Look: The thing is, when you are writing political copy or giving a political speech, you should always remember that you are speaking to the craziest person who will read your message. Any government official who has held a town meeting or been required to sift through every public comment on an issue knows this. Crazy people gravitate toward politics, because politics is supposed to be all-inclusive. Politics is the discourse of the people, and it’s the one public sphere where nobody is supposed to be disenfranchised. That’s why stuffy people hate to go to the library—because all of the people they try hard to ignore on the street are welcome there. When you traffic in the language of politics, you’re writing to them. They feel empowerment in politics. And when politics goes crazy, they go crazier.

You should read MightyGodKing’s reaction to the shooting. He makes some very important points I haven’t read anywhere else:

But most paranoids don’t go out killing people; the tinfoil hats and hoarding is usually enough to get them by. So what happened with Jared Loughner? The same thing that happened with Andrew Stack when he flew his plane into an IRS building, or Byron Williams when he decided he had to go shoot up the Tides Federation and the ACLU, or James von Brunn when he shot up the Holocaust Museum, or Jim Adkisson when he decided to shoot up a Unitarian Church, or Richard Poplawski when he shot up a bunch of cops, or Nidal Hasan when he shot up Fort Hood.

I threw that last one in there in purpose, because back when Nidal Hasan — somebody who was obviously mentally disturbed — committed his crime, there were no shortage of people who were willing to say that radical Islam influenced his actions even if he was a nutbag. Now, this is not to say that Sarah Palin is equivalent to Osama Bin Laden; of course she isn’t. Bin Laden is a terrorist; Palin is just a generally terrible human being.

But she, and more importantly the modern conservative movement, uses the violent rhetoric of uprise and uses it routinely.

Not bad for a Canadian. Please go read the whole thing.

8 replies on “Politics and the Shooting”

  1. Plus, as my very wise wife pointed out – political speech is *intended* to persuade people. So you ought to be careful you;re not literally persuading them to “reload”.

  2. Please, there is nothing new there. This is the same bullshit armchair analysis we’ve been getting for 3 days straight. The only “context” that seems to be getting the short shrift is the actual context of this mentally ill guy who had a personal problem with Giffords going back to 2007 when she didn’t adequately answer his question of, “What is government if words have no meaning?” when he attended one of her events.

  3. It’s just more of the typical right-wing disassociation: when the nut-bag holds a set of beliefs different from their’s, they’re a “deranged terrorist”; when the nut-bag holds the same set of beliefs as their’s, they’re just “deranged”.

  4. Ahhhh, so we can blame your anti-police and anti-law and order idiocy for  left wing cop killers like Chris Montfort and Maurice Clemmons! Great!

  6. It seems like stuffy people love the library. Maybe you were thinking classist?

    And, as a classist blowhard, I don’t mind the library since the hoi polloi are forced to behave themselves there, unlike on the bus or on the street.

  7. Harry Shearer touched on that this morning:

    Now comes another view, at least from me. This country has had toxic political rhetoric since its birth pangs, and there has undeniably followed in the past two centuries an occasional outbreak of political violence. But now we’re being told that toxic political rhetoric is dangerous, because of its possible effect on the less rational, more mentally unhinged folks among us. So, maybe it’s time to ask this question: Why are they among us?

    In the bad old days, this nation had a system of mental hospitals — sad, dreary institutions in which the unhinged were quite often warehoused, sometimes for life. The worst of them were exposed as “snake pits,” cruel and uncaring, and a reform movement sprang up. We should, we were told (by, among others, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan), close down these shameful institutions, and return the patients to their communities, where a system of community-based mental health clinics would administer care that was, well, more caring.

    So we closed down the mental hospitals. And we neglected to set up community mental health clinics. And suddenly we had a crisis of homeless people, many if not most of whom were mentally ill.

    And now we have this: a society where we’re being lectured to temper our political rhetoric lest we inflame the crazies to acts of violence.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shea…

  8. There are some assumptions being made about Loughner’s motivations which might turn out to be completely wrong. Remember John Hinckley shot Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster. Loughner might have been influenced by right wing rhetoric, but its also possible that he was completely detached from reality.

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