It is how the GOP operates, and how it will always operate.

This is how people act when they have nothing truly constructive to offer society. Blame the other guy and distract everyone.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that if the guy with the gun in his hands had shot a preacher or a teacher, conservatives would be as much about blaming the broader society (specifically liberalism) as liberals are now (specifically conservatism).

@3 You're probably right, but even then it would depend on what type of preacher or teacher, in the same way that it matters to liberal commentators that it was a Democratic Congresswoman from a predominately red state that got shot. Take George Tiller's murder - anti-abortion conservatives showed no concern or disgust that he was shot during a church service, because it was an ELCA (liberal) Lutheran church that was willing to have him as a member.

You know, I want to think that this is just a lone nutcase. But when there's a huge increase in creepy gun rhetoric and demonizing of liberals among right-wing politicians, and this just so happens to coincide with a huge increase in death threats against (mostly liberal) politicians, I just can't believe that it's just a big ol' coincidence when a liberal politician is then shot in the head.

Even if the guy is just a mentally ill centrist with no left or right-wing affiliation, the gun rhetoric is still partially responsible. Violent rhetoric in mainstream politics elevates things, and this can easily be a catalyst that pushes a crazy person over the edge and encourages them to take crazy action. So even if his personal reasons have more to do with "Masonic lizard men from Atlantis" conspiracies and less to do with "Kenyan socialist health care death panel" conspiracies, he can still easily have been emboldened by the general political atmosphere that not-so-subtly equates political action with shooting the fuck out of people.

Conservatives are all about personal responsiblity. Basic tenet is that people should be punished for every bad choice, why should society pay? If you're poor, anything can and should happen to you.

And yet, when it is time for them to take accountability for their actions, they can't do it. Whether it is soliciting guys in a MN bathroom or being responsible for tweets or website content, all they can do is try to obfuscate. Lie, cheat and steal. Do they have no shame?

It may well be that the suspect Lee Loughner will prove to be a highly deranged and unstable individual. That certainly is the way he's being spun, and not without evidence to support it. But it would be folly to automatically assume that his actions occurred in a vacuum somehow uninfluenced by the events of collapse that we see all around us. Fear is everywhere.

@7, I don't think it matters if his gold and silver standard views are more in line with Ron Paul.

The point is that Giffords opponent held a “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16″ event to “Get on Target” and “Remove Gabrielle Giffords.” The point is that Palin's website reinforced such images by showing a scope site in Arizona for Giffords.

And now, morons are the right are going to try to say that both parties are doing it. Both parties are not doing that, and Conservative nutbags can take responsibility for the climate they created. The double-standard from the right is laughable, and that's the point 'nobody at all'

Budiansky's comment is like an echo of the exact conversation I had yesterday with somebody who was complaining about Liberals projecting their politics on a "tragedy."

I kinda agree that lots of lefties were almost gleeful trying to retro-fit any fact about the shooter into some Teabagger conspiracy. Which was fucking irritating. But the fact is the right in this country has become increasingly hostile and violent in it's mainstream rhetoric over the last two decades. What used to be fringe - calling a sitting president a traitorous communist secret spy or showing up to civic meetings and polling stations openly armed, a candidate openly encouraging "Second Amendment Solutions - is now fully "legitimized" and rationalized by rightwing pundits.

And it's going to be legitimized by more and more left wingers eventually. Nobody likes to be bullied and pushed around forever.

That's where we have crossed an insanely dangerous line. Our political leaders are supposed to be the adults calming everybody else the fuck down. Not anymore. The adults are not in charge anymore.

I tell you this. When I see these stupid as shit bubbah's showing up to rally's packing assault rifles there is growing irrational voice in my head that says "What the fuck! Maybe I better come here packing!" And I know I'm not the only one. And that's the last thing we need.

It's precisely this kind of hair trigger climate that touches off things like civil wars. The Bosnian war comes immediately to mind.

The fact is the Right has realized one truth. The Left won the culture wars. The Right's culture is an abysmal failure. Even a cursory examination of statistics in conservative dominated congressional districts will show you how much worse the general symptoms of social decay are. From teen pregnancy and divorce to erectile dysfunction and foreclosures (Though Texas oddly has some interesting anomalies there).

All these fuckers have remaining is to blame the left and bring it all down with them. Like some obese moron drowning in pool of their own shit and holding on to a 100lb lead bible... and you.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime . . . upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%.

It depends on whose ox is being gored.

If some 22 year old kid murdered a Republican representative who had been in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts and there had been a popular song at the time with the lyrics "fuck the right-wing bastards / cuttin' taxes on the rich / fuck 'em with some hot lead / fuck 'em like a bitch" then righties would be screaming that the artist bore some responsibility and demanding an apology from the aritst, and lefties would be saying "bullshit. you can't blame lyrics for the actions of an angry loner who's crazy."

As I recall, most liberals at the time scoffed at and ridiculed the arguments and pleas of the wife of a prominent Democrat. From the introduction to her 1987 book...

A small but immensely successful minority of performers have pioneered the "porn rock" phenomenon. A Judas Priest song about oral sex at gunpoint sold two million copies. So did Mötley Crüe's album Shout at the Devil, with lyrics like: "Not a woman, but a whore/I can taste the hate/Well, now I'm killing you/Watch your face turning blue."

There's definitely ridiculous rhetoric coming from both sides, but while the left's rhetoric seems to come from the fringe the right's hate-spouting seems to be much more mainstream (see an ex-Vice Presidential candidate putting crosshairs on Democratic candidates). Then again, I could be seeing things through my liberal glasses and the left could be equally culpable.

@12 Time to stop thinking you can see anything besides through your liberal glasses. The point is that we have a point to make about the nature of the rhetoric being used against liberals and the conservatives refuse to acknowledge that it's legitimate.

The conservative machine is creating a violent mob and it's time for moderates of all stripes to stand up to it. No more equivocating about "If it had been a conservative Congressperson shot ..." It wasn't. And we can all see the link between Sarah Palin's crosshair map and that particular Congresswoman being shot.

If the machine had any decency or sense of the enormity of an assassination attempt against a US Congresswoman, they'd say "Maybe we should step it back a little bit," instead of "They were surveyors' marks." Because if they don't, they'll lose control of their mob soon enough.

I agree with @13. Conservatives obviously feel they have something to gain by creating an angry mob. I imagine their goal is steal all the money they can while avoiding any discussion about it. Even now, they don't want to talk about their angry rhetoric. Fine then, let's talk about gun control. Oh wait, they refuse to talk about that too based on the fact that there is no legitmate chance of a bill making it to the floor of the House. All they want to do is huddle and pray. It's never the right time for discussion of anything of substance. The time for equivocating is long past.

10: So far I haven't heard any liberals hypothesize that this is part of a teabagger conspiracy. Most everyone is saying that it's a consequence of violent teabagger rhetoric.

Our reality is rhetorical--we really have no way of knowing the world on its own terms: our understandings are all managed by the ways we talk about things, the words we use, the stories we tell, etc. This doesn't mean that we will be automatically influenced by rhetoric; otherwise, we'd have incidents like this happening constantly. What does happen is that rhetoric normalizes things--makes it seem natural and the right thing to do. So, no; Sarah Palin or Giffords' opponent or Glen Beck did not _cause_ this shooting to happen, but they certainly played a role in setting up the narrative, in creating the reality that liberals need to be stopped with force, if necessary.

Historically, this is not unusual at all. The term applied is "Eliminationist Rhetoric" (see book by Dave Neiwert), and this same basic way of talking about political opponents or any others (not just disagreeing, but saying since they disagree, they must be driven out or destroyed) is part of this country's history with African-Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, and many more.

@ 10 has a point. This country is having a collective nervous melt-down. It is getting worse, and reality--and rationality--in public discourse is slipping away from us. No way back up until we hit rock bottom.

What disturbs me even more than the prospect of more assassinations is the likelihood of Republicans (who now have total control of 16 state governments) removing Obama from the 2012 ballot, making it quite easy for any extremist wingnut nominee of theirs to be elected.

Nice piece.

@11: Budiansky's point is that the same sort of violent rhetoric that's coming from Republican political candidates/elected officials isn't coming from the Democratic ones. The Left will always have e.g. musical groups like Rage Against the Machine or The Coup, but there are several differences between that and candidates or "News" pundits advocating violence.
1) While artists like those mentioned occasionally single-out specific politicians they see as exceptionally problematic, most of the vitriol is directed at the way our entire social system is organized. It's not opposing nor supporting a political party within our system, it's calling for a dismantling and restructuring of the way we do society. While this could certainly contribute to (perhaps not entirely unjustifiable, given the problematic nature of our system for the Global South and the destitute in our own country) anti-government violence, it's not a case of one political party singling out members of the opposing party for violence, as is the case with several of the Tea Party candidates and their FOX News propaganda machine (or I should probably say "the FOX News political party and its Tea Party candidates").
2) There's a big difference between the two camps in the potential legitimacy of using violence. Whereas the Left-wing radical calls to violence are in opposition to oppressive systems of enforced poverty (resulting in miserable deaths by starvation, exposure, and treatable illness) and state-sponsored violence, the Right-wing calls to violence are for things like defending lower taxes for the extremely wealthy (how got that way by exploiting everyone else), not taking care of sick people, not giving food to starving people, not creating housing for the homeless, basically defending the "right" of people to abuse and fuck-over other people for short-term personal gain. I don't think we're at that point yet where violence is justified, but once we hit it (it's not a matter of "if", historically we've always hit that point eventually), there's a big difference between shooting the guy trying to institute a secret police force that can and does abduct and detain citizens critical of fascist policies and shooting the guy who's trying to establish an optional publicly-run non-profit insurance pool, or charge someone making $150,000 a year a few thousand more in taxes. The Right supports violence to defend systems of exploitation and privilege; the Left supports violence to defend the lives and well-being of all people within a society. These are not even close to the same thing.

All that said, I DON'T think we should be out blaming Palin or FOX for this shooting; it's all of our responsibility not to tone rhetoric down but to make sure people are armed with the intellectual tools necessary to dissect and analyze that rhetoric and to care for and guide people who don't have those abilities into socially-productive courses of action. This guy's friends and family failed in this regard. His community failed to find a functional space in which to include him. (It's still not their "faults", though I never really understood the point of assigning culpability anyway; that's a reactionary, placating practice, when we need solution-oriented action.) I think the FOX folks are despicable disingenuous motherfuckers who are actively doing what they can to back policies enabling a form of corporate feudalism, but I still think they should be permitted to say what they want. There is no "too far" when it comes to free speech, because we only need to protect those things that the majority find objectionable.

Think long and hard about condemning, universally and on-principle, vitriolic or violent rhetoric that motivates actual violence. She wasn't, but what if Giffords had been, instead of a Congressional Representative, part of Miloshevich's government or Hutu militia leadership when they were pursuing ethnic cleansing? Would violent rhetoric advocating their murders be bad then? Should we stop the violent rhetoric surrounding Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda because rhetoric advocating violence is just plain wrong? Hell, what if health insurance regulation and half-assed financial-sector regulation and environmental regulation REALLY WERE fascist plots to strip our freedoms and turn us all into labor-drones working to support a corrupt state (that happens to be spending its money on supporting masses of lazy poor people who don't need to work? I don't really understand the Right-wing narrative, because it's self-contradicting and makes no fucking sense). I realize that plenty of people might think these would be/are wrong, in which case the call is not inconsistent; I disagree that violence is always bad, mainly because Pacifism only works as a resistance strategy if it's functioning to motivate non-Pacifist entities to threaten or exercise violence against the target-of-resistance - otherwise you just get slaughtered, and the "moral high ground" is useless if you're dead. It's not the principle that's problematic, it's the specific deployment, and it's problematic because the Right-wing pundits are lying in order to advocate morally-objectionable social and legal policies.

This was a tragic event, hands down. The problem, the "cause", is that we have created a culture where this young man (delusional or no) thought that shooting these people was a good idea, something that would somehow make things better for himself or others in the long run, and was able to execute his plan. The Right-wing isn't to blame because of its rhetoric, it's to blame (and I'm including Free Marketeers, Deregulators, and anti-Socialists who identify as Democrat here) because of its actions, dismantling and opposing the sort of social services systems that could have backed friends/family and community in guiding the shooter's actions to healthy, pro-social ends.

Modern information technology means that the lone crazy person is never really alone. They can access re-enforcing viewpoints from any public library. You don't really need a "terrorist organization" when everyone can just contribute youtube videos and discussion board posts egging each other on in a disorganized fashion. No one has to take any blame except the shooter.

The attitude of the Right wing has been one of encouraging this for a while. I think your average GOP congressperson or senator knows this could bite them in the ass (probably in the form of pipebomb shrapnel), but they aren't willing to break with their increasingly radicalized base.

Right... And it's all conservatives. Where was the outcry when liberals made a "documentary" film about the asasination of Bush? I wonder how the left would react to a similar film about "if they bring a knife, we bring a gun" Obama.

This is bullshit. The problem is that we do not forcibly institutionalize the mentally ill any more... This communist manifesto reading, skull worshiping, athiest (not your standard tea party tags...) nut bag should have been locked away in a loony bin way back when.

@ 21 That film was British, and if you'd seen it, you'd have realized that it featured Bush simply because he was in office at the time. If that film was made now, it would feature Obama.

It IS a "liberal" film, but it doesn't attack Bush personally. Instead, it's a rather intelligent take on what's dangerous about the current vindicative American mentalilty.

Everyone in the US should see it. But of course, no one will.

I cannot beleive we all have had this staring in our faces for nearly 40 years, yet just now someone articulates it so perfectly.