The really obnoxious thing Palin said

[nancylebov]

The BBC, with quotes and context about blood libel.

"Blood libel" has been used a fair amount without the full weight of historical context, even in Israeli politics.

Palin is both stupid and ignorant, and I have no reason to think she thought the phrase would be especially offensive.

However, the discussion about blood libel has overshadowed this from Palin:

"Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.

I think she knows what "purport" means, and she said journalists are at best neutral about hatred and violence, and possibly in favor of it.

This is horrendous.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

I think she's projecting.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is, but it feeds into the old clichéd image of the journalist, like Gene Kelly in Inherit The Wind (or the way that character tried to appear, anyway) or, more broadly, Damien Day in Drop The Dead Donkey, who doesn't care what happens to anybody as long as it makes a "good story." You know, the ones who dig through celebrities' dustbins to find dirt from their past they can use to make a headline. The ones who hang around public appearances by politicians hoping some nut with a gun will show up. That myth.

I believe she is both stupid and ignorant, but I think her spin doctors know exactly which buttons to push to get her public back on side.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Wait, because Dershowitz has used it, that makes it OK? Puh-lease. No. He's hardly the ad hominem argument for appropriate speech he makes himself out to be.

I don't think Palin's speech writer cared whether the phrase was offensive. This is all about painting Palin as the victim of this shooting. People on the right are completely sympathetic, since it distracts attention from the issues of gun control and mental health care--solid liberal issues, both. Why was someone who had been acting irrationally walking around untreated, and how did he manage to get his hands on an automatic weapon and ammunition?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

If you read the bbc link, it isn't just Dershowitz.

Here is a discussion which includes the difficulties of deciding how people with odd behavior should be treated. It's a mostly liberal/progressive venue.

A lot of the comments on the specific point are by or to Renatus.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was just reading that. He's very concerned about "othering" Loughner, because he himself would be violent without medication.

So...why was someone behaving in a manner scarily irrational enough to be expelled from college not on medication? Especially given that the one friend who spoke to the press about him said he was a nice, smart kid before he became mentally ill. I can take a stab at some reasons:

1. there's a stigma attached to seeking mental health treatment--part of what Renatus is deploring, of course
2. we have gaps in our health care coverage for a large chunk of the population. A person in his early 20s who is not in school can now be covered under his parents' insurance, under the new health care law--however, that presumes he's on good terms with his parents! What kind of mental health care do you get if you don't have insurance?
3. Sometimes emergency room staff don't take young people with mental illness seriously until they've already done themselves harm.

Many people with paranoid schizophrenia begin exhibiting symptoms during young adulthood in the way this young man did--in fact many mental illnesses first manifest during this period. So a gap into which mentally ill young people can fall is a major social disaster. It's not only a problem in the sense that some people with depression can become suicidal and some people with psychosis can become violent--it's also a waste of many lives, people who can't study or work or participate in community life.

Then there's the whole gun control piece.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

"So...why was someone behaving in a manner scarily irrational enough to be expelled from college not on medication?"

Even without forcing medication, just following proper investigative and reporting channels would have got information on his record that would have kept him from being sold a semi-automatic gun with 30+ bullets in each clip.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Here are other instances of 'blood libel' being used in a political sense.

Mike Barnicle said that the Swift Boaters' accusation against Kerry was a blood libel.

Tony Blankley said that a Time report on a possible massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines was being used as a blood libel against the military, "a propoganda catastrophe" for the US.

Tucker Carlson said that an accusation against Ashcroft was a blood libel being resurrected by the Center for American Progress (accusing him of advance knowledge of the 9/11 attack).


Source: Salon's War Room....
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/12/blood_libel_politics/index.html

Worth reading Salon for the context of these usages. The speakers all sound like they're using a familiar term in a familiar sense. These sound like leisurely elite talk show conversations, where it would be easy for the other guests to challenge the term, but apparently no one did.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

The best analysis of this I've seen is from springheel_jack. Basically he's arguing that Palin is appealing to her supporters as a righteous minority persecuted by a fascist/liberal all powerful elite. In this context, any violence from their side is self defence.

No prizes for guessing where this strategy has been used before.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I agree about the inappropriate self-pity. I'm much less sure about the anti-Semitism.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's anti-semitism in there at all.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The anti-Semitism lies in the phrase "blood libel".

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I understand the connection but I don't think Palin really does. I don't think she's suggesting the liberal media is anti-semitic. If she is, she's further gone than even I imagined.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's not what I think she's saying; what her words suggest to me is that she thinks the media treatment of her is as bad as persecution and accusations of the Jews over the centuries.

I do think she's capable of being that melodramatic. I don't think that's what she actually meant in this case because I agree with you that it's unlikely she knows the meaning of the phrase.

But I still hold her responsible for the content of her words, no matter what she actually meant to say, just as I hold her responsible for the implications of the images her group posted. She's sought the public eye and high public position; she has a responsibility to understand the message she's sending.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

That's not what I think she's saying; what her words suggest to me is that she thinks the media treatment of her is as bad as persecution and accusations of the Jews over the centuries.


Certainly I think she's suggesting that she is being "persecuted" as a member of an embattled righteous minority. Maybe she is even going as far as you suggest.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is that your standard of horrendous? Palin is accused of encouraging and holding moral responsibility for political murder; a crowd of columnists, all the way up to Paul Krugman, join in the accusation; and you're offended that what she says in response strikes you as excessive? I thought the rush to accuse, in advance of any evidence about the killer's state of mind, motives, or background, based solely on an association of images, was horrendous. I certainly think it's fair to say that it incited hatred; it doesn't take much searching to see people online expressing the wish for Palin to die, or to be murdered, or posting images of guns pointed at her. And quite aside from such effects as that, the initial accusations came from people who already hated Palin on partisan grounds, and were willing to credit, or to take advantage of, even a purely associative link between her and a monstrous crime to condemn her, without waiting to see what the actual evidence showed to be the causation involved . . . because they knew she had to be guilty. When I see you calling that conduct horrendous I'll take your judgment on Palin's rhetoric more seriously.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm not up for developing a calibrated scale at the moment. However, saying that none of the journalists feel any of the normal grief, fear, or anger at a mass murder strikes me as a little much.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

In the English language as I speak it, and as I use it professionally, "journalists and pundits" does not mean "all journalists and pundits do X." It means "some people, who are journalists and pundits, do X."

As to the moral status of the people in question: Before we had any information about the killer's motives, mental state, or personal history, any causal chain, or any evidence, and while most of the country was in shock, they were writing columns pinning the blame on Palin. That says something to me both about what their priorities were, and about their professional ethics.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

For a clear case, look at coverage of the JFK assassination. There was a chorus of "Dallas Rightwing Kennedy-haters did it!" before anything was known about that assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. (His affiliation turned out to be clear: he had often declared himself a Communist, had more or less emigrated to Russia and Cuba.)

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

It would have been nice if Palin had shown some personal responsibility and apologized for her past speeches -- a weasel apology for "inadvertent misinterpretation of my words on the part of others" would have been fine -- instead of denying any responsibility and blaming the whole thing on journalists.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

But what evidence is there that any actual person has misinterpreted her words as encouraging political murder?

Look. The imagery of violence and warfare is commonplace in politics. Barack Obama said, "If they bring a knife, we bring a gun." Ayn Rand used to have a column called "Intellectual Ammunition Argument" for evidence against the welfare state. Paul Kanjorski, at the time a Congressman from Pennsylvania, said of Rick Scott, at the time running for governor of Florida, "Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida." If you care to look at this site, you can see maps of the United States with target images placed over districts hosting Republicans the Democratic Party wanted to defeat, including one that uses the phrase "behind enemy lines."

If you're going to assume that a psychotic murderer was driven to crime by violent political imagery, there are a whole lot of sources where he could have found it. To demand that one specific person apologize, when there is no evidence that her particular image was even involved, and when you don't demand that anyone else apologize, amounts to demanding that that one person make an admission of guilt. And I don't see that it's been shown that she has any guilt to admit.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might have a point there. I tend to be more comfortable with leftish groups, and it's harder to see it when your own side is being insulting.

A left winger who thinks Palin is being treated unfairly.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Xeni Jardin at boingboing weighs in. I didn't know Giffords was Jewish.
I wonder if there's some other dog whistle being sounded here, though. It's so gratuitous, and it kinda goes to your previous post about pissing off a bunch of the people you're supposed to be on the same team with. Unless somehow Palin's team doesn't contain any Jews... So I wonder what she gains by deploying this frankly rather obscure reference (sorry, if it has to be explained to readers it's obscure enough that you'd be better off just with the explanation).

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Palin is an idiot. The problem is, she's an idiot with plenty of low cunning, and a publicity machine to boot.

Alas, the USA appears to have produced a LOT of folks like her. I'm going to quote madwriter and then send you to his post (unlocked) that contains the quote. It's worth a read.

"Like a lot of other people right now, I'm angry. The difference is that I'm not throwing my anger in one particular direction, at one particular party, at one specific set of P&Ps (Politicians & Pundits). I'm angry at all of them."

Here is the post (http://madwriter.livejournal.com/791150.html). (This comment edited to include a much more appropriate icon.)

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I haven't had time to look up the definition of 'purport,' but fwiw, my sense of the word is that it means a claim or assumption has been made and the speaker is not addressing its truth or falsity -- not that the speaker is declaring that the claim is false, or that the opposite is true.

In any case using 'purport' is nowhere near as strong as the outright claims that Palin and others want assassinations, or are deliberately inciting 'hate' and violence.