…between Fort Hood and Tucson:

Shootings, beheadings, stonings, you name it. No big deal. Nearly a month after the Fort Hood massacre, the NYT’s Thomas Friedman finally worked out that Hasan was “just another angry jihadist”. Which was what Hasan tried to tell us from the very beginning.

Now to Tucson, Arizona, where six people are dead and Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is seriously injured following another gun rampage. Attacker Jared Lee Loughner has thus far offered no clue at all about why he did it. Apparently the fellow is a drug-using gamer whom one former classmate recalls as “left wing”, a “political radical”, “reclusive”, a “pot head” and “quite liberal”. He’d met Giffords four years ago and thought her “stupid & unintelligent”. Besides that background and Loughner’s MySpace and YouTube rantings, that’s all we have. There’s no “Allahu Akbar” here. Yet – incredibly – many clearly heard a cry of “Allahu Palin”.

They apparently have no sense of irony. I know whose souls should be searched here, and it isn’t Sarah Palin’s or the Tea Partiers.

…and the politics of blood libel.

If you really want to elevate civility in public discourse, you could start by not falsely accusing your political opponents of being accomplices to murder. But that’s not really their goal. Their goal is to quash any opposition to their agenda.

[Update a few minutes later]

United in horror:

Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.

This is the world that gave us Oswald and Bremer. More recently, it’s given us figures like James W. von Brunn, the neo-Nazi who opened fire at the Holocaust Museum in 2009, and James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel last summer to express his displeasure over population growth. These are figures better analyzed by novelists than pundits: as Walter Kirn put it Saturday, they’re “self-anointed knights templar of the collective shadow realm, not secular political actors in extremis.”

This won’t stop partisans from making hay out of Saturday’s tragedy, of course. The Democratic operative who was quoted in Politico saying that his party needs “to deftly pin this on the Tea Partiers” was just stating the obvious: after a political season rife with overheated rhetoric from conservative “revolutionaries,” the attempted murder of a Democratic congresswoman is a potential gift to liberalism.

But if overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock. (It took conservative bloggers about five minutes to come up with Democratic campaign materials that employed targets and crosshairs against Republican politicians.) When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost.

But expect the liars and demagogues to continue to do it for perceived political gain.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The “Progressive” climate of hate. A ten-year retrospective.

Stand there. My thoughts on yesterday’s tragic events, and the predictable reactions to them.

[Update a few minutes later]

“You can almost hear the disappointment on the left that he was a pot head rather than a Tea Partyer.”

“Almost hear” it? Hell, it’s palpable.

[Update later morning]

Two sicknesses on display on Arizona.

[Update a few minutes later]

A colossal failure of journalism. In other words, business as usual.

[Update a couple minutes later]

In defense of inflamed rhetoric:

For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I’ve listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I’ve even gotten angry, for goodness’ sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.

From what I can tell, I’m not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.

Well, actually, it may make politicians somewhat safer, but I’m not sure that the safety of politicians should be the highest priority goal. Partly because infantilizing and neutering us is what it’s all about for many politicians and their media enablers.