Accountability and Victimization
by digby
Adam Serwer has a good post up today about Clinton’s Oklahoma City speech (which I excerpted earlier, here.) I hadn’t realized until this incident that it was an article of faith on the right that this speech was considered a case of political opportunism which wrongly attributed the bombing to the right wing extremism of the time. I should have known. If they don’t feel any responsibility for Tim McVeigh, then they can say and do anything and will never take responsibility for it.
And just as predictably, denial of responsibility is followed by accusations of waving the bloody shirt:
Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities. That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.
John Amato caught Bill O’Reilly pearl clutching until he turned blue last night over “the left’s” unfair characterization of right wing rhetoric in the wake of the Tucson massacre.
Bernie Goldberg was furious too. Hey, how many people used Keith Olbermann’s book to go out and murder people, Bernie? None of course, but I guess he forgot about Jim David Adkisson, who murdered two people in a Knoxville church after reading Bernie’s book.
The manifesto he composed before his murderous rampage was just released; you can read the whole thing here [pdf file], and it’s worth reading in its entirety for a number of reasons. But I especially took note of Part III:
This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.
They are extremely upset that anyone would even think to bring this sort of thing up in the wake of an assassination attempt against a Democratic politician. Very unfair. As always.
Right wing victimization is definitional. In the wake of politically inspired right wing violence, their first instinct is to rise up in anger and accuse the other side of waving the bloody shirt — without ever acknowlging where the blood came from in the first place. It’s as American as apple pie.
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