Gun shooting in Arizona

[_aussieguy55]

Tree of Failure (Great piece by a conservative writer for NYT)
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 13, 2011

President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.
Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility. Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. Every column, every speech, every piece of legislation and every executive decision has its own humiliating shortcomings. There are always arguments you should have made better, implications you should have anticipated, other points of view you should have taken on board.

Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.

But every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward.

Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in succession they make the social organism better.

As a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process. We all get to live lives better than we deserve because our individual shortcomings are transmuted into communal improvement. We find meaning — and can only find meaning — in the role we play in that larger social enterprise.

So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.

The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.

But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.

So, of course, you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. Of course you get people who prefer monologue to dialogue. Of course you get people who detest politics because it frustrates their ability to get 100 percent of what they want. Of course you get people who gravitate toward the like-minded and loathe their political opponents. They feel no need for balance and correction.

Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away.

President Obama’s speech in Tucson was a good step, but there will have to be a bipartisan project like comprehensive tax reform to get people conversing again. Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty.

In a famous passage, Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

[_Eric]

More evidence of right-wing links to Tucson attack

...Loughner asserted, for example, that he would not “pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver,” which dovetails with similar comments by anti-abortion gunman John C. Salvi III, who murdered two women in 1994 at an abortion clinic in Massachusetts.

The ultra-right spokesman most famously obsessed with gold and silver is Glenn Beck, the top-rated Fox News ranter. Beck regularly suggests that he or his co-thinkers are preparing to meet this or that supposed left-wing assault with armed force, declaring last fall, for instance, that if the federal government sought to compel him to have his children vaccinated against the flu, he would invite them to “meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.”...

...The Times pointed out that Loughner’s claims of government mind control through the use of grammar were not simply bizarre and idiosyncratic raving—as right-wing pundits have claimed—but “were drawn from David Wynn Miller, a far-right activist in Milwaukee....

...Not only did Loughner espouse views similar to those of the ultra-right, but in the hours immediately following the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, many media outlets found their online blogs filled with comments celebrating his action, posted by other deranged right-wing individuals who recognized a co-thinker.

The Los Angeles Times referred to these comments in an editorial, but there has been virtually no media coverage of these postings, which expressed sympathy for the gunman’s targeting of a prominent Democrat....

[_richardMdBorn]

I don't know of anyone on the left who has said Palin or talk radio is directly to blame for this, so stop beating the straw mane

Really?

Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin, http://is.gd/knNgl 1:19 PM Jan 8th via TweetDeck Retweeted by 100+ people

markos
Markos Moulitsas

http://Twitter.com/markos/status/23821038362034176

This is quite a contrast to the Left's reaction after the Fort Hood massacre. A Muslim shouts Allahu Akhbar as he murders 13 people and we were told that we should not jump to conclusions by Obama and others.

[_richardMdBorn]

Your own source says he wasn't on the left, but you call him a "leftie" in the other thread.

My source on this thread called him a leftie

A classmate of the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords this morning describes him as "left wing" and a "pot head" in a series of posts on Twitter this afternoon.

I was quoting this. Geez, Kevin, get your sources straight. Clearly, friends of the shooter have different perspectives. But no one has called him a follower of Palin or a Tea party person.

[_richardMdBorn]

So Richard, based on yoru own definition of terrorism, how do you feel about living in a country that commits terrorism abroad?

Gosh Kevin, you disappointed me. I was expecting you to write that Corporations were terrorists. Well, maybe you'll put that in your next post.

[_Kevin Graham]

Are you prepared to argue that the USA is not a terrorist nation, Richard? If not, I won't waste my time.

[_The Nehor]

Indeed, politicians like using things to their advantage all the time.

It's one of the things I rather dislike about politics... along with all the finger pointing and name calling and denouncing advertisements, etc.

The sad thing is it will continue to be the way things work until it stops working for them. Most politicians I've had a chance to talk to hate this but the reality is it is the only way to get people interested and to get into power so you can do the things you think are right. If we collectively bloc-voted out politicians who engage in 'low' forms of politics then we could see real change.

[_Molok]

It's still early, but it appears that the shooter is a leftist.

Not with a copy of "Mien Kampf" in his bedroom. I'm guessing he'll turn out to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Still, lefties don't do the shootings. Always righties (with the possible exception of Oswald).

What about the guy who shot reagan?

[_Molok]

Uh, that doesn't make someone a leftist Richard, good grief. That sounds exactly something Beck and Hannity would say.

The fact is this guy is probably closer to a Tea Party activist than anything else. He hates government and he complained that his school was unconstitutional. SOunds like virtually every Right Winger on my Facebook.

I thought nobody said these kinds of things?

[_Molok]

Are you prepared to argue that the USA is not a terrorist nation, Richard? If not, I won't waste my time.

I really fail to see how anyone could say with a straight face that they couldn't understand how citizens of certain countries would view the U.S. as a terrorist nation.