In the Times today, David Brooks takes on those in the media who would lay the acts of an apparently quite mad Jared Loughner at the door of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, et al. “These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave,” writes Brooks. “They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness. Yet such is the state of things. We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons. I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.”
Brooks is right: it’s a bad thing to jump to conclusions, if only because we have all been surprised before. (Most people initially thought Arab terrorists were behind the Oklahoma City bombing; it was a surprise that a domestic right wing terrorist was the author.) But it is a regular and routine (and often lamentable) phenomenon in America to use a specific event to discuss a bigger issue that we can’t quite talk about (think, for example, how the OJ Simpson case became a springboard to discuss race relations, the administration of justice, racism among the police, interracial relationships, and so on.) Brooks finds reprehensible those who dumped this incident at the feet of the right wing, and he’s right. But one reason that people on the left (I personally saw Joe Klein) jumped on this conclusion is because the right has been spreading outrageous lies for a long time, at least since the swiftboating of John Kerrey, and that not enough people like Brooks (and maybe not even Brooks personally, although I’m not sure) haven’t called out Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes for their rhetorical excesses, flagrant distortions and outright lies. Instead, they are mildly deplored and gently admonished, usually with a boys will be boys shrug. And on they go.
So yes, blaming this on the right wing was wrong. But the right wing behaves outrageously all the time, in ways that ought not be countenanced.
And here’s the other thing: if Jared Loughner had been a regular Glenn Beck listener, would anyone have been the least bit surprised?