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We open with Craig Pirrong, aka Streetwise Professor. He responds to liberal Paul Krugman’s disgusting commentary on the Tucson shooter, and Krugman’s intellectually dishonest article on Texas.
…If you want a more reasonable conjecture about the Tuscon shooter, I suggest Shannon Love’s piece at Chicago Boyz. The conclusion is spot on:
The left plays a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating game when in every case to date, they have immediately, often literally within minutes, of a reported act of political violence, sprung out to denounce ordinary non-lefitsts as culpable in the attack. Since it is widely known that such attackers are either seriously mentally ill or individuals with highly egocentric and idiosyncratic ideologies, seeking to link such attacks to their mainstream political opposition makes it clear that they see instances of political violence merely as chances to advance their political power. Moreover, since such attackers have a hodgepodge ideology, one can just as easily blame leftist’s rhetoric for such attacks as non-leftists.
More darkly, by linking ordinary, mainstream political opponents to such political violence, the left appears to be creating a context for suppressing or even violently attacking such opposition. They are desperately trying to create an equation in which disagreeing with a leftists is tantamount to a violent attack. …
Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on “political vultures” who try to spin tragedy to fit their repugnant world view.
…There is much talk that Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” ad pushed Loughner over the edge. But if sloppy use of gun metaphors can drive anyone to shoot congressional representatives, think what we are up against when the president of the United States invokes violent imagery to galvanize his supporters. What are we to make of Obama’s warning of “hand-to-hand combat” if the Republicans take over; or his comment that one of his supporters could “tear [Sean Hannity] up”; or his Untouchables boast that “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”; or his advice to supporters of his presidential campaign to argue with Republicans and independents and “get in their face”?
…Yet do we really wish to tie crude presidential metaphors, similes, and bombast to the next violent attack on a conservative political figure? Are we to suggest that President Obama’s occasional indiscretions have created a climate of fear that someday will lead to violence against his political adversaries? Or, did Obama merely from time to time indulge in sloppy thinking and clumsy expression? Even as someone who did not vote for Barack Obama, I do not think the president’s ill-advised and juvenile similes and allusions will ever drive a liberal extremist into “bringing a gun” to a political fight or literally “tearing up” a political opponent.
…the outrage of Daly, Krugman, Sullivan, and others is partisan and transparently self-serving. Paul Krugman would have more credibility on the topic of extreme rhetoric had he written a column a few years ago warning Americans that it was one thing to oppose George W. Bush, but quite another to publish a novel envisioning the assassination of the president, or to award first prize at the Toronto Film Festival to a “docudrama” constructing the shooting of Bush…
…If crazed gunmen are sadly a periodic characteristic of American culture, so are political vultures who scavenge political capital as they pick through the horrific violence.
In the WSJ, Glenn Reynolds makes several excellent points about the shameful comments made by some liberals after Tucson.
…American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. “Where,” asked Mr. York, “was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?”
Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.
…To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?
I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America’s political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder. …
Jennifer Rubin notes some of the people who demonstrated dignity in their responses to the Tucson shootings.
The horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the death of six (including a 9 year old and a federal judge) and the injuring of a total of 18 revealed the best and the worst in American politics.
First, let’s look at the best. President Obama issued an eloquent statement as did Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Obama, having learned something about emergency incidents, quickly dispatched the FBI chief and appeared on top of the incident. Congress appropriately put off its business for the week. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) paid tribute to the slain federal court judge. They all conducted themselves in a calm and dignified fashion.
…To his credit, Howard Kurtz blasted the blame game. He wrote, “This isn’t about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map [targeting Giffords's seat]; it’s about a lone nutjob who doesn’t value human life. It would be nice if we briefly put aside partisan differences and came together with sympathy and support for Gabby Giffords and the other victims, rather than opening rhetorical fire ourselves.” Likewise, Howard Fineman wrote: “The deaths there are not about politics, ideology or party. From what we know, Jared Loughman’s acts were those of a madman divorced from reality, let alone from public debate.” Bravo. …
And we wind things up with NRO Shorts. Here are three:
Morgan Tsvangirai is the prime minister of Zimbabwe and the leader of the democratic opposition: the opposition to the president and strongman, Robert Mugabe. Tsvangirai is one of the bravest men in Africa, or anywhere. As the Zimbabwe Mail put it, “Tsvangirai has survived several attempts on his life, had his wife killed in an ‘accident’ and was a hunted man for years. Only the unwaiving attention of the world’s powers kept him alive.” He will need such attention now. In a conversation with American and European diplomats, he said that he supported sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies, because they were forcing concessions from them. He could not support the sanctions in public, however, because Mugabe had succeeded in painting them as anti-Zimbabwe instead of anti-regime. How do we know about this conversation? Because a U.S. diplomat memorialized it in a cable, and this was one of the thousands of such cables released by WikiLeaks. Tsvangirai will now be investigated for treason, and faces the death penalty. The Zimbabwe Mail said, “Wikileaks may have just signed Morgan Tsvangirai’s death warrant. It will take an enormous effort on the part of the diplomatic corps of many nations to prevent that.” Let them make that effort, then. It seems strange, doesn’t it? Brave democrats are in jeopardy while Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, accepts applause and largesse as a freedom fighter.
We’ve been beating the hell out of the Taliban in and around its traditional stronghold of Kandahar. A mid-level Taliban commander quoted by the New York Times complained that “the government has the upper hand now.” The conventional wisdom about the war hasn’t yet caught up with this military progress — a phenomenon that General Petraeus must consider standard operating procedure by now. The corruption and unreliability of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the double-dealing and instability of our ally Pakistan remain, of course, enormous problems. They aren’t susceptible to any easy solution, but we can at least minimize the hedging of Karzai and the Pakistanis if we convince them that we intend to stay until we finish the job. It helps that the administration has walked back its self-defeating July 2011 deadline for the beginning of withdrawal; it doesn’t help that Vice President Biden says the new deadline of 2014 will bring the withdrawal of all U.S. troops come “hell or high water.” Biden has an infallible instinct for saying whatever is most foolish or damaging. Regardless, events on the ground show that the futility of this war has been greatly exaggerated.
On Labor Day, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo published an op-ed in the New York Daily News that, though making many rhetorical genuflections, said what had once been sayable only by New York’s conservative think tanks: “Public employees unions must make sacrifices.” And Cuomo has kept up the pleasant surprises post–blowout election. “The words ‘government in Albany’ have become a national punchline,” he acknowledged at his January 1 inauguration, a symbolically terse one. “This state has no future if it is going to be the tax capital of the nation.” He then gave himself a 5 percent pay cut and requested a one-year government-employee pay freeze. Maybe only Andrew Cuomo — a creature of the Albany Democratic-machine/public-sector-union complex — can solve the bloated-government crisis that his father’s governorship, seminal in the creation of the union-kickback system that has enabled Democratic ascendance in Albany, wrought. We hope Cuomo II will keep his harsh word — but hope rarely triumphs over experience.