Jon Kyl

There’s an old Bill Cosby routine, called “Shop”, on the album Why Is There Air? that is quite apposite to the events of the past two days. In it, Cosby describes how his junior-high-school shop teacher tricked the guilty party into tacitly confessing to having put a bullet in the shop class furnace — and without directly accusing the kid or even so much as saying his name. With the right-wing attacks on Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, we’re seeing something rather similar play out.

Just as Cosby’s shop teacher didn’t directly accuse any of his students of being the one who put the bullet in the furnace, Sheriff Dupnik, without naming persons or ideologies directly, blamed the political climate in Arizona for making possible the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others. And, just as the kid who put the bullet in the furnace inadvertently revealed himself — “I didn’t put the bullet in the furnace, and stop talking about my mother!” — the attacks by conservatives on Sheriff Dupnik, who never once said the words “conservative”, “Republican”, “Tea Party”, or “right-wing” when discussing the creation and creators of the climate of bigotry and prejudice, stand as a tacit admission that they know full well they are responsible for having created it.

First off, we have the nuttier of Arizona’s two nutty far-right senators, Jon Kyl, who said this on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday morning:

First, I didn’t really think that that had any part in a law enforcement briefing last night. It was speculation. I don’t think we should rush to speculate. I thought that the report that we just saw from Tucson seems to have it about right: We really don’t know what motivated this young person except to know he was very mentally unstable as was pointed out in the piece.

It’s probably giving him too much credit to ascribe a coherent political philosophy to him. We just have to acknowledge that there are mentally unstable people in this country. Who knows what motivates them to do what they do? Then they commit terrible crimes like this. I would just note Gabrielle Giffords, a fine representative from Tucson, I think would be the first to say don’t rush to judgment here.

Um, except the sheriff didn’t do any of what you claim he did, Senator. Unless you’re going on the record as approving of Arizona’s becoming the capital and mecca for prejudice and bigotry?  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo.

(Crossposted from Renaissance Post.)

Yesterday afternoon, at a press conference to discuss the Tucson, Arizona shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and over a dozen others — a political hit that has so far resulted in six deaths, a nine-year-old girl’s among them — Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was quite clear on who he thought was to blame in egging on a mentally imbalanced suspect with ties to the right-wing racist hate group American Renaissance. From FDL’s Jane Hamsher’s liveblogging of Sheriff Dupnik’s news conference:

Says Giffords was the target, and that there were 2 incidents occurred in a “very vitriolic” campaign. Someone in an “angry audience” dropped a weapon out of their pants. Another incident where windows were broken out of her office. At her office at Swan and Pima right now, suspicious package being investigated.

The 22 year old suspect does have a criminal past. Says this is how “unbalanced people respond to vitriol coming out about ripping down the government. Arizona has become the capital. We have become the mecca of prejudice and bigotry.” Believes people who are unbalanced especially, like the suspect, are extremely susceptible to vitriol.

Interestingly enough, there has been an effort by the media organs that have served as enablers of the peddlers of vitriol to minimize, if not outright conceal, their roles in spreading it. One method is to simply pretend that Sheriff Dupnik — a man who, as an Arizona law enforcement officer, has been a first-hand witness to the effects of this media-promoted vitriol — didn’t say what he said. This method is the one used by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike of the New York Times, who in this story on the shootings scrubs out Sheriff Dupnik’s comments on media-enabled vitriol helping to make Arizona the capital and Mecca of prejudice and bigotry as assiduously as various right-wingers such as Sarah Palin and Giffords’ Republican opponent Jesse Kelly have been scrubbing their websites of crosshairs and other implied threats directed at Representative Giffords. Meanwhile, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander is ordering the press to stop talking about Palin and the Stalinesque “Commissar Vanishes” removal of this inflammatory material from right-wing websites; knowing how the corporate media usually leaps to fulfill the requests of their GOP allies, I suspect this will happen very shortly.

. . . Read the rest of this entry →