or promise of violence as a means of rallying political support or otherwise achieving political ends.

If we come back four years from now, when Sarah Palin is president, and you have Democratic members of Congress and prominent liberals talking about overthrowing the government through violent means, I hope and believe you'll find me castigating them in unequivocal terms. (You might find me reminding you of the current debates, as well; I'm only human.) Suggesting that your political rivals need to be shot is wrong, no matter how cutely or coyly phrased -- and no matter who does it.

Matt Yglesias on national security and defense spending

Another way of looking at this is that we don’t really know what the world will look like in 25 years. But it’s predictable that whatever military challenges we face, they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a better-educated crop of twenty-somethings rather than a worse-educated one. That they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a productive economy with a modern infrastructure than if we don’t. And it’s predictable that the more we spend on the military in the next ten years the fewer resources will be available for non-military purposes. But it’s the civilian side that ultimately supplies the capacity to engage in military activities over the long run. Obviously the long run does you no good if your country can’t defend itself in the short-term, but a strategy based on perpetually higher commitments to defense spending is self-defeating over time.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Bad idea, Bob Brady

It's legitimate -- and right -- to call out vitriolic and violent speech and name it for what is. But this seems a step down a road we'd rather not go down:

Representative Bob Brady of Pennsylvania told The Caucus he plans to introduce a bill that would ban symbols like that now-infamous campaign crosshair map.

"You can't threaten the president with a bullseye or a crosshair," Mr. Brady, a Democrat, said, and his measure would make it a crime to do so to a member of Congress or federal employee, as well.

Asked if he believed the map incited the gunman in Tucson, he replied, "I don't know what's in that nut's head. I would rather be safe than sorry."

He continued, "This is not a wakeup call. This is a major alarm going off. We need to be more civil with each other. We need to tone down this rhetoric."

I'm always leery of any idea to restrain speech -- bad speech is generally best met with more and better speech. Threats aren't free speech, of course, and graphic-design bullseyes and crosshairs can definitely be used to signal that certain individuals are marked for death. But the reason I didn't make a big deal of Sarah Palin's infamous crosshairs graphic in my earlier post today is because I didn't think she was really trying to send assassins after members of Congress. And I think Bob Brady's proposal is a step (possibly inadvertent) towards the prohibition of, well, metaphor. 

If you want to prohibit threats against Congress, prohibit threats against Congress. But it's a bad idea to simply ban potentially ambiguous symbolism irrespective of context. (And it's maybe less-than-egalitarian to ban the use of those symbols when they're associated with federal officials while leaving the rest of us at the mercy of a crosshair-laden world.) I understand nerves are frayed right now; that's precisely why everybody should step back and take a deep breath before passing any laws we might regret someday.

That doesn't mean that the rhetoric of violence is somehow a good or productive thing. I still think it's a problem for the right, and for our politics. I'm not convinced, however, that banning speech is the right response. 

Having your cake of violent rhetoric and eating it too

Except for an initial intemperate Tweet, I stayed largely silent -- on the Internets, at least -- during the early hours of the Gabrielle Giffords saga on Saturday afternoon. I don't think myself exceptionally wise or laudable for the silence: I was covering my butt. There's nothing like holding forth on What It All Means in the early aftermath of an event, only to find out the story is completely different. I didn't want to completely embarrass myself.

But I had my suspicions. I thought a Tea Partier did it.

I'm glad I kept those suspicions to myself, though. Turns out the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is just plumb crazy. Unless he had an accomplice, trying to suss out some larger meaning from this story is going to turn out to be a fool's errand.  Sometimes, crazy is just crazy. It's tragic and awful and stupid. Period. No bigger lesson to be learned.

As I say, though, I spend the first hour or two of the unfolding story convinced -- and deeply angered by that conviction -- a Tea Partier (or somebody influenced by the Tea Party) had committed the awful crime. 

I don't think it was unreasonable for that to be my instinctive reaction. I do think many of my fellow liberals would've been better served by waiting for facts to emerge, but I also don't think their assumptions were entirely unreasonable either.

Why?

Because we take Tea Party rhetoric seriously.

Let's back up, and let me see if I can frame this in a way my conservative and TP-inclined friends understand. Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995? I'll bet you assumed Arab-Muslim terrorists committed that awful act in the first hours of that unfolding story. Lots of people did. Why? Well, because of the track record. America had been through the first World Trade Center bombing a couple of years earlier, the Beirut barracks bombing a decade before that, and we'd generally been conditioned to understand that there was one likely source of big, bombastic violence against Americans. Turned out we were all wrong, though.

Well, Tea Partiers, I hate to tell  you this, but that's how a lot of liberals see you these days. 

Why?

Because we take Tea Party -- and Republican -- rhetoric seriously.

And that rhetoric has been liberal, to say the least, in its use of language deploying terms of violence and revolution.

* "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." A Jefferson quote that found great currency at Tea Party rallies.

* "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. They're saying: My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?" Sharron Angle, 2010's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, in her campaign against Harry Reid.

* "I'm not saying the Democrats are fascists. I'm saying the government under Bush and under Obama and under all of the presidents that we've seen or at least most of the presidents that we've seen for quite some time are slowly but surely moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism." Glenn Beck, sounding off on a theme he has pursued tenaciously over the last two years. 

* "This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I've seen in the 19 years I've been in Washington." Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, upon passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.

I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. But I won't. Some of these folks are at the fringe of respectable discourse, but a remarkable number of them are well within the mainstream of our country's dialogue. The message from both elected officials and Tea Partiers in the street has been clear and consistent:

* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.

* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.

All this comes from a movement that cherishes the Second Amendment -- not just because folks want to go hunting and keep their families safe, but in large part because they believe that the threat of armed rebellion will keep the government in line. 

As Matt Yglesias says: "If you believed, as Beck purports to, that progressive agenda is a form of totalitarianism wouldn't violent remedies be appropriate?"

It's not as though we haven't been down this road before. Those of us on the left remember the Clinton Administration for many unhappy events, but chief among them was (coming full circle) Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government radical who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. We remember G. Gordon Liddy telling listeners to take "head shots" at ATF agents and somehow remaining a member in good standing on conservative talk radio to this day.

I know a number of my conservative friends believe that political point-scoring was behind the left's immediate effort to blame the Giffords shooting on right-wing rhetoric. I have no doubt there was some of that. We all know how the cycle works by now.

But Tea Partiers and conservatives have spent two years employing the rhetoric of violence and revolt. Yes, there are occasional similar efforts on the left -- but really, the phenomenon belongs almost exclusively to the right. Some of us take the rhetoric seriously. We're meant to take the rhetoric seriously, I think. 

So while I think it was wrong for my friends on the left to jump to conclusions, I have frankly little pity for conservatives who are indignant about that jumping. You've spent the last two years crying wolf. Are we to be blamed for believing you believe what you say? And if we believe that you believe what you say, can you blame us for making certain assumptions when a Democratic congresswoman ends up with a bullet in her brain?

If you don't like those assumptions, friends, there's something you can do: Stop playing make-believe with the language of armed revolt. We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it.