Special Comment By Teh Keith

[filkertom]

On our toxic discourse, and the unacceptability of violence. And I invoke his last lines, and I will do my best to stand by them:

Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

Comments

[zenturbo.livejournal.com]

I made time to see this when I was working last night...very well said.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

While I agree with his words I can't help but think this is only the tip of the iceberg.

I pray to my goddess that this won't be the day I tell my grandchildren about in the future that "The second civil war started on this day." :-(

It's going to get worse before it gets better unfortunately. Having been shown that the soap boxes, the ballot boxes, and the jury boxes to be fairly ineffective...there's only one box that people can see remaining.

I hope it's not too late for that to be untrue.

[zorya-thinks.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this Tom. I didn't know that Keith was covering the shooting yesterday and missed the live comment. This is vitally important for us to understand - no matter what our intentions, invoking violent imagery can and will result in tragic, unintentional consequences.

[kshandra]

He was on for two hours last night, opening with the Pima County Sheriff's press conference and continuing on with conversations with a few people. The entire show should be up is available at countdown.msnbc.com at this point, and the podcast version is up on iTunes.

Near as anyone on Twitter can tell, Keith didn't sleep last night....

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think the fact that we are all Americans is kind of irrelevant to the violence thing - we are all people, and that gives us moral standing. And one of the things you aren't supposed to do to other people is assassinate them.

[batyatoon]

This.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. But part of the whole gestalt of this noisy mess is an Us vs. Them dynamic in which patriotism figures strongly, so I suspect that's the button Keith was trying to push.

[wickedladybear.livejournal.com]

I'll join you in that attempt.

No matter how wrong I think you are, it is *never* ok to do violence in the name of belief.

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

I am of the same mind as nimitzbrood. With each party that comes to power being only interested in undermining the other, we're going to come to a point very soon I think, where the system as a whole is going to just collapse out from under them. We got a preview of this during the last electorate period when the economy crashed.

When that happens, the only thing I can see happening is both sides of the political spectrum coming to arms against the other in order to gain some semblance of control over whatever is left of America by that point.

I have a few personal insights on this.

[invader-tak-1.livejournal.com]

As a former conservative nutbag I'm deeply frightened that the only way this CAN end is in another civil war.

I've been in the radical conservative movement. We were so conservative we thought George Bush Senior was a wussy Liberal sellout. "seriously, I had friends who had range targets with his picture."

Yes it was a long time ago, and yes I got better. But I know these people. And people this fired with ideology and manifest destiny are not going to stop simply because "Violence is sad and icky"

The Republicans wanted a powerful grass roots movement, and they got the strongest one money could buy. But I don't think even they realized how deeply crazy the people they were appealing to are. I do realize it. Hell, I've rented to it.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. These are the people who are not going to let Government get away with stopping a "free America" Free America being a world where everyone is just like them. And is straight and Christian "but that goes without saying"

These are people who will carry the Constitution in their back pocket next to the New Testament, but not one in ten will actually read either. They simply use them as talismans.

They are motivated by fear. Yes, despite their rhetoric they are deeply frightened. And nothing is more dangerous than frightened people. They do NOT see themselves ans anything but defenders of good. No matter how bigoted or crazy they get, they believe they are doing the best they can for the country. Don't forget that. Its far too easy to make them cardboard cutout monsters.

They believe "or they have been convinced" that if they can assign a very specific set of social values that existed at a time of prosperity the prosperity will return. Sort of a modern day version of the "cargo cult"

They are angry, frightened, and dangerous people. And I cannot help to see the irony in the fact that many of the people who make sure I have the right to defend myself are helping me defend myself against THEM.

Re: I have a few personal insights on this.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I think you're right on the money here. And I seriously hadn't thought of the equivalence to talismans, but that's a really good way of looking at it. The Inherent Magic Of The Bible And Constitution Will Save Us, and if we hold them we hold that magic though we don't understand.

Re: I have a few personal insights on this.

[danceswithlife]

I would like to suggest that you put this in an email and send it to Keith and/or Rachel.

I come bearing an icon.

[kshandra]

Created with http://wigflip.com/minifesto - feel free to use this one, or head over to the link and make one in your preferred color scheme. (To get the frame refresh to "break" cleanly, I put two blank lines between the end of the first sentence and the beginning of the second one.)

Re: I come bearing an icon.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched Keith in a while, but I never remember him calling for violence. He only demanded legal actions be taken.

Re: I come bearing an icon.

[kshandra]

It was something he said during Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign (he references it earlier in the SC - I don't recall the specifics myself), and everyone is saying that it wasn't a patch on the rhetoric we've seen from the Right, but he's clearly holding himself to a much higher standard here.

Re: I come bearing an icon.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

No question he holds himself to a higher standard. I have noticed liberals tend to be more introspective as a whole than conservatives. (Yes there are exceptions, but liberals tend to more willing to criticize other liberals than conservatives are willing to criticize other conservatives.)

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

ALL of us? Last I heard it was the goddamn *right*-wingers who were doing 98% of this violent rhetoric shit.

More of that false equivalency. "Three women have raped men, and there's been one female serial killer -- which is just the same as millions of men systematically raping, torturing and serial-killing women and girls for millennia." "Twenty gays were rude to the visiting Pope, which is just as bad as the nonstop homophobic rhetoric from every pulpit that leads to thousands of gay-bashings and murders every year." "100 right-wingers used their websites, rallies and TV shows to call for death to their opponents -- which is equally as bad as one or two left-wingers making single jokes about assassinating their opponents in their private e-mails."

Yeah, it's all bad. But for God's sake, look at the bloody scale and figure out which side is worse.

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

And by renouncing the condoning and encouragement of violence for the cause of furthering ones political viewpoints across the board, whom are we thereby undermining more?

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

I actually dread the coming week and seeing what the pundits on Fox will be saying about the shooting. So far they seem to have been fairly straight with the overall facts but then O'Reilly, Beck and Hannity have yet to chime in. One can most likely rest assured that they'll be in defense mode.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Yep. A whole lotta "Oh, how terrible! Naturally, we condemn any violence -- BUT PEOPLE ARE ANGRY!*"

* WE HELPED MAKE 'EM ANGRY, REALLY CRANKED 'EM UP ACTUALLY, BUT DON'T MENTION THAT PART!

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

It has already started to some extent. They're calling into question the shooter's political beliefs by saying he'd read the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, of course they're ALSO saying that he was clearly mentally disturbed but I figured it would be at least another day before they brought his politics into the equation.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

It isn't like I think any of us have enough information to be really informed as to the guy's motives. However, here's my (as usual, more moderate than most here) expectation on this:

The guy didn't shoot people for political reasons, or because he was angry. He did it because he's outright clinically unbalanced, and if he hadn't opened fire at a political event, it would have been at the Post Office, or in line to see a movie.

Politics may be his stated reason, but it isn't the actual cause of this man's disturbance or his violence, and a better political climate would not have stopped him from shooting people - it would simply have changed the target.

[kilbia.livejournal.com]

I will acknowledge and concede that politics alone is not likely to have driven this man to brain imbalance. I have no problem believing that if he hadn't been inspired by the political environment, he would have been a mere footnote in the news, state-level if he were lucky, as some random mall or school shooting.

However, what I am personally upset about is not that it happened, but that so many people in the Republican party, in their attempt to connect with what they perceive as a populist movement and to "stir men's hearts and minds to mutiny", have used violence as metaphor and refused to acknowledge that their choice of words might have influenced this man's choice of target.

(This anger increases exponentially if any of the hand-wringing apologists have ever moved or voted to ban or restrict access to any type of book, music, game or art on the grounds that "impressionable people might get the wrong message". I have no proof that any of the individuals in question *have* done so; it's just that hypocrisy is a rage trigger for me.)

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I can thoroughly understand anger at hypocrisy - if you are going to claim right to restrict material because of "impressionable minds", then certainly you have to walk the walk.

Other than that, though, I don't see why influencing the man's target is an issue. If someone was going to die, we'd still have a dead person. The death of a congresswoman is tragic, but not any more so than, say, the death of a mom dedicated to her kids. In the end, the worms don't care what you did for a living.

[lone-cat.livejournal.com]

Another possibility is that he had a personal grudge against Rep. Giffords. Mother Jones has an interview (http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message) with a friend of his which indicates that he did.

Still, even if his motivation was not political, even if it was that the voices in his head said to do it, it was done in a climate in which many people make fast and loose with language and imagery suggesting violence against political opponents. Some of that even borders on suggesting that violence may be an appropriate response when those opponents win an election. Given that, can you be certain that someone else, someone who thought the wrong person won, wouldn't have shot her?

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I don't think using violent metaphors is appropriate in civilized discourse.

However, your theoretical might-have happened is... a strawman at its worst. Can I be certain that nobody else was going to shoot her? No.

Can I be certain that I won't run over a puppy the next time I drive my car? No. That does not mean I should take my car to the junkyard, just in case.

A nutjob did something. The presence of the nutjob does not imply that there's significant risk of anyone else doing that thing. The nutjob is not an indicator of what anyone else on the planet is likely to do - that's kind of part of being a nutjob, you know.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the problem with the Republican side of our politics is not what people think it is. They are a body that has spent decades fighting -- against the commies, against the nazis, etc etc. Now that the soviet Union is gone and they ahve nobody but a ragtag bunch of pirates (terrorists) to focus anger upon, they are without a target.

So, they invent a target.

[violinsontv.livejournal.com]

Yes, the young man is quite ill. However, my understanding is that this is not the first encounter Rep. Giffords has had with him--Bing had an article up and would love to link but my lameoid wireless bandwidth isn't letting me, dagnabit.