I was struck by today’s response of Sarah Palin to criticism that her rhetoric and “targeting” of Rep. Gifford’s district may have added to the recent massacre in Tucson. In fairness to Palin, the family stated today that Jared Loughner did not watch news or listen to talk radio. However, I was most interested in her claim that the attacks against her and conservative commentators amounted to a “blood libel.”
On her Facebook page, Palin has the following comments:
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.
There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.
Of course, she is not speaking of actual libel. Such criticism of the over-the-top rhetoric of conservative commentators is clearly opinion and not defamation.
“Blood libel” is a term usually associated with religious groups who are accused to killing innocents. Blood libels have a strong anti-Semitic history, such as claims that Jews feed on the flesh or blood of innocent children. For that reason, the Anti-Defamation League has denounced the use of the term — though I do not believe that the simple use of this term is evidence of any anti-semiticism by Palin.
That is a pretty loaded term to use for the criticism over violent terminology and over-heated rhetoric. Indeed, it seems to emphasize a degree of persecution. There is probably some distance between dueling and discourse.
The closest term in torts is “group libel” which (as discussed earlier) is generally difficult to establish.
If either term is relevant, there appears to be an ongoing effort on both sides to tag the other with the massacre. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stated “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information. . . [Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.”
Limbaugh has reportedly fired back by saying that the Democratic Party supports Loughner and is “attempting to find anybody but him to blame.”
In the meantime, members are moving toward a spasm of new laws to criminalize speech.
There is of course another obvious possibility: Loughner is mentally unstable and fully motivated by his own personal demons. Of course, this does not mean that we should not reexamine the rhetoric of our politics.
Frankly, I also share the concern of conservative commentators with politicians like Bernie Sanders (who I agree with on many issues) referring to the massacre in fundraising appeals. This massacre has somehow become about the politicians as opposed to the killer or the victims. That alone says something about the state of our politics.
Jonathan Turley
Bob,Esq.,
I don’t support assigning any blame for the shooting to a specific group, much less an individual in the media, without additional information about why the shooting occurred.
However, the fact that the shooting occurred during a time in which the nation is experiencing particularly divisive rhetoric (with a whole movement devoted to fetishizing the idea of revolution) and that the political situation was particularly divisive where the shooting occurred, has focused public attention on that rhetoric. Calling out problem rhetoric isn’t the same as assigning blame, even if it was motivated by the shooting.
I didn’t say lying was acceptable, Bob, so don’t put words in my mouth.
I’ve said is that inciting rhetoric appeals to the mentally unstable. Whether or not it appealed to this particular lunatic is beside the point.
I’ve said a change in circumstance has given rise to a condition that creates tactical advantage to neutralize an actual danger – namely inciting violent rhetoric.
A feint is not a lie.
It’s a tactical misdirection.
If you disagree with the tactical decision, that’s fine.
I am not, however, lying or endorsing lying.
You want a legal definition of causal connection, but this isn’t court proper.
Direct or proximate cause is not required. No one is talking prosecution. That would require a lie (barring contrary forthcoming evidence if any).
It’s the court of public opinion and as such operates by different rules and has different acceptable tactics. What is required is simply any mechanism that gets people to think about the problem you wish to address. Cybernetic “combat” – propaganda and anti-propaganda – operates on different axioms than adversarial process.
Minimal proof or no proof is required when you simply wish to draw attention to a problem that speaks for itself. Simply drawing the attention is sufficient.
Mike Spindell,
I’m sorry you are ending your participation on this thread because I wanted to tell you how very much I appreciated your post on January 13, 2011 at 11:29 am.
My fault for not doing so sooner.
Call me crazy but I don’t consider lying about the existence of a nexus between the shooting in Tuscon and the hate-rhetoric on the right to be good ‘tactics.’ There is no ultimate tactical advantage in mortgaging your credibility. Case in point, you’ve stated that lying is acceptable outside of a court of law.
Morally speaking, your argument is no more convincing than Nixon claiming “When the president does it, it’s legal.”
Bob,
Taking tactical advantage of a change in the field of operation isn’t intellectually dishonest. It’s good tactics. Consider that inciting rhetoric is the terrain. Sun Tzu said, ”
The principle governing contested terrain is that if you let the enemy have it, you can get it, but if you try to get it you will lose it. If the enemy has occupied the contested terrain, move carefully and do not attack him. Feign retreat and withdraw. Set up flags and sound the drums, hasten to the enemy’s most vital points. Drag brush behind the troops raise the dust to confuse the ears and eyes of the enemy. Separate off our best troops and lay them secretly in ambush. The enemy must come out to the rescue. What he wants we give him. and what he abandons we take. This is the way of contested terrain.”
Neutralization by marginalization is analogous to the this tactic.
If I were calling to prosecute the hate/fear mongers for the Tuscon episode? That would be intellectually dishonest and analogous to attacking directly.
This is simply forcing them to defend the indefensible.
Thus they are ejected from the terrain in question.
Buddha,
Again, while I agree with your motives and your desired objectives, they’re rendered completely irrelevant if your means are intellectually dishonest.
Or even proximate cause. (previous post written before I saw your last post)
If you require direct causal connection to take on destructive rhetoric? Can’t help you, Bob. Direct causal connection or not, this event has put such incitement in the spotlight. And be it an artificial light source or sunlight, it’s still a great disinfectant. If we were talking about prosecuting the likes of Angle and Limbaugh, I’d be with you, but we’re not. We’re talking about neutralizing their ability to effectively incite violence.
Show me a nexus (proximate cause) between Laughner’s actions and the rhetoric of Palin, Bachman & Angle, and you’ve got yourself a sledgehammer. Till then…
Buddha,
Much as I loathe Palin, Angle, Bachman & Beck, I will not dispense with reason and rationality to ‘make my case.’
Drawing a nexus between Laughner and the rhetoric of the usual suspects above is no more moral than Bush connecting 9/11 to Saddam Hussein.
What’s worse?
Neutralizing a rabid dog upon recognition of visible problems?
Or waiting for it to bite someone and run rabies tests before neutralization?
It’s no contest.
What’s worse?
The rhetoric of Palin, Angle & Bachman?
Or using a tragedy to falsify a case against them based on no evidence whatsoever?
Deontologically speaking, I’d say it’s a tie.
And now a word from one of the victims . . .
“Eric Fuller, 63, who was struck by a bullet in the hail of gunfire in Tucson that killed six and wounded 13 on Saturday, claimed Thursday that conservative figureheads such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Sharron Angle were to blame for the violence in Arizona.
‘How many more demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target,’ Fuller, a former campaigner for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), told Democracy Now.
‘Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled — senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls,’ he added, reading from comments he said he had written down while being treated for his wounds.
Fuller was taking part in Giffords’ ‘Congress on Your Corner’ meet-and-greet when he was shot in the back of the knee and grazed in the back.” [emphasis added]
Oh yeah.
Like Krauthammer doesn’t have a dog in this race.
What with him being a Neocon cheerleader and all.
Rae:
that sounds like someone we both know.
Charles Krauthammer: Climate of hate charges are scurrilous
“WASHINGTON — The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.
The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.
As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings — and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him — there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.
Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated.
There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. “His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world,” said the teacher of Loughner’s philosophy class at Pima Community College. “He was very disconnected from reality,” said classmate Lydian Ali. “You know how it is when you talk to someone who’s mentally ill and they’re just not there?” said neighbor Jason Johnson. “It was like he was in his own world.”
His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,” reported The Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.
This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder — ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class “I sit by the door with my purse handy” so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords back to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no tea party or health care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”
Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.
Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest. That’s why the language persists. That’s why we say without any self-consciousness such things as “battleground states” or “targeting” opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest — “campaign” — is an appropriation from warfare.
When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at (it)” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.
Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel’s little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd — unless you’re The New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.
The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness.”
JWNTWACK-BBBGIR-ADWAD
Nate,
I’m blushing.
Lemur,
Really?
I’m not the one making up definitions for political ideologies that are polar opposites of the their actual definition, Brownie.
The only thing divorced from reality here is apparently your head.
Thanks, James.
does my discourse bother you James?
Good, the left has left a large brown stain on this country for years.
By the way I don’t watch Glen Beck. I am usually working at that hour of the day. Now I do like John Stossel’s and Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show.
Buddha is Laughing:
You really don’t know “brown” about the Tea Party. And your assertion about the left is humorous at best. Really not even worthy of comment due to it’s disassociation from reality.