There is no such thing as news. There is only narrative. The significance of most of what passes for news is derived from the attention the media pays to it rather than its intrinsic importance. A case in point is the remarkable, ongoing obsession of the news media on both the left and right with the shootings in Arizona. In this case the feeding frenzy was set in motion by the left. Even though there have obviously always been people on both ends of the spectrum who have no life outside of politics, I was still taken aback by their desperate attempts to seize on this issue like so many drowning men grasping at straws. Evidently their resounding defeat in November was even more galling than I imagined. They made no secret of the fact that they were waiting with bated breath for some incident they could construe as evidence of the “violent nature” of the Tea Party movement, conservative talk radio, and the rest of their pet bogeymen. They admitted as much. As their reaction to the shootings makes clear, they were very eager indeed. They’re acting for all the world like so many Communists marching behind the coffin of a murdered “martyr” in days gone by. All that’s missing is the red flags.
Some examples of their overwrought reaction can be found here, here, and here, all based on zero evidence that there was any link whatsoever between the shooter and the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, or anyone else on the right. The “objective” CNN even went so far as to write a panegyric of Sheriff Dupnik, now infamous for his ham-handed attempts at political exploitation of the murders, as the soul of wisdom, complete down to everything but his birth in a log cabin. I doubt we’ll be seeing more of the same from those quarters, as in the meantime the good sheriff has been giving off such a stench that even the stalwarts of the left have begun holding their noses.
The left’s seizing at this particular straw was, obviously, ill-considered. Other than not bothering to come up with any evidence to back up their accusations, only to find out after the fact that there was none, they set their own hypocrisy on a pedestal for the right to take pot shots at. After all, the left doesn’t commonly engage its opponents in reasoned discourse. Its forte’s have always been demonization, virtuous indignation, and a style of “eliminationist rhetoric” all its own. They gave the other side a perfect opportunity to point that out, as they did with relish, for example, here, here and here.
There is little that can demonstrate the extent to which the left overshot its mark in its crudely insensitive attempts to exploit the Arizona deaths and the grave wounding of Gabrielle Giffords than the reaction of the foreign media. Germany’s for example, is usually reliably leftist, often taking its talking points directly from the New York Times. It is all the more remarkable that the Washington correspondent of Der Spiegel, Marc Hujer, penned an article entitled “America’s Insane Debate,” in which he wrote, among other things,
The very people who got so upset about the tone of debate in the past year, about the rhetoric of the Tea Party, the harsh words of the Right, the unabashed caricatures of Obama as Hitler, are now poisoning the debate themselves with shameless insinuations. Without learning the facts, they seek the guilty behind the attack, and commonly find them on the right, in the Tea Party, in Republican Party chief Michael Steele and Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin.
The language chosen by Sarah Palin and other Tea Partiers was doubtless raw and over the top, but doesn’t come close to providing any proof for the claim that they motivated the shootings in Arizona. Indeed, what is known about the shooter at this point gives no indication that he is a member of the Tea Party movement, or a fan of Palin, or that he has any clear political convictions at all. His favorite books included the Communist Manifesto, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Peter Pan, a weird collection. However, there is no indication that his act was motivated by politics.
The massive criticism directed at Sarah Palin is delusional, and not just because it’s a baseless accusation. The attempt to weaken Palin in this way could accomplish the opposite.
That’s strong stuff coming from a source that’s usually reliably critical of the right, in the U.S. as well as in Germany. The left in this country might do well to take heed for their own good. Perhaps more worrisome than their baseless accusations is what they propose as a cure; a further dismantling of the Bill of Rights. In this case their targets are the first and second amendments to the Constitution. If the history of the last hundred years is any guide, we have more reason than ever before to continue to fight against any diminishing of those rights.
