Keith's Special Comment on the nine days since Tuscon:
To date, only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership, of the existence of the fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded.
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the nine days since Tucson. That awful night, I said this: We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently. Left, right, middle - politicians and citizens - sane and insane.
This age in which this country would accept "targeting" of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces, and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.
I cited seven examples of violent rhetoric from the right; only one from the left -- my own. Because the point of that Comment and this one was not that the right pulled the trigger in Tucson but that we as citizens must stop the next Loughner, and the only way to do this is to accept personal responsibility and to pledge -- as I said that night -- that "violence, or the threat of violence, have no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence."
This afternoon, former President Clinton issued a statement honoring what would have been Dr. King's 82nd birthday:
"...we'd all do well to heed this message. While no one intends their words or actions to incite the violence we saw in Tucson -- and it's wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise - we live in a world where what we say and how we say it can be read, heard, or seen by those who understand exactly what we mean and by those whose inner demons take them to a very different place.
"That's not an argument against free speech, but a reminder that, as with all freedoms, its use carries with it responsibility. Therefore, we should follow the example Dr. King set and exercise our freedom of speech in ways that both clarify our honest differences and nurture the best of us rather than bring out the worst."
Perfect.
Yet the response?
To date, only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership, of the existence of the fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded.
"Our political discourse," John McCain wrote in an otherwise steaming serving of Washington Post Op-Ed partisan flab, "should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so."
That's it.
One individual assumed any personal responsibility for any of it, besides me: John McCain. Not Palin, not Beck. Not Limbaugh, not West. Not Kanjorski, not Malloy. Not O'Reilly, not Angle. Not Jesse Kelly, not President Obama.
It's me and John McCain.
