The talking heads were wringing their hands and pointing their fingers.
To some in the leftwing establishment, the connection was obvious: the vitriolic political rhetoric coming from the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, surely contributed to the shooting of more than a dozen people, including U.S Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson last weekend.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a career sports announcer who has become a successful if somewhat self-righteous critic of the rightwing establishment, issued one of his over-the-top manifestos within hours of the shooting.
“At a time of such urgency and impact, we as Americans—conservative or liberal—should pour our hearts and souls into politics,” Olbermann said. “We should not—none of us, not Gabby Giffords and not any Conservative—ever have to pour our blood…
“It is a simple pledge, it is to the point, and it is essential that every American politician and commentator and activist and partisan take it and take it now, I say it first, and freely: Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or anything in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.”
Olbermann gave voice early and often to a notion that, again within hours, found support among others who identify themselves as liberals, including Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman—”[V]iolent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers”—and Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott: “The sad truth is that Hate is the Right’s Ring of Power. They’re never going to give it up, because they know the minute they do—the minute they’re no longer allowed to pretend that Liberals are evil, freedom-hating fifth-columnist monsters who are dragging America into a Marxist abyss on the secret orders of our Kenyan Usurper Overlord—their whole ideology would implode… they would never win another election… and tens of thousands of powerful, well-remunerated insiders from Rush Limbaugh to David Gregory who depend on that hate for their daily bread would suddenly have to go out and find honest work.”
No surprise, Olbermann’s call to disarm also drew more than a few objections, though not instantly from his polar peers. Hannity, Limbaugh and Glenn Beck held their tongues through the weekend, while less celebrated conservatives hit back in cyberspace.
“[W]hat are the first words out of Keith Olbermann’s mouth about the deranged psychotic who did the shooting?” writes Dustin Koellhoffer in his blog for the St. Petersburg Examiner. “That it is Sarah Palin’s fault! That her party should ‘repudiate her’ and ‘dismiss her from politics.’ And if they don’t, they are as guilty as she… His reasoning for this? Because Palin had a chart with crosshairs over Democrat districts that were being contended during the 2010 campaign. That’s it. Leftist logic proving Palin inspired the shooter. Olbermann names every Conservative commentator as being complicit and not a single one of the left, giving himself a mild rebuke for his own vitriolic demonization of Conservatives. He blames everyone except the shooter! No, not everyone, just everyone on the Right.”
I’m not particularly surprised that Olbermann and others chose to use the shooting in Tucson as a rhetorical tool against Palin and her pals on the Fox network, but I think it was reckless and ultimately counterproductive. For one thing, Olbermann, who regularly demonizes conservatives in his “Worst Person in the World” segment, is easy to dismiss as a hypocrite. His one-sided critique of pundits and politicos who use vitriolic rhetoric does nothing to ease partisan tension that, at its most extreme, may lead to real, not just rhetorical, violence. Conservatives will no doubt see his “pledge against violence” as an unfair attack and as further reason to describe themselves as victims of leftwing intolerance.
Worse yet, Olbermann’s speech laid the foundation for the broader bipartisan bromides that came fast and furious on Monday, as respected newspapers politely asked media and political elites to weigh in, recording their near-unanimous agreement that our political discourse has become too uncivil, too extreme.
I don’t buy it, this idea that the cure for violence in a society should begin with an examination of our political speech. Free expression, in fact, may serve to lower violence by allowing people to vent their frustrations. A better use of our collective time will be to examine the failings of a political system that leaves unattended myriad issues—the widening income gap, the runaway cost of higher education, urban blight, economic globalization, the decline of news reporting in the major media in favor of cheap, often ill-informed commentary of dubious value, to name just a few—that coarsen every part of our society, not just our political rhetoric.
