Let’s stop the blame game. And, from a longer perspective, let’s apply the same standards to all sides. Don’t blame the other side when it does things you already excused when your side did them.
Such are the responsible reactions to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Right-wing media and social media for days now have been full of people blaming the Left for the shooting, with particular ire focused on President Joe Biden recently saying he was putting Trump in a “bull’s-eye.” Never mind that the shooter was a registered Republican gun enthusiast whom a high school classmate described as a consistent conservative. Never mind that “bull’s-eye” has a long-established metaphorical meaning that isn’t necessarily violent.
And never mind that conservatives (mostly correctly) howled when the Left tried to blame the 2011 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona on a print ad from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that put visual gun crosshairs on congressional districts held by Democrats.
Plenty of Republicans for nearly nine years have dismissed an abundance of violent rhetoric from Trump as metaphorical, not to be taken literally, but now they want to say it’s out of bounds for Democrats to say Trump is a “threat to democracy” even though the Capitol riot of 2021 was, well, at least something of a threat. When a loon brutally attacked the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), top conservative media stars and elected officials offered barely a word of sympathy while they openly speculated whether Paul Pelosi was homosexual — and Trump himself repeatedly mocked both Pelosis while spreading conspiracy theories about the attack.
The examples of hateful rhetoric from Republican elected officials in recent years are almost endless. The same, though, is true of the Left, whose denizens repeatedly use extravagant language to denounce conservative Supreme Court justices while refusing to offer them legally mandated protection. They also refuse to denounce (and they even express sympathy for) violent left-wing street riots, with then-Sen. Kamala Harris, amid violent unrest related to Minnesotan George Floyd’s death-by-cop, calling for the protests to continue all year. Again, the examples could be legion.
Biden himself, in a poorly delivered Oval Office address that was meant to be unifying, used examples of political violence that all featured liberals, not conservatives, as victims. With a single nod to “members of both parties being targeted and shot” and of course his reference to the Trump shooting, Biden got specific only about liberal victimhood or conservative perfidy: the Pelosi incident, the Capitol riot, the “intimidation of elected officials,” and a bumbling attempt to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). He did not mention the near-fatal shooting of Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), nor the foiled assassination plot against conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, nor an attack that left Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) hospitalized, nor the blade-wielding assailant who attacked former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York.
The reality is scores of people on both sides are guilty of violent rhetoric or imagery against the other and of excusing each’s own side’s transgressions but often of overly whining about the use of relatively mild, long-accepted idioms from the other side. To pretend that one side is noticeably worse, or notably more innocent, is to be flagrantly dishonest.
A broader point is relevant, though, one applicable to everybody even tangentially involved in the political arena but especially to journalists, even opinion journalists. It should be a responsibility, before spouting off on a particular situation, to self-impose two tests. First, take all names and ideological affiliations out of the picture and ask yourself if you would apply the same principles and standards to the situation no matter which side is involved. Second, go even further and, in your mind, substitute people from the opposite side into the circumstances and ask if your assessment still would be the same. If you can’t honestly answer “yes,” then stifle yourself.
In the past five years, I’ve warned against impending political violence exactly twice. Once was on Jan. 5, 2021, cautioning against exactly the sort of outrage that was perpetrated on the Capitol the very next day.
The other was just nine days before Trump was shot, in a rare joint column with my near-political opposite, Democratic consultant James Carville, urging a search for common ground and writing that “we need to be sure we keep our disagreements within what only seems like rough-and-tumble politics rather than in the real rough and tumble of violence. That’s what our Constitution and our culture are supposed to do: force us to fight each other inside our political system with rules by which we (mostly) abide and then eventually suck it up and find things to agree on so we can move on to other political fights — all while trusting the whole system isn’t going to implode.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Instead, after the Trump shooting we see the likes of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) saying, without a shred of evidence, that Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
The better idea is what Carville and I suggested: Recognize when temperatures are rising toward violence and step back from the edge, including from false demonizations of only one side. As we wrote, “Put aside extremist nonsense.” Strive mightily to be fair-minded. And remember that endless rounds of payback can be dangerous to our constitutional republic. Stop fueling the fire.
