Fighting the American Taliban

The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords has both galvanized the nation and sent us all scurrying back to our respective camps. 

I am disgusted and saddened with both the whole event and the lack of intellectual integrity I believe being shown by certain folks regarding this matter and would like to make a few observations.


Don't tell me that the shooter is a liberal lunatic because he read the Communist Manifesto in high school. I was weaned in the civil rights movement and the sixties and in fifty plus years have known maybe one liberal who pronounced himself a communist. He happened to live in Israel. Now you republicans might identify liberals as marxists or communists but I have got news for you, we liberals don't and except in very rare cases, never have.


It is a fact that since the sixties, when you had a few depraved acts by the SLA and the Weathermen, political violence has been almost exclusively the province of the right wing. Scott Roeder, the killer of George Tiller, the bomber Eric Rudolph, Tim McVeigh. The Alan Berg killing. A host of other shooters and bombers of abortion doctors and clinics.


I was on my conservative friend's website and was told that the right would take responsibility for Loughner when the left took responsibility for Major Hassan and the 9/11 terrorists. And it is really the most nonsensical sequitur since both of these perpetrators were fundamentalist ideologues. Who most resemble what group in this country? Bingo! Conservative evangelicals. I would like to think that the supposed relationship between the left and islamist terrorists was made as just a big fuck you but I think that these people are unfortunately very serious. The left hasn't made a violent stand in this country since the Wobblies way back when. Unless you think that the innocent victims at Kent State were violent in some way. They died violently, for certain.


Now we get into the ridiculous argument trying to decide if Sarah Palin's gunsights were really gunsights and you know I will lean with Gabrielle Giffords on this one because she made a point of complaining about them and trying to ratchet down the climate of fear in Arizona prior to being shot. I think that she has amply paid to get the last word. It scared her. Let's give her this one.


And I know that it is counterintuitive but can you explain to me why an angry liberal would want to go kill another liberal again? Or does that just strike at the root of our perfidy? Now the story is over the shooter's alleged pot use, oh and the high school classmate who said that he was once left wing. Guess he shouldn't have gone to the other side, never killed anyone when he was on the left side now, did he?


I have written a bit lately on linguistics and the meaning of words and the manipulation of language. George Lakoff's seminal work on framing. And I firmly believe that the hateful words uttered by the teapartyistas these last few years are akin to pouring gasoline on the floor and waiting for somebody to drop a cigarette butt. Like manchurian candidates waiting for a signal to go off. And that the promulgators of hate are totally responsible when these weaker, sicker minds hear the pavlovian signal and all hell breaks loose. Because these people knew exactly what they were doing.


Arizona has been the epicenter of hate in this country for the past several years. The militia movement. The completely excessive reaction to illegal immigration, contrast it to California's. We may not like it here but we don't hate them. We understand them and their desire to find work. We aren't going to stop and i.d. you if you've got brown skin or outlaw spanish or restrict the teaching of hispanic studies or paint over murals of black people or do a Barney Fife impression and have our deputies shoot themselves in a fitful expression of our ire against the visitors from the south. We don't make our inmates sing for their supper or eat spoiled meat. Arizona, one of three states in the Union where you can carry a firearm without a permit. Where the hell were all the tough heroes with guns to shoot this guy down anyway? I thought that you were all armed?


Of course as Rand Paul said today, guns don't kill people - criminals kill people. Right. But also angry family members kill people, insane psychopaths kill people and a host of other people that don't even approach criminal until the evil deed is done.


I read a very interesting article by Mark Potok of SPLC today which I will link to and reprint:

Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?

It’s hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 20 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged. His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his runs of unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his mysterious references and his apparent semi-literacy.

That said, there are some clues.

At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers. So-called Patriots say paper money — what they refer to with a sneer as “Federal Reserve notes” — is not lawful.

At another, Loughner makes extraordinarily obscure comments about language and grammar, suggesting that the government engages in “mind control on the people by controlling grammar.” That’s not the kind of idea that’s very common out there, even on the Internet. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee. Miller claims that the government uses grammar to “enslave” Americans and offers up his truly weird “Truth-language” as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable. Miller may be mad as a hatter, but he has a real following on the right.

Loughner talks about how you “can’t trust the government” and someone burns a U.S. flag in one of the videos attributed to him. Although certain right-wing websites are already using that (and his listing of The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books) to claim that Loughner was a “left-winger,” that does not strike me as true. The main enemy of the Patriot movement is certainly the federal government. And so-called Patriots have certainly engaged in acts like burning the flag.

Finally, I think Loughner’s reading list, although it included children’s books and a few classics, had an underlying theme — the individual versus the totalitarian state. Certainly, that’s the explicit central theme of Ayn Rand’s We the Living and Orwell’s1984 and Animal Farm, among others.  I would argue that that’s the way Loughlin seems to be reading The Communist Manifestoand Hitler’s Mein Kampf — as variants of a kind of generalized “smash the state” attitude.

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, which does similar work to that of Hatewatch, points out in a post earlier today that Loughner also makes a reference to a “second American constitution.” As Chip notes, that is commonly understood to refer to the Reconstruction amendments that freed the slaves and gave them citizenship, among other things. Chip says that “raises the question of a possible racist and anti-immigrant tie” in the Arizona shooting.

On top of that, Fox News is reporting on an internal Department of Homeland Security message suggesting some tie between Loughner and American Renaissance, a kind of white-collar racist group.

I can’t speak to those allegations, although a federal official in a position to know gave me some details that made it clear the alleged link to American Renaissance appears very weak. Outside of what Chip pointed out, I didn’t see anything that suggested racial, anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant animus in Loughner’s writings. Certainly, there’s nothing I saw at all reminiscent of American Renaissance, which focuses heavily on the alleged intellectual and psychological inferiority of black people.

At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target.

One thing that seems clear is that Giffords, who was terribly wounded but survived, was the nearest and most obvious representative of “the government” that Loughner could find. Another is that he likely absorbed some of his anger from the vitriolic political atmosphere in the United States in general and Arizona in particular. Perhaps no one made that point better than Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking to a press conference yesterday. “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 has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Potok makes some pretty strong points for Loughner being a disciple of David Miller. The shooter's infatuation with grammar, the second American constitution, the need to go back to silver and gold. The nexus to the American Renaissance group is more tenuous, being primarily an anti immigration, white identity movement. But Loughner did kill a judge at the forefront of the immigration battle and he did purportedly call out his victims' names during the shooting, so perhaps there is a link.

The other thing I am hearing from the right is that nasty liberal people were calling for George Bush's assassination, making movies about it and you never heard a squawk from them. And you know I can never remember anyone calling for Bush's death. Cheney, maybe. That the Daily Kos showed targets. And you know we are required to read that every day, right. To hear the clarion call of our communist masters. Never had any use for the Daily Koz myself. Never was required to take any oath. So stop telling me that there is a case of moral equivalence. We haven't threatened to take the country down.

We are the love and peace crowd remember? We wear the Birkenstock's, you wear the Florsheim Imperials. I can recite a lot of seditious, bloodthirsty language from the tea party members and politicians over the last several years. Stuff on the order of the Sharron Angle comment. Second Amendment remedies. Watering the liberty tree with a little blood. Taking back the country, by force if necessary. Hopefully it will be your own blood and you will spare the rest of us. 

He may be a seemingly non aligned, deranged psychotic but you gave him the matches. The angry, violent vitriol from the right is well documented over the last several years. It is a matter of record. You need to own the bad apples. You fed them.

"if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. ...

Sharron Angle

Guns are neat little things, aren't they? They can kill extraordinary people with very little effort. 
John W. Hinckley, Jr.

"The thing is, the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there's consequences to that action."

Gabrielle Giffords

"Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!"

Sarah Palin Twitter Message