As many of you have already known, Sarah Palin released a video today about the Tucson shootings. Instead of taking the opportunity to exhibit leadership, she made herself the victim and threw red meat to her base.
Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.
The excerpt everyone is talking about refers to “blood libel:”
Second, her core accusation on the video, the one that was clearly selected with an intent to drive headlines, not only accuses critics of “blood libel,” but actually accuses them of expressing concern and outrage about the shooting in bad faith, as if they are doing so in an effort to do nothing more than damage her politically:
Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
Words can’t express how vile this paragraph is. First of all, I’m not sure if Sarah Palin knows what “blood libel” means.
Blood libel is a term that usually refers to an ancient falsehood that Jews use the blood of Christian children in religious rituals. For hundreds of years, particularly during the Middle Ages, it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews in the street and their expulsion from entire countries. “Blood libel” is not wrongfully assigning guilt to an individual for murder, but rather assigning guilt collectively to an entire group of people and then using it to justify violence against them.
Did Palin know or care how offensive it is to use that term in reference to the attempted assassination of a Jewish Congresswoman? It’s beyond disgusting. Her message is also striking in its incoherence. In one paragraph she says that criticizing Sarah Palin will cause violence but her earlier message was that Loughner was a deranged loner who wasn’t affected by political speech. It’s also incredibly tone deaf to reference dueling with regards to a mass shooting.
Sarah Palin thinks we should use this opportunity to reflect on how we’ve hurt Sarah Palin. But the criticism is about more than Sarah Palin. Palin is a convenient target because she is one of the biggest names that is indulging in rightwing militaristic paranoid speech.
Harold Meyerson adds something really important today to the broader discussion on the effect of political speech and puts his finger on what I think a lot of people were having trouble articulating. It’s not really the martial metaphors that are the issue it’s the culture of paranoia being stoked by the right and most of it is aimed at the government and government officials.
The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today’s America isn’t that it incites violence per se. It’s that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism’s domestic adversaries.
Much of the culture and thinking of the American right – the mainstream as well as the fringe – has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn’t have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it’s the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.
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As much of the right sees it, the government is planning to incarcerate its enemies (see Beck and Erickson, above), socialize the economy and take away everyone’s guns. At the fringe, we have figures like Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America, who told a rally in Washington last April that, “We’re in a war. The other side knows they are at war, because they started it. They are coming for our freedom, for our money, for our kids, for our property. They are coming for everything because they are a bunch of socialists.”
But the imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the default rhetoric of the right. Never mind that Obama is a Marxist, a Kenyan and an advocate of sharia law. Consider the plight of poor Fred Upton, the Republican congressman just installed as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, over considerable right-wing opposition. According to Beck, Upton is “all socialist,” while Rush Limbaugh calls him the personification of “nannyism” and “statism.” Upton’s crime is that he supports more energy-efficient light bulbs. How that puts him in a league with Marx, Engels and Nanny McPhee, I will leave to subtler minds.
I think you’ll recognize a lot of this speech from people like Palin and Christine O’Donnell. We’ve heard about the danger that Michelle Obama will steal our cupcakes and that Congress will restrict our lightbulbs. Modest regulatory proposals are met with extreme vitriol from the right, even things they once supported (like cap & trade).
How do we take our political discourse away from the abyss? Perhaps I’m longing for days that have never been but this is as bad as I’ve seen in my lifetime. The events of the last few days have shown that people aren’t ready to face this yet. I just hope things don’t get worse before they get better.