Quote of the Day Last Week

"Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you've got? That's a question that I think has to be asked. It's certainly possible that we've all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I'm not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people."

-- Matt Taibbi, posted over at his Rolling Stone blog not long after the Tucson shooting

Yeah, I'm late to the party with everything these days. Good news on the horizon, though, folks -- really good news. I'll be getting into it a little more over the next couple of days; suffice it to say, output here is likely to finally get back to respectable levels by this time next week.

Quote of the Day

"That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations... I want America to be as good as she imagined it."

-- President Barack Obama

Fair Imbalance

In case you haven't been paying close attention during all the back and forth over the current state of our political discourse, the absurd "both sides" meme has returned with a vengeance over the past couple of days. The claim, of course -- generally heard from the side accused correctly of trafficking most in irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric -- is that, well, both sides are guilty of trafficking in irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric. It's bullshit -- but you hear it a lot.

Well, now there's this from CBS News, which conducted a poll to try to pin down just who's behind all the anger:

"The poll also shows that while three in four Americans say violence against the government is never justified, 16 percent say it can be justified -- the same percentage that said as much in April. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans said such violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of Democrats and independents."

Anybody surprised? Anybody?

First of all, at this point, after what we now know about Jared Loughner, I'm not saying that he was some right-wing stooge who took the words of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin to heart and acted on them. He's much more your garden variety whack-job whose ideology is, predictably, all over the place. But there remains the possibility that the overall climate of unfocused rage in Arizona may have fed his psychosis -- and the discussion about how far things have gone in this country when it comes to politically based outrage is one worth having, regardless.

What the above poll clearly shows, though, is that, no, both sides of the political spectrum aren't dispensing the same brand of dangerous invective; they don't subscribe to the same consistently stoked anti-government paranoia or, let's face it, possess the same fetishistic view of militarism -- that worship of gun culture or innate horseshit frontier mentality that still, in 2011, believes that it might only be a matter of time before they have to pull a John Wayne and grab their rifle to defend what's theirs, en masse. I'm damn well not saying that everyone on the right is like this, only that most who are like this are on the right; it's part of their ideological DNA.

And it's adopted as a cynical sales pitch by people like Sarah Palin, who plays the entirely fictional role of Caribou Barbie on her reality TV show -- hunting "wild game" while a make-up tent and craft services spread sits directly off-camera.


Or Glenn Beck, who strikes a Jack Bauer-esque pose -- complete with handgun -- on his website, despite the fact that if he were ever really put in a live-fire situation, he'd almost certainly cower in a corner and cry like a four-year-old.


(h/t Kevin)

Enough Is Enough

I realize this will sound a tad hypocritical given all my whining about the need to tone down the violent rhetoric, but, let's face it, there have to be one or two things in this world we can all agree on.

So with that in mind, can somebody please just finally beat the fucking shit out of Fred Phelps and the psychos in the Westboro Baptist Church?

Please?

The Village Voice: Westboro Baptist Church To Picket Funeral of Tucson Shooting Victims, Including 9-Year-Old Christina Green/1.11.11

(By the way, it pains me to no end to put a picture of this little girl up next to my own rage and the mere mention of Fred Phelps's name, but I wanted to make the point crystal clear.)

Quote of the Day

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry... It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. And that's the sad thing of what's going on in America. Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office... Let me just say one thing, because people tend to poo-poo this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it's not without consequences."

-- Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

The momentous nature of this comment, coming as it did from a public official, simply can't be overstated. If by some miracle the unconscionable attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords -- as well as the murder of, among others, Judge John Roll, Congressional Aide Gabe Zimmerman and 9-year-old Christina Green, who was born, ironically, on September 11th, 2001 -- becomes a turning point in our national discourse, then Sheriff Dupnik's call against arms may very well stand as the Cronkite-saying-we-can't-win moment of this repugnant era.

It may seem like such a pedestrian observation to those who've closely followed the increase in irresponsibly incendiary rhetoric within our national politics, but make no mistake: what Sheriff Dupnik said took unbelievable balls. The man is a hero and he's owed a huge debt of gratitude for taking those who even indirectly incite violence to task. And no matter how much they deny, misdirect and obfuscate -- they know who they are.

That Is the Sound of Inevitability

While we're still in the early stages of fact-gathering following the attempted assassination of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona -- and I really don't like to jump to conclusions -- I can't deny the terrible feeling I immediately got when I heard about this.

It was heightened when I read this quote in the piece about the shooting currently running in the New York Times:

"During the fall campaign, Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, posted a controversial map on her Facebook page depicting spots where Democrats were running for re-election; those Democrats were noted by crosshairs symbols like those seen through the scope of a gun. Ms. Giffords was among those on Ms. Palin’s map."

So, yeah, anybody wanna put any bets down?

(Update: I likely won't be sitting here adding little tidbits as they come in all night -- there's the Huffington Post and Twitter for that -- but one thing is really worth reminding people in all of this: A federal judge and a nine-year-old girl are among the dead. Just unbelievable.)