Congresswoman Gi
ffords, seriously wounded, and six innocent by-standers, all mown down by gunfire, are the victims of another deranged loner who America’s laws allows to carry a gun with impunity. But Congresswoman Giffords is also a Democrat who voted for President Obama’s healthcare bill, and who supports abortion. Her seat was one of 20 targeted by Mrs. Palin for taking back, illustrated by the helpful device of a rifle crosshairs over the seat on a map of the USA.
Now Mrs. Palin’s aggressive imagery – she also talks of not rereating but ‘re-loading’ – may or may not have directly influenced the killer of Judge John Rolls and the wounder of Congresswoman Giffords, but it is part of an increasingly poisonous political atmosphere in America. In the hours following the tragic event in Tucson, which has also seen the death of a 9 year old girl, taken to see the Congresswoman because she had recently been elected to her school’s student council and developed an early interes in politics, the political blame game has ratcheted up. Some extreme commenters on internet sites have tried to blame Mrs. Palin directly for the shooting. Clearly ridiculous. This in turn has led conservative commentators to launch shrill defences of the Chosen One in their turn. The British blogger Cranmer, a usually thoughtful and stimulating writer, has produced arguably one of his worst ever posts where he has sought to caricature the critics of Mrs. Palin by focusing on the lunatic fringe, and paint her as a martyr for the lovely, sensitive right.
In fact, there is a serious case for the right in America to answer. This is the right of extreme rhetoric, gun-toting imagery and shock jock talk radio hosts. The judge who was killed in the shooting had himself been the target of ferocious and murderous abuse from these people. Mrs. Palin glories in her polarising status. She has removed her infamous cross-hairs graphic (why, if it was so innocent?). A blogger on the Daily Kos blog (liberal leaning) sums up the right-wing problem thus:
Those whose violent, eliminationist rhetoric has polluted the air waves and other media for the past couple of decades, ramping itself up a little more each year, especially with the arrival of an African American in the White House, are, of course, denying that the shootings of a Congresswoman, a judge, a child and bystanders on a street corner in Arizona have anything to do with their savage words. No surprise. One thing they’re good at is refusing to accept any responsibility for the consequences of this murderous talk, whether it’s Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building or Scott Roeder assassinating a doctor.
The Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, similarly raises the issue of whether vitriolic and bigoted rhetoric might not have had an influence on the unbalanced mind of the shooter. Sarah Palin didn’t shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But she is the high priestess of an increasingly intolerant and aggressive politics that creates the atmosphere for just such an action. As a final thought, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish offered this reflection on 1963 from William Manchester’s ‘Death of a President’:
“In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .”
