The Slate's Jacob Weisberg's Arguments are Shredded: Why Liberals Like Him Shouldn't be Allowed to Write about the Giffords Shooting

Over the last several days, I have been battling with liberals on the internet who want to score political points with the awful tragedy in Arizona. I have been trolling on many different sites, commenting and battling comments on my comments, trying to communicate that it is wrong to try to politicize this awful tragedy- that it was not a conservative who committed it, that it wasn't Sarah Palin, that it wasn't tea party people, etc. Today, I finally felt that the conversation was changing and that those who had made those arguments had lost credibility and respect such that they would cease and desist with using the killings of innocent people to engage in character assassinations of people they don't agree with politically, and then I read the following article in Slate from Jacob Weisberg that was published today.

In The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy: How anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism made the Giffords shooting more likely Weisberg writes:

There's something offensive, as well as pointless, about the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner. We hear that the accused shooter read The Communist Manifesto and liked flag-burning videos—good news for the right. Wait—he was a devotee of Ayn Rand and favored the gold standard, so he was a right-winger after all. Some assassinations embody an ideology, however twisted. Based on what we know so far, the Tucson killings look like more like politically tinged schizophrenia.

Let's start with this paragraph. Weisberg first establishes that Loughner has a lot of typical liberal views, such as his belief in wealth redistribution and  supporting free speech over honoring the American flag, to which I could add that the sicko also bought other views associated with liberals like the 9/11 Truther argument and opposition to drug control, and we should probably add to that list that in high school he was characterized as being very much liberal, and apparently enthusiastically supported Democrat Obama in the 2008 election.

But then Weisberg submits as evidence that the sicko was 'right wing' that he read Ayn Rand and favored the gold standard. Is that indeed evidence of 'right-wing' views- the wringings of a libertarian who disliked the traditional social structure and supported abortion? And apparently the nutjob shooter's preference for a gold standard wasn't because he wanted a more stable and solid fiscal system, but was because he thought that elites in the government (likely right-wing elites) really controlled the monetary supply in our nation and he wanted to fight against that. The evidence is not very strong at all that the nutjob was a conservative- the evidence that he is a liberal is considerably stronger. But for now I'm going to be nice and just go with what he registered as and call him an 'Independent'. Let's continue with the article that Slate published...

It is appropriate, however, to consider what was swirling outside Loughner's head. To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn't Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona. Extremist shouters didn't program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

Here is where the utter derangement of liberal bloggers like Weisberg is demonstrated. Weisberg says that since what was going on inside Loughner's head wasn't important (which I disagree with), we should instead blame what was going on inside of his head. To do so though would be beyond foolish though, because by all accounts, Loughberg was increasingly withdrawing from the world around him (the world that Weisberg characterizes as increasingly conservative) and was focusing more on his dreaming and sleeping and philosophizing and smoking pot. As he became increasingly isolated and along and unconnected to the world around him, the world around him returned to conservative values- based on that information, you could definitively assert that it was not the increasingly conservative views of Arizona that affected him, but rather his past liberal views and the liberal environment of 2006-2009 that shaped and formed him and then left him to float away and disconnect from a world that went conservative in 2010. Let's continue with the article though, since this liberal blogger just gets more and more wrong with each statement that he writes...

At the core of the far right's culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government—a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on "government bureaucrats" and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama's birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism.

Often the two issues are blurred together, because if government is illegitimate, rebellion is an appropriate response (hence the Colonial costumes). Conservative entertainers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin like to titillate their audiences with hints of justified violence, including frequent reminders that they are armed and dangerous. Palin went so far as to put a target on someone who subsequently got shot. Whether or not the man who fired the gun was inspired by Palin isn't the point. The point is that you shouldn't paint targets on people, even in metaphor, or jest.

Did you all follow the logic for this liberal? Oklahoma bombing to birth certificate to climate of violence to assassination of Congresswomen? Really? That's what he is committing to? I would contend that he is simply grabbing unrelated examples that he cherry-picks from history to prove his point, rather than evidence pointing him towards a conclusion.

On a related note, I play a game with my US history students where I ask them to time-travel back to 1776 and pick which side of the US Revolution they would be on- the Colonists or the British. Myself, seeing how much I love liberty and freedom, I'd side with the Colonists. Weisberg and other liberals though would likely side with the British- look at how he constructed his argument above- he thinks that rebelling against government is an illegitimate response to misuse of government power and that the Colonists were examples of this. He's a Loyalist! I'd suggest tar and feathering the guy if it wasn't now frowned on to joke about violence.

The next parts of his editorial are simply reasons why the government should take our guns from us- we'll skip over that for now and simply go to his conclusion-

Again, none of this says that Tea Party caused the Tucson tragedy, only that its politics increased the odds of something like it happening. It was in criticizing writers on his own side for their naivete about communism that George Orwell wrote, "So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot." Today it is the right that amuses itself with violent chat and proclaims an injured innocence when its flammable words blow up.

Again, in his editorial that was published by Slate he didn't write any even slightly convincing arguments that connects the Tucson tragedy with anything related to conservative politics, the tea party, the right-wing, or anything related to those. Orwell's quote is a great one to bring up here, because much of what left-wing Weisburg wrote was simply baseless accusations that sounded good (ie, fire) being thrown around by someone who don't even have a clue what they are writing about.