Moving past right-wing rhetoric
By: Joe Scarborough
January 18, 2011
We get it, Sarah Palin. You’re not morally culpable for the tragic shooting in Tucson, Ariz. All of us around the “Morning Joe” table agree, even if we were stunned that you would whine about yourself on Facebook as a shattered family prepared to bury their 9-year-old girl.
The same goes for you, Glenn Beck. You’ve attacked your political opponents with words designed to inspire hatred and mind-bending conspiracy theories from fans. Calling the president a racist, Marxist and fascist may be reprehensible, but it did not lead a mentally disturbed man to take a Glock to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s “Congress on Your Corner” event.
Good on ya, buddy. You weren’t personally responsible for the slaughter at the Safeway. Maybe you can put it on a poster at the next “Talkers” convention.
But before you and the pack of right-wing polemicists who make big bucks spewing rage on a daily basis congratulate yourselves for not being responsible for Jared Lee Loughner’s rampage, I recommend taking a deep breath. Just because the dots between violent rhetoric and violent actions don’t connect in this case doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore the possibility — or, as many fear, the inevitability — that someone else will soon draw the line between them.
Actually, someone already has. When you get a minute, Google “Byron Williams” and “Tides Foundation” to see just how thin a layer of ice Beck skates on every day.
Beck and Palin aside, I do understand why other conservatives pushed back on the media’s initial response to the Giffords shooting. The avalanche of condemnations that came pouring down on Palin, Fox News and the tea party were off base and offensive. Most of the same outlets calling for restraint after the Fort Hood shooting showed no such discipline after Tucson. The fact that the left predictably played to type did more to unite the conservative movement than any event since President Barack Obama’s election.
Now that the right has proved to the world that it was wronged, this would be a good time to prevent the next tragedy from destroying its political momentum. Despite what we eventually learned about the shooter in Tucson, should the right have really been so shocked that many feared a political connection between the heated rhetoric of 2010 and the shooting of Giffords?
Who, other than Palin’s most strident supporters, was not troubled by the bull’s-eye target over Giffords’s district? Or the political advertisement promoting the removal of Giffords from office with the firing of a “fully automatic M16” with her opponent? Or the gunned-down congresswoman’s own warning to NBC’s Chuck Todd that violent words have consequences?
And who on the right is really stupid enough to not understand that the political movement that has a near monopoly on gun imagery may be the first focus of an act associated with gun violence? As a conservative who had a 100 percent rating with the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America over my four terms in Congress, I wonder why some on the right can’t defend the Second Amendment without acting like jackasses. While these types regularly attack my calls for civility, it is their reckless rhetoric that does the most to hurt the cause.
Which brings us back to Palin and the GOP’s field of 2012 candidates.
In Palin’s Facebook manifesto last Wednesday, she didn’t condemn extreme speech and its potential for violence. Instead, she seemed to say, “Deal with it.” Then she proved it, ineptly and offensively naming herself the victim of a “blood libel,” which generations of persecuted Jews know carries connotations much more serious than a drop in the polls.
We know Palin won’t call out irresponsible language or lead the discussion back to civility, but who will?
Where was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who covets the moral authority to lead his party in 2012? Is there anything — anything at all — a member of his own party can say that offends this man?
Or former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who refused to call out his state’s best-known congresswoman, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, for saying that the best way to oppose energy legislation is to be “armed and dangerous.”
Or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich? Oh, wait. Never mind.
From their defensive crouch, these candidates are clearly scared to do the right thing by calling out reckless rhetoric. So let me try a different tack by speaking to their politically expedient minds.
Overblown rhetoric is tailor-made for midterm elections like 1994 and 2010, when a conservative movement rises up to check a progressive tide. It’s why Republicans gave Gingrich the keys to the car in 1995.
As the liberal president is checked by the conservative Congress, a new presidential race approaches, the voting base expands and the keys to the car get turned over to more unifying figures. This explains how a party could move from Gingrich in 1995 to Bob Dole as its nominee in 1996.
Presidential-year elections are driven by a completely different demographic. Good luck trying that “Second Amendment remedies” crap on swing voters in the suburbs. It just won’t fly. And neither will the cacophony of crazy talk that has gripped the far right for the past two years.
It’s time to grow up, act responsibly and start planning for the 2012 election.
If you can’t be civil because it’s the right thing to do, then do it because it is in your party’s best interest.
A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47705.html
