After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was nearly killed in a January shooting spree, talk of a “new tone” was all over Congress as lawmakers from both parties hoped the traumatic event would calm America’s increasingly violent rhetoric. Instead, Giffords returned on Monday to find things as bad as ever.
In the most recent instance, Republicans are slamming Vice President Joe Biden — who stopped by the Capitol for Giffords’ big entrance — for reportedly comparing conservative lawmakers to “terrorists” in a meeting with House Democrats the same day. Biden has claimed it was a House Member who used the phrase instead, but Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) demanded an apology in a fundraising email to supporters. “Our belief that America should live within its means and not spend more than it takes in distinguishes us as patriots who love our country, not to be equated with the terrorists whose sole aim is to destroy it,” she wrote. Sarah Palin — who famously accused President Obama of “palling around with terrorists” in 2008 — jumped in as well, telling FOX News that “to be called a terrorist because of our beliefs from the vice president, it’s quite appalling. It’s quite vile.”
Op-ed pages and cable news discussions are loaded with similarly violent comparisons that make January’s love-fest look like a quaint memory. The Boston Globe’s Garrett Quinn has been keeping a running tally just of Tea Party “terrorist” comparisons: Maureen Dowd referred to Tea Party activists as “political suicide bombers,” for example,while Kathleen Parker wrote a column on the “Tea Fragger Party,” likening them to soldiers who kill their commanding officers with grenades. Nor has a deal calmed things: Joe Nocera wrote in a New York Times column today that “Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.”
Tea Party leaders, for their part, have been happy to return the rhetorical favor: Red State founder Erick Erickson called for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to be burned in effigy before retracting the phrase.
Democrats have accused Republican lawmakers of employing violent rhetoric and imagery in the debt ceiling debate as well — top party officials attacked House GOP leaders for days for using a clip from the The Town in which Ben Affleck asks a gangster pall to help him “hurt some people.”
Whether this rhetoric matters is an open question. Plenty of people argued at the time of the Giffords shooting that efforts at building a “new civility” were a waste of time. But taken on its own terms, the debt ceiling fight has fallen far short of January’s hopes for a more civil Washington.
As Giffords left the House yesterday, a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi whether her vote might help the two parties put the worst partisan excesses of the debt fight behind them.
“I certainly hope so,” she said. “She’s a symbol of that.”
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
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