Death Becomes Us

As soon as I heard about the shooting incident in Tucson Saturday that wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and seventeen others and killed six, I knew that every asshole blogger in the world would use it to score political points. Sadly, I wasn't disappointed.

Almost immediately, everyone was trying to figure out the political motivation of the shooter, which I suppose is fair enough. The shooting of a politician usually has a political motivation. But the partisan leanings of an individual blogger decided what that motivation would be. This is because bloggers are lazy and not exceptionally bright, and political bloggers are even more so.

It is noteworthy that Sarah Palin put crosshairs over Congresswoman Giffords' district and specifically named her on that stupid Facebook page, but that's about all it is*. No rational person thinks that Palin or the Tea Party was actually calling for murder. Unfortunately, rational people don't tend to be successful bloggers. Assholes do. The Left blaming the Right for Saturday and the Right responding in kind sort of proves that. Not only have the last couple of days in the blogosphere been disgusting, they've been intellectually lazy.

This, however, is a new low. Using the body of a nine-year-old girl to take a shot at Palin or the Daily fucking Kos is unbecoming for all but the worst bloggers, which just happens to be most of us. Citing the "eliminationist rhetoric" of Barack Obama, a guy that has received more death threats in two years than most presidents get in eight, would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetically desperate.

Yes, I've heard the argument that "the rhetoric and the current political climate is responsible for this" and I know that it's horseshit. Deep down, I suspect that you do too. Political rhetoric, particularly in the United States, has always employed violent or militaristic imagery. Even the word "campaign" has a military origin.

Without the right to free speech, none of it matters. That's why any sane person should go out of their way to oppose a law that Representative Robert Brady plans to introduce. The bill would make it a federal crime to "use language or images that could be interpreted as inciting violence toward members of Congress or federal officials."

That's worse than the violence against Gabrielle Giffords, it's violence against the First Amendment, which the congresswoman read on the floor of the House just last week. I have little doubt that Congress will pass it, but it cannot and should not survive judicial review. Hopefully, that's something that the Left and the Right can agree upon. Again, rhetoric is not the issue here. Violent imagery and language is used far more often in sports and you don't often see machetes and automatic weapons waved about the field of play.

Look, baseball isn't America's national pastime, shooting one another in the head is. And Americans love shooting their political leaders most of all. The United States has as many or more political assassinations that even your most savage Third World shithole. But in Third World shitholes, assassinations either precede or immediately follow something productive, like the overthrow of the government. Americans seemingly just plug their leaders for the simple fun of it.

If that sounds like a call for gun control, it isn't. I don't really care about guns much one way or the other, so I'm inclined to let people have them. Besides, murder is already pretty famous for being illegal. Even if you somehow managed to make every gun in America vanish, Americans would just club their politicians to death.

Stopping the rhetoric or taking away the guns isn't going to accomplish a damned thing, assuming that you could actually do either as a practical matter. As a matter of fact, you're not going to prevent what happened on Saturday in Tucson from happening again. It just so happens that crazy people do weird shit from time to time, and the alleged gunman in this case appears to be crazier than most.

This might have been a political act on the part of Jared Loughner. We shouldn't make it one against one another. Down that path lies Loughner's most important victory. Not that anyone gives a shit.


* Having said that, I found it adorable that Governor Palin sent out a flack to lie about the crosshairs on her Facebook page. Either Rebecca Mansour is an idiot or she thinks that everyone else is. Using surveyor's symbols with the slogan "Don't Retreat, Instead Reload" doesn't make very much sense, does it?

If you've got nothing to hide, it's the better part of wisdom not to act like you do. And this ridiculous spinning looks like you very much want this to go away, and acting like that almost guarantees that it won't.