Andy Yorke
The shooting of Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona by a Right-wing gunman has sent shock waves throughout the US and put Republican Party politicians on the defensive.
On the 8 January, Jared Loughner attacked Gifford’s “Congress on the Corner” meeting with local supporters outside a Safeway in Tucson, shooting her point blank in the head and then firing indiscriminately into the crowd, wounding thirteen in all and killing six – including a nine-year old girl.
The attack has sparked a sharp debate on whether this was simply an isolated, tragic incident linked to a mentally ill young man, or a politically-motivated shooting by someone poisoned by the toxic rhetoric of the Right-wing media and Republican politicians.
The Republicans and most of the media, from the Right-wing Fox network to the “liberal” New York Times, are pushing the idea that Loughner is a lunatic to downplay the obvious political dimensions of his action.
The media has poured over Loughner’s Facebook postings and Youtube videos he put up, and his police records, interviews with teachers and students, to put together a long record of bizarre statements and unbalanced actions.
No doubt, his personal situation was one of increasing isolation and frustration, unemployed for months after being forced to leave college for bad behavior, failing to get into the army, and losing several jobs – he complained in one online gaming forum that he had had 67 job applications rejected. Certainly, some journalists have drawn attention to the terrible state of mental-health services with deep cutbacks, particularly acute in Arizona, which has the second-lowest number of beds per capita in the country.
Much of the media emphasis is to draw out things that could link to the Gifford attack in hindsight, such as a comment to a female bank teller refusing a request that women shouldn’t be in power. He mentioned the American Renaissance Group in some internet postings, an anti-immigrant far-right group that calls the Federal Government the “ZOG” or Zionist Occupation Government. Fox News has leaked a Homeland Security memo focusing on this angle since Senator Gifford is Jewish.
But the other issues he was obsessed with in postings or conversations are the same ones fermenting very publicly in the Tea-Party movement, such as the many mentions of the need for a new money system or the gold standard. Anti-abortion comments and hostility to some progressive amendments of the Constitution that are bugbears of the Right are all part of the Tea-Party movement’s daily discourse. The forensic media analysis of his personal life point to someone attracted to the American Right.
So while evidence is piling up that Loughner was mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic, the question remains, why did he choose to fatally target a Democratic politician and meeting? To answer this question it is necessary to look at the political context to the rampage, a deep and prolonged economic crisis, and the historic Obama presidency. Since his inauguration in January 2009, the political atmosphere has become superheated as the Republican Right wing seeks to recover from its losses of both houses of Congress and undermine the first Black US president.
Backlash against Obama
This burst out into the open with the Tea-Party Movement’s summer protests against Obama’s healthcare plans. While the Tea-Party Movement has drawn in angry sections of the middle classes, it is bankrolled by billionaire backers like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, with prominent Republican politician Sarah Palin and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck as its figureheads.
The Tea Party has brought out into the open the buzz of paranoid (and contradictory) rhetoric on the Right-wing blogs and phone-in radio shows, with placards of the “Socialist” Obama or showing him dressed as Hitler. By angry street protests and town hall invasions, they raised the temperature and gained a larger public hearing for these ideas.
The feverish rhetoric was aimed at stirring up the anger felt among millions after four years of slump, mass unemployment, and diverting it against the Democratic health, immigration, and financial-reform agenda, attacking it as “un-American” and even “traitorous.”
The Republicans wanted to stir up as much resentment at the Democrats and Obama as possible before the mid-terms in November, in hopes of reaping votes. In Arizona, controversy over anti-immigration laws stoked the temperature even higher.
Arizona hotter than most
The Arizona Senate Bill 1070 passed in April, with its draconian provisions against immigrants and built-in racial profiling. The right did everything they could to blame illegal migrants and their Democratic-Party “protectors” for the problems facing the US.
Taken up nationally by the Right as “their” model policy, the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the bill in July, and the Federal District Court injunction against some of its more extreme provisions, have only added fuel to the Tea Party flames.
Town-hall meetings were besieged by Tea-Party protestors with local Democrats the target. Giffords’ office was attacked after the signing of the Health Act, with the assailants leaving cracked and broken windows.
Yet nothing has stirred up more controversy than Sarah Palin’s now infamous web-site “cross-hairs” over Arizona’s eighth Congressional district, represented by Gifford along with others of prominent Democrats who had just voted in favor of healthcare.
Put up in March 2010 on her Facebook page, with a tweet directing people to it saying “don’t retreat, reload!” Gifford herself at the time criticized Palin’s rhetoric saying, “you’ve got to realize it’s not without consequences.”
Republican Right whips up violence
Palin’s reload rhetoric and gun-scope imagery is not the exception but the rule on the ever more frenzied Right.
In July, it was leaked that the Sharron Angle, Tea-Party candidate in the Nevada Senate race, told a talk-show host on air that “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies (the right to bear arms and form militias)… I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
Like Palin’s “Reload” graphic, Angle’s argument in favor of assassinating the leading Democrat Senator Reid sparked only a limited debate in the media before dying down, such stories have become the norm over the years. Liberals complain that Tea-Party supporters regularly bring guns to protests while candidates like Angle have links to organizations even further to the Right.
When Fox News anchor Glenn Beck burned Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi in effigy on national television, it was just one of many such stunts.
The Media Matters think-tank has pointed out that in 2010 three violent threats, including one attempted mass shoot-up of the ACLU in San Francisco; all three attackers quoted Glenn Beck and Fox News as their inspiration and source of information.
Against the disingenuous denials of the Republicans, a murderous result was completely predictable from the Right’s hysterical verbal attacks and threats, as this piece by Huffington Post writer Rick Horowitz written ten months ago shows, even before the Tea Party really gathered steam:
“Already there have been bricks thrown through windows, and pictures of nooses. Already the authorities have had to increase security for certain government officials whose votes, whose beliefs, have displeased the ranters and the thugs and the rest of them.
“And when the bricks become bullets, as they surely could, and the death threats turn into conscious acts, just watch the ranters and the thugs pull back in horror, or some half-baked simulation of it. ‘We never dreamed…!’ they’ll say. ‘We had no idea…!’ they’ll insist.
“That will be a lie.” (Rick Horowitz, 25 March 2010)
Palin unrepentant
After the Gifford shooting, the response of key figures associated with the Tea-Party movement has been unrepentant. Rush Limbaugh, the millionaire talk-radio bigot, in a classic example of the counter-logic of the Right, accused the Democrats of giving their “full support” to… Jared Loughner!
He explained these outrageous comments stated by explaining, “the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he’s just a victim.”
Similarly, Sarah Palin after three days silence denounced the liberal media in a special video message, accusing them of a “blood libel” – a shocking choice of words as the term was popularised during the historical persecution of the Jewish people – suggesting that her and her fellow Tea-Party
compatriots responsible are actually wronged victims of the debate.
The Republican establishment also loudly rejected the claims but tilted away from such outrageous arguments. The smears, violent rhetoric, and Tea-Party protests have all been useful for restoring their fortunes – in a dramatic reversal, they seized back control of the House of Representatives only a year after Obama’s triumph.
However the Tea-Party movement has also been two-edged, winning Republican primaries and ousting favored careerists from the race, and threatening to lose the support of more middle-of-the-road voters.
The Gifford shooting has shown there are potentially even more liabilities from the populist explosion. Whether this will cause rifts with the Republican Right remains to be seen.
Rush Limbaugh, at least, has slammed other Right-wingers for “slobbering over” Obama’s Tucson speech.
Democrats dither, Obama backs down – again
In the context of such an unusually heated debate, Obama’s much awaited speech in Tucson on 12 January received lots of attention. However, instead of attacking the Right, he once again surrendered to its pressure.
Obama merely labeled the Phoenix shooting a “tragedy,” that “terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding… and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.” A “lack of civility”- Obama’s polite description of the Right wing’s violent rhetoric – did not cause the tragedy, a clear rejection of those of his own supporters who had drawn the link between the Tea Party and Gifford’s shooting.
He finished with the usual bland calls for unity and “listening to each other more carefully, make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
The Democratic Party establishment was joined by gushing Right-wing pundits and Republican top guns praising, for once, Obama since the speech backed them up. Glenn Beck called it Obama’s best speech ever, and praised him “for becoming the president of the United States of America last night.”
Jon Podhoretz, columnist at the Right-wing Murdoch tabloid, the New York Post, crooned at Obama’s “pitch-perfect response to the disgusting national political debate over the past couple of days.” Now Democrats are focusing on the woeful state of the mental health system – rightly, but trying to seal the wrong conclusion on the incident.
This policy of conciliation is not Obama’s strength, over the last year it has cost him his popularity and support. Far from mobilizing his supporters to push through reforms, he bent the knee to the Republicans repeatedly, abandoning environmental reform, trade-union rights, and finally gutting the health-care bill, while mass unemployment continues unabated and 2010 was a year of record foreclosures.
After the mid-term elections, he promised again to work with the Republicans, rewarding them by keeping Bush’s tax cuts for the richest.
Support for Obama has plummeted as millions despair of seeing the “change” he promised. His eloquent speeches letting the Republicans off the hook have not stopped their drive to repeal his health-care bill, especially after such tactics won them the House.
More importantly, his policies and reforms are all pitched at saving capitalism and the USA’s position in the world; they have so far rewarded corporate America rather than the millions of workers, youth, and poor people who put him in office.
By selling out the hopes he raised, and abandoning policies that could redistribute wealth from the rich to creating jobs, services, and healthcare for people like Loughner, he has demobilized the Left and helped unwittingly unleash the Right.
Calls for national unity and healing won’t negate the fact that capitalism remains in crisis mode, and discontent will be in no short supply. The Republicans will continue tapping prejudice and utilizing ignorance to divide the working class and defend Capitalism. The Democratic Party, in hock to the same system’s banks, corporations, and led by an establishment of millionaire politicians, have no alternative to provide and no way of staunching the growth of the right.
The only conceivable path out of the apparent cul-de-sac is to build a working-class movement to combat austerity of both the Democrats and Republicans.
Out of this resistance build a new, working-class party that can lead the US working class to their own “second amendment solution” to the terrible suffering of millions and dark future that capitalism holds out for us: the forcible abolition of the rotten system that is at the root of an historic crisis not just in America but the world.