The shootings in Arizona at the weekend were shocking; I was a bit incredulous when the news reports came through on Sunday morning. Since then, there's been much coverage of the underlying issue, which must certainly be the fact that partisan rhetoric in America has been escalating to some quite worrying extremes lately.
The problem with free speech is that it ends up in a whole series of cul-de-sac "baby and bathwater" arguments. Nobody would suggest that free speech is, in and of itself, a bad thing. Few people would wish to curtail that essential liberal principle of an open society. But problems crop up when the right to free speech is so abstracted that any form of bullying must be protected. When any form of imprudence is defended in this way, free speech is itself curtailed.
Arguably, a politician with presidential aspirations whose website featured a map where gun sights are trained on marginal electorates would be well-advised to keep that sort of content private, and not even to distribute it to party members. A more prudent view of free speech would be to destroy any such document before it could be caught up in any controversy. Sarah Palin's website featured just such a map until early this week.
And there's more to it than that. Jeff Sparrow has a
good piece on Crikey today, where he discusses the intersection of violent rhetoric and gun toting in right wing circles in America.
But the thing that takes the cake is Sarah Palin:
If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But especially 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 that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
There are a lot of edited videos taking this part of the statement and adding commentary, so finding one that's been left alone (well, mostly) is a challenge. I think the video below is the full statement:
Sarah Palin is proving, once again, that the more one scrapes the bottom of the barrel, the more people take pity on your obvious desperation. Defending the hopelessly indefensible is how this effort looks to me.
What strikes me about this video is that Palin is
fudging the issue, proving that she can walk both sides of about three streets. Simultaneously. Chewing gum and spitting on "thah pundints." Blaming the media could well be a good start, if only Palin would take a more critical eye to one of her chief supporters, Mr Murdoch and his Fox Network.
It will be interesting to see what happens to her popularity polls over the next few weeks.
For my money, dear Sarah is the Sir Joh of our political generation.
