Wired State

Why Can't We Criticize the Muslim Brotherhood?!

Here come the Experts to tell us why we shouldn't worry about the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yes, we get it that the people who are running the revolution in Egypt appear to be a lot of middle class and jobless youth with Internet tools who seem to be the antithesis of backward extremist movements. Yes, we get it that while Muslim Brotherhood members have been arrested by the government in connection with the unrest, in fact the revolutionaries haven't chosen to focus on them so as not to distract from the cause. Yes, we get it that the situation is evolving and complex and confusing.

But I'm failing to see why we can't criticize the Muslim Brotherhood, and can't ask a lot of questions about this secretive Islamist movement that has been banned by the despotic Mubarak regime now being toppled in Egypt.

I'm putting this post on my blog about new media because I think there are a number of media-induced aspects to the framing of this debate, amplified and accelerated by new media, and that makes it difficult to have a critical and open discussion about this phenomenon. Already I've seen profound myopia and even looniness from a media researcher who refuses to accept my pointed -- and correct -- comment that there aren't very many women visible in the protests in Egypt. And I've seen the Egyptian revolution picked up uncritically as group-bonding experience for Internet denizens, whether they are Anonymous 4channers who are "helping" by practicing DDOS "civil disobedience", or buyers-remorseful Obama voters looking for something more dramatic to express their unhappiness than the complexities of health care.

A lot of the reportage making the claim that the demonstrators aren't like the Muslim Brotherhood seem to establish this claim merely by invoking their youth, their jeans, or their use of Facebook, without doing much actual polling of their views.

I've written in the past about the left's aversion to condemning extremism and violence, and forthrightly making the critical separation and distance between advocating for the rights of victims of oppression, which might include extremist Muslims, and those extremists' own views which are antithetical particularly to women's rights and intellectual and religious freedom -- this was exemplified in the story of Amnesty International and Gita Sahgal, the former women's rights program officer who departed. I've also written about the global left's increasing unwillingness to insist on nonviolence and even its tendency to provoke and celebrate violence, as in the Gaza flotilla tragedy.

The theory of the Muslim Bros goes like this:

o if you criticize them, you must be for Mubarak -- a despot who lorded over a corrupt and abusive regime for three decades where dissidents and rebels have been arrested and tortured and civil society oppressed

o if you criticize them, you must be ignorant of history and culture and the many nuances of this complex movement

o if you criticize them, you must be prejudiced against Muslims

o if you criticize them, you must be an uncritical supporter of Israel or even part of a Zionist lobby

o if you criticize them, you must not be aware of all the moderate things the Bros have been doing and their acceptance in the revolutionary coalition

o if you criticize them, you must be part of the American Tea Party or conservative right-wing

o if you criticize them, you must fail to see the good social welfare work they do among poor people

 

So, that's a pretty stacked deck, and many a timid soul stops with their worried thoughts and their misgivings, seeing this stacked deck. Not I.

The first thing to admit about the Muslim Brotherhood is that nobody is an expert. That comes as quite a shock and surprise to some who have based their entire careers on being regional Middle East experts who are now being quoted everywhere about this movement, and comes as a challenge even to the manhood of various intrepid young scouts from the global wired left backpacking around Cairo and tweeting their impressions "from the ground".

Too bad, I'll repeat it again: nobody is an expert.

The reason is very simple: the movement is a secret, banned, Islamist movement and nobody has ever seen what they would be like if and when they came to power. That's all. So everybody is guessing, nobody is an expert, nobody can point to some other country -- or Egypt itself -- where this movement has been in power, so we can't know. We'll see.

Next, nobody can be sure that this movement, which says it is moderate and is shying away from the imposition of a Caliphate or the use of violence or even some aggressive agenda with regard to Israel or the suppression of women, in fact has control of all its factions or in fact is telling the truth about what it will do.

ElBaradei, the moderate who has emerged as a leader of the "big tent" is waiving away concerns about Islamist fundamentalists saying that those who ask this question are just like the Mubarak regime, invoking Islamism in order to justify oppression.

No, I'm not. I'm invoking Islamism because it has been used to oppress other people in Iran, in Algeria, in Afghanistan and other countries, including in countries where it is supposed to be moderate, and -- again -- we don't know how this historical moment will play out.

Women in Tunisia demonstrating against the return of some extreme Islamists don't waive away these concerns like ElBaradei -- but, oh, I suppose in the next minute we'll hear they are tools of the regime and justifying past oppression.

Groups that have their history in the underground and who have faced torture and oppression learn subterfuge and live the life of partisans. That doesn't lend itself to being open and transparent and saying what you're really about. Therefore it's more than fine to ask questions about intentions and plans -- and to worry out loud how it might turn out. Doing that is what I call "walking and chewing gum at the same time" -- it doesn't mean you advocate their oppression or side with their oppressors, it means you care about universal human rights for all.

After all, tons of middle-class Egyptians who have become more secularized, including many making this revolution themselves, are asking these very questions themselves, but maybe not out loud.

They may not be able to ask them out loud if they feel they are in a politically constrained situation where to ask them out loud looks like a) playing into the hands of their oppressor they're trying to get rid of and b) playing into the hands of putative propper-uppers of their oppressor, like America.

But we don't have to live by those constraints -- and we shouldn't.

To the extent this revolution *does* turn out better, it will be because not only we, but people for whom it is a life and death matter in their own country get to ask this question, and those being asked the question dispel doubts not by dispelling debate, but by actually going ahead and tolerating women's rights and other human rights as well as peaceful dissent and a negotiated process to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

A Fractured Reality: No Women in the Pictures from Egypt

Early this morning I looked at the photos the New York Times published which were placed on its front page, and I tweeted that there were no women in the pictures from the revolution in Egypt.

That's because there weren't any, pure and simple. That fact tells us something, and something we will need to continue to pay attention to.

A woman journalist I know immediately "liked" my comment on Facebook because she got it. Many would.

But then, right away, a male Twitterer named @rrichard09 who calls himself a media researcher and runs an erudite blog disputed my claim, saying that in fact videos on other, back pages of the Times in fact showed women were participating in protests in Europe. (The best way to follow twit-fights like this is to separately read the streams @rrichard09 and @catfitz -- it's not really to render them coherently togther.)

This is the sort of literalist and obdurate comment one can expect from knowier-than-thou types on Twitter, but I was undeterred. Der, I get it that women *are* protesting, and I've seen them in other media, but I gotta say, there is something to be said for what occurred with these Times photos: no women. For a reason.

The *front page* photos in fact, fresh from the scene, were all of men. Men praying in rows. Men demonstrating. Men by burning tanks. Men with masks or scarves trying to deal with tear gas. Men shouting or looking worried. Men, men, men.

RR persisted with his complaint. He began talking about "discoverable content," i.e. pushing his futurist view that "the front page" is now an outdated and irrelevant concept, harkening back to actual newsprint days, and that I should get with it and realize that anything can be found anywhere, so actual placement on some digital page doesn't matter.

Oh, baloney, sez I. The front page still does matter. That's why the most important stories are still on the front! After all, the Times editor don't use it to put pictures of fires in Newark, New Jersey, or just any old thing as it streams in, but places the foreign war stories there. People come to nytimes.com to look at what's on the front first -- they don't imbibe all their news by first typing a search term into Google. If what RR thought was true about the concept of "discoverable content" making all content equal on flat plain, then...no one would ever go to nytimes.com as an address. They would never have to. They'd only go to Google. Er, perhaps that's how he (and they) would like things...

This sort of actuality of the optics of the situation should all be obvious, but this dude kept flogging this point as if it were some sort of self-evident truth. The reality is that "the front page" still matters, and at some level he realizes this, even if he would prefer to live in a Vernor Vinges novel called Rainbow's End, where among many other troubling futuristic oddities in a virtualized world, all the books in a library of the future are shredded, and thrown up into the air, to see what might stick...

RR then began blabbering about "data sets". Of course, this on the face of it is patently ridiculous, because the known data set by which one could agree to judge something like, "are there, or are there not, a lot of women participating in these demonstrations in Egypt" might be a function like "X = all the online newspapers of the world" or "X plus Y=all Flickr photos" or "X plus Y plus Z=all Facebook photos" -- or who the hell knows.

Helpfully, I did a search on Google images with the words "Egypt" and "January 25" and send him the link. It's all men in crowds, marches, throwing stones, praying, etc. There was one picture of a woman voting.

Those NYT front page photos also have, in one of them, one woman in the far distance and on other pages, you can find a few more.

Mister Literalist RR seems to think that this then opens the way to refute my complaints. First, he's worried that I'm accusing the Times of being sexist. But that's not the issue. The Times probably *isn't* sexist here, and has probably pretty faithfully shot the photos of the scenes as they really are, even though I've seen flash by on all the news stories the usual crowd of men's names rather than women's names but -- that's how it is. I am not in the business of going around accusing media of sexist bias -- I'm not a feminist. By that I mean I don't make it my life's work to fight for women's rights or equality -- I simply chose to work on human rights, and I believe women's rights are human rights. as the UN slogan has it.

No, the reason there aren't women in this picture isn't because somehow women don't participate in this revolution at all. Of course they do. We have famous pictures already of the woman in the headscarf kissing the policeman. Sure, there are women. But not lots. Most are men. And in many scenes, there just aren't women, period. Maybe it's considered too dangerous. Maybe they don't have a custom of public prayer. But they're not there. And that's because, well, it's not a society with equality for women, as any UN CEDAW report or voluminous amounts of NGO reporting can tell you.

But that somehow seems terribly hard to admit, with this revolution, especially for the left (and by imbibing these fashionable PC views about revolutions and media, PC has positioned himself on the left as well although he is loathe to admit it and his website seems to position him as even conservative).

I think I've definitely put my finger on a sore point here, judging from the shrill reaction from Jillian York, who found this sort of questioning about women's rights as somehow ignorant and inappropriate, and judging from the reaction from PC RR and others on Twitter and Facebook.

This is really the essential point, isn't it, whether the revolution will lead to Islamist fundamentalists coming to power -- whose hallmark anywhere in the world is always suppression of women's rights and even of their very presence.

And that's why there is such neuralgia around this point, with so many not wanting to admit the W-word could be an issue.

The global left doesn't want to admit that the revolution might take this awful turn.  And even "conservative media researchers" don't seem to want to admit it. And sure, I'd like to believe that legions of women will be coming out in peaceful rows to take their seats in parliament and government and civic organizations (although they don't have equality in those institutions now). But...it's ok to express some doubt on this score. And these pictures back it up.

The vehemence with which someone would defend several untruths like this is truly disturbing, and for the long run, more than just the question of who is in the Egyptian protests.

The Double Standard of the Wired Global Left on Revolutions

Framemaker, the photographer who took this photo of the demonstrations in Egypt says, "A new "third force" gathers momentum in the mideast. Between Western-backed, modernizing, authoritarian governments on the one hand and also-authoritarian fundamentalism on the other, we see the emergence of a new movement for democracy and social justice in the mideast. A breath of fresh air.

I'm sorry, but I have trouble believing him. I guess it's because I've lived long enough to see many revolutions come and go around the world, and more than a few turn out to bring to power forces  as bad -- if not worse -- than the regimes they overthrew.

I'm also much less enthralled with rock-throwing, car-burning, and screaming of obscenities and proclamation of ecstatic revolutionary theories than many people on Twitter.

Thomas Carothers of Carnegie Endowment has an interesting essay posted, Tunisia -- Not a Color Revolution but No Solace for Autocrats.

I think it's important to add that the revolutions in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and even Palestine are not necessarily the droids the global wired left are looking for, either -- but I'm happy to be surprised.

That is, they are jumping to bless the revolutionary movements in the Middle East enthusiastically, but without any of the caution, cynicism or even hatred they bring to the colour revolutions of the post-Soviet East, which they tend to denounce as Western-sponsored, insincere, inauthentic, etc.

So I view them as having a definite double standard on revolutions and social change.

In fact, much of what you see on Twitter is a global swoon right now. WikiLeaks and DDOS supporter NoNeck, who also runs our NYS government servers (yikes!) gushes on Twitter:

in 2007, I met a network of Egyptian geeks who showed me more love & generosity than most westerners. I tear at the current thought of them.

Always, that need in the Western idealist, that need to ascribe to the Exotic Other features missing in one's own people! Always, the belief in hospitality and love greater than any man has at home! Yes, we should weep about people living under oppression and harmed by it, and even hold a special place in our heart for the ingenious geeks. But yes, we can ask why they are throwing rocks and burning cars and why they hate Israel so hysterically, too.

Clay Shirky and Rebecca McKinnon are tweeting and retreeting about evil American corporations helping evil Egyptian autocrats -- and I respond that this is a silly moral equivalence between companies that are pragmatic and regimes that are deadly -- and fails to concede that their dissident friends coming to power might very well want these companies they're willing to chase away *now* to come back and provide jobs and investment in their country.

Egypt's internet crackdown, courtesy American companies http://act2.freepress.net/sign/dpi #netfreedom #jan25 (via @rmack)

(There's actually just...one company. And we're not sure in fact they are actively helping the Egyptian despots, but they do sell technology for deep inspection of packets that could be used to spy on dissidents. The story originates in a piece by Timothy Karr in Huffpo. Timothy Karr is a typical leftizen with a blog filled with attacks on Genachowski for not being radical enough, hate on AT&T and Comcast for being telephone companies, furies over Fox News, and agitation for "Net Neutrality". All of this by way of noting that he is highly selective on the "freedom" causes he choses and only very sporadically interested in the problems of oppressive regimes abroad related to the Internet, as his main issue is fighting capitalist media in the U.S. -- and I'm sorry, I never believe people when they "represent 2 million people" especially when it's a list of the usual suspects -- and I'm not surprised to see this kind of criticism of Karr, or this kind of rebuttal).

As I will explain, it's not that companies aren't somehow beyond criticism, or that we shouldn't protest their practices if in fact we can document that they did evil things (er, did we?). No, it's that this reaching to balance, balance, always balance the saddlebags every time we criticize anything abroad with a whack at America, too. It's  just plain myopic and even infantile, if not suspect.

What's the real agenda here? Is the real purpose to attack capitalism by magnifying the sins of corporations, or single out America for special hatred in the world? Sorry, but as I point out in my answer to Carothers, we need to steer the global left -- if they are sincere about their concerns for human rights and justice, which I don't believe they always are -- toward Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers REALLY able to influence these situations -- and usually for the worse.

And say,  can't you guys just ever condemn tyranny without making it seem like it's all made in America?

Something called SavetheInternet (turns out it is run by Karr, too) is protesting Egypt's shutdown of the whole Internet -- but a glance through their site doesn't show them ever protesting any other Internet freedom problems, and mainly campaigning for "Net Neutrality," which I view as a little-disguised call for overreach by a U.S. government agency, the FCC, to run the business of the Internet -- the sort of government control these groups usually protest elsewhere, including in the U.S.

Gosh, I *do* wonder where all these Internet freedom fighters have been for the last month on Turkmenistan. I think I and Steve LeVine are the only people in the Western world who have written about this outrage. Russia's MTS was completely shut down by the Turkmen government, blocking 2.4 million people -- half the population! -- from accessing cellular communications, including Internet access which is difficult to get otherwise in this isolated and oppressive country. No freedom fighters whatsoever have shown up for this blatant grab -- it just wasn't interesting enough and didn't involve being able to Blame America First or blame some recognizable Western corporation.

The freedom fighters were pretty much missing from the shut-down of the Internet and jailing of presidential candidates and supporters in Belarus, too, of course -- again, like Evgeny Morozov, they sneer at what they view as inauthentic, Western-backed movements. (In fact, an Austrian company is involved in selling technology to the Lukashenka regime that tracked cell phone users who were at the demonstration December 19, but only a few diehard Belarus-watchers are protesting that -- it's not big, it's not American.)

Too bad the people in what are in fact real movements have to sit in real jail for their participation in what the global left views as fake.

And yep, right on cue there was lefty social media maker NewMedia Jim, the White House cameraman, telling us, in the same tweet that condemns Egypt's shut-down of the Internet, that Obama wants to do this here, too:

RT @marshallk Complete Internet Blackout in Egypt http://rww.to/e7mk1K || notable that White House wants this power too http://is.gd/RMnQ04

Sigh.

Although NewMediaJim lives in a country where he can bash his employer -- the government -- without reprisal, he still feels the need to reference the fact that Obama has talked about some kind of "Internet kill switch". This hasn't come to pass; such a thing won't come to pass given all the opposition to it, and there will be a political struggle, a free debate, and something in the end that is about protection of the Internet in the U.S. from hostile forces. These Internet freedom fighters sure wouldn't like to see the Internet serving hospitals and airports and their own intellectual life shut down by hostile forces, yet they can't concede a discussion that has to happen about what measures need to be taken to prevent that from happening -- as it all too often happens in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, let alone now in the Middle East.

What is it with these people? Why can't they just condemn the Egyptian or Tunisian tyrants and be done with it, without having to also, in equal-opportunity fashion -- bash the U.S.?

Arizona Shootings Are a Second Amendment, Not a First Amendment Abuse

Timothy Egan's essay in The New York Times is typical of many philosophical musings by liberals now that seem to incite a call to "do something" about the First Amendment, but stop short of actually prescribing policy, or looking at the Second Amendment -- or for that matter, policies to treat and restrain the violently mentally ill in an effective and humane manner.

Like others striking a thoughtful pose and remaining content to let their readers bray in the comments to bridle freedoms of campaign speech and political association, he isn't saying what exactly he means when he implies in fact there *is* some legal remedy here involving the First Amendment:

Neither amendment, of course, killed a 9-year-old girl or put a bullet through the head of that bright soul, Gabrielle Giffords. But both amendments, when abused, can have lethal consequences, as the congresswoman herself said so hauntingly in March. The sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, who is already under Tea Party attack for speaking his mind, had it mostly right when he said Arizona had become “the Tombstone of the United States.”

As I have, he notes the plea of Congresswoman Giffords herself last March, when Palin came out with the infamous crosshairs map:

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” said Giffords. “Crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences.”

My response in the Times comments:

And what are those consequences, do you think, Timothy Egan? Rep. Giffords didn't say in March -- and we may never know what she meant.

I'll tell you what I think the consequences should be -- that such politicians should not be elected. That's all. *Not elected*. Not entrusted with power to represent the American people. The consequences *surely* shouldn't be that they are silenced. If in March you could not find any way to bring Sarah Palin to court over a campaign image with target crosshairs, then there is no more reason to bring her to court today, as the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that to be actionable, speech must rise to the test of "incitement to imminent violence".

And if you can concede that there isn't a legal remedy here via the courts in invoking "abuse" of the First Amendment as you imply, when are you suggesting that we be bound by some politically-correct coercive code of conduct shy of such a legal remedy? Then say so.

If you are not implying in fact that we need private institutions everywhere to instate codes of speech conduct (and they have already done so on many Internet forums, college campuses, and workplaces), or you're not calling for public confessions and recantations of rightwing figures (as CREDO and Daily Kos are), then..that's it.

And all the sly incitement that Paul Krugman engages in at the New York Times to delegitimize the left; all the opportunistic calls for bullying campaigns by CREDO and the Daily Kos; all the smug and pious rallies for sanity by Jonathan Stewart and Steven Colbert, even as they, too, annihilate the right from existence by cultural ostracism -- none of it will achieve their goals. Unless they mean to turn rhetoric into coercion and violence themselves.

If you don't like what Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Fox News are saying, change the channel, and don't elect them or those whom they recommend. Meanwhile, let's recall that they and those they recommend were not elected as president. The right *isn't* in the White House -- and it's been two years. Can you handle it?

So...Deductions, Timothy? Do you in fact mean imposing some sort of civility code instead of keeping the First Amendment?  This tragedy isn't an "abuse" of the First Amendment, nor is it a lawful exercise of that freedom that killed a 9-year-old girl (and a judge, too) -- although we *do* appreciate your effort -- as sly as Krugman or Rich -- to try to jerk our tears here. This tragedy is a result of the inability of society to care for and restrain the mentally ill in a timely, humane and appropriate manner, and to control guns. While I quite understand your desire to read more into it -- your reading more implies there's some change regarding free and unfettered democratic politics, rather than change in procedures for registering the mentally ill and guns. Difference. And shame on you for not making that difference and implying that all our freedoms have to be threatened.

And shame on you for trying to take the horrible story of Senator Murray into yet another coercive lever to extract policies by fiat. Those angry at this policy obviously don't see it as "giving others a chance to get well" but find that it threatens to take away some economic freedom they previously enjoyed. Can you stand that some people have a political difference about this with you, without ascribing to them deadly intentions?! Why would a public policy change that happened to spark a murder threat require that such a policy change has to be rammed through?

As for your rehashing and parcing of all these other rhetorical excesses from the overheated rightwing at home that also don't rise to the Supreme Court test of actionable behaviour, I suggest you get busy at something more realistic: addressing our Nobel Peace Prize laureate president about two wars abroad where more people have been dying, both our own soldiers and innocent civilians, since he received it.

It sounds like *when* the law-enforcers find people who threaten violence in language that they claim comes word-for-word from Glenn Beck," they act and put away such offenders promptly. They don't "put away" Glenn Beck. Or are you suggesting they should? Let's hear you answer that question rather than whiplashing legions of your readers to bay for it themselves.

And...we are to think about...what? Don't be coy. Say what you mean. You hinted you want to change or remove the First Amendment. Would that not also risk silencing your own purported words of insight and peace?

Words matter. And fortunately, we have a way to respond to words we find matter -- at the ballot box.

A National Tragedy: Violence on Our Corner

I endorse what President Obama has said about the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge Roll and others in Arizona: it is a national tragedy. Not everything is known yet about the survivors and victims; one person killed was a little girl of only 9 who went to visit the politician out of her interest in civics.

Violence must never be used in politics; no one ever deserves to be intimidated or harmed because of their political views. I'm happy to define this case, like all victims' cases, through the lens of the fears of the victim -- Rep. Gifford -- which horribly came to pass. Months ago, she denounced Sarah Palin for her infamous "target" map that put a gun sight on states where congress people who supported Obama's health care plan were running in the elections, as it has been reported:

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

I don't believe that the use of the target icons was intentionally violent -- in fact people have come up with a use of a target map with bull's eyes by the DLC (and of course, argued relentlessly that gun scopes and dart boards are different in implication). And in fact, while Palin stands accused of guiltily removing this offensive map yesterday without comment (it may have been removed to prevent overwhelming of the site), the Daily Kos has also removed a tasteless old blog headlined "Gifford is Dead to Me" -- because she wasn't far enough left for the Kossack taste -- she is, after all, a Blue Dog Democrat and former Republican.

Yet in this case, those perceptions of mine about intent are those of one far from the scene in Arizona. I think we in the North (especially in New York City where guns are outlawed) do two things about the gun culture of the South and West -- we both exaggerate it because we don't see its normalcy for some people, and we also tend not to take it so seriously as it seems a caricature. But for Congressman Gifford, in that situation, daily dealing with the rhetoric and passions around the immigration bill issue and health care reforms, who had already had her office door shattered, who had already suffered an incident where someone dropped a gun at a meeting she spoke at, her perceptions of the Palin rhetoric are legitimate -- in ways that the hysteria of Northeastern or California twitterers merely looking for anything to discredit the right are not. After all, these same extreme leftists can go after Blue Dogs and moderates in just the same vicious way -- look at what they did with Hillary on Youtube during the campaign last time.

When I first heard the news, I felt that same helpless fear I recall from when I was a little girl of six years old in second grade, and the nun who was the school principal came into our classroom with only one, stark report: "The president has been shot. Please rise to pray." I remember getting to my feet along with my classmates, knees shaking, and saying a futile "Hail Mary" and "Our Father" before being sent home on buses, where we sat grimly in silence, and a class clown standing up and inappropriately re-enacting the shooting not getting any laughs. It was one of the longest rides of my life. It is mixed in my memory with the sound of air raid sirens and the Cuban Missile Crisis sending the fathers home early from work. There is a profound horror in having the leader of your country killed -- and now of having an elected member of the House shot and critically wounded and a judge and other aides and supporters killed.

So that same feeling swept over me and many others that remember not only the Kennedy assassination but those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

In this case, we don't know yet whether we can call this an assassination (although some believe that any killing of a public figure, even if for reasons of mental illness, is still an assassination merely for the fact that the person was a public figure), even if it is a targeting, because the shooter is clearly mentally deranged, and the role of a possible second person who acted strangely before the public meeting in the grocery store isn't clear yet.

Yet in the early hours following the news, there was a tidal swarm of the left and liberal twittering and blogging masses roundly denouncing Fox News, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and talk radio stars like Rush Limbaugh for this shooting. They held them responsible for this shooter, as if he was somehow directly responding to their command, at worse, or somehow responding to a violent zeitgeist in the culture that they are responsible for creating.

It turns out this young white male, age 22, was a pot smoker.  It turns out that some defined the shooter as "left-wing" in his views and culture. But you won't find anyone blaming pot or the Internet's random leftwing culture for this incident -- that would be uncool. No one will refrain from stumping for the legalization of pot, if that's their issue, due to this tragedy. No one will criticize the way the Internet is bringing up our young with a constant intravenous drip of cultic emotion and propaganda.

It might turn out like any young male of his generation, he played first-person shooter video war games  -- although that hasn't been mentioned. But even if that turns out to be true, we will never, ever hear that cultural fact mentioned as a possible cause. It won't be looked at; policies will not be made.

The shooter was so incoherent in his speech in classrooms that his fellow students were impressed by it -- and in fact campus police had to intervene due to his disruption on five occasions. His teachers had him suspended and even called in his parents to tell them that their son could not be reinstated until he had a psychiatric evaluation. His Youtube page, with its incoherent and strange conspiracy theories indicating that he believed he was under mind control, or that some forces were instating some sort of new currency -- or should -- and opposing the current monetary system and the flag and praising Hitler's Mein Kamp along with Marx's Communist Manifesto -- seem to be the product of mental illness. They do not reference, or appear to be informed by, Palin or Beck.

Yet we will not hear a root cause or a radical solution to this shooting to be any change in making it easier to institutionalize the mentally ill -- a very, very difficult process in most states. Nor will the discovery that he was severely mentally ill with a number of outbursts and breaks with reality be the end of the story -- no, not at all.

Nor will there be any serious review of gun control policies -- the Congresswoman herself was said to have a pistol permit. Many in the North especially are revulsed by the gun culture of the South and West -- I sure am -- and they'd be happy to abolish guns or make their availability extremely limited. But that won't be happening, no more than it happened after the last big school massacre by an insane person.

No, pot criminalization, or reduction of cultural violence incited by TV or videos, or more gun control, or increased ease in locking up the mentally ill -- none of these will be accessed as causes or issues or policy changes in response to this tragedy.

Congresswoman Giffords was Jewish, the first Jewish legislator in Arizona. In fact, the FBI statistics show that most hate crimes in America are made against Jews, and not blacks or Muslims, as many believe, although they are of course victimized by hate crimes as well. Yet her Jewishness was not immediately studied as a possible motive of this deranged man who had come to believe various other Internet cult theories. Sarah Palin, who has never been criticized for antisemitism, was. Now Andrew Sullivan -- who has no comments open ever on his blog -- has produced a reference an FBI angle that may indicate the shooter belong to a far right decidedly antisemitic group. Will Sullivan find a Fox News or a Glenn Beck angle for that, too?

No one will be looking at the leftist vilification of Israel and its frequent indulgence of antisemitism, of course.

Instead, the groundwork has been laid by the furious blogging and tweeting masses and then the liberal establishment that this narrative will have to be about changing the imagery and rhetoric of right-wing politics, and it will be not about the attempt of the left to delegitimize the right with the smear of violence incitement, but about the use of some elements of the right of symbols from gun culture, and about right-wing anger at left-wing policies.

So...Good luck on that one. Sadly, I don't think we will be seeing a change in conservative gun culture any time soon. Those conservatives who are capable of realizing the impact of their rhetoric would have already changed it; a tiny percentage of those who might have become heedless might change as a result of this tragedy.

But most will be infuriated by the notion that they are charged with inciting the use of assassination as a political tool and will respond accordingly -- by becoming smarter about it, but rising in anger and indignation, and ruthlessly seeking power. So in the end, the left that has so hysterically sought to delegitimize the Tea Party as a movement, and has tarred even any conservative as somehow tainted by violence will be in part inciting the backlash sure to come, just as it came after the upheavals of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Tragic Arizona Shooting: How Hard It is To Get the News

Brinkley on Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.

When it comes to the murder of public figures, I think there is something different about America by contrast with Russia or Italy or Pakistan, and that is that the mentally ill rather than the consciously sane but radically politically are responsible for more of the assaults. And the media makes more of a spectacle of politics, especially electoral campaigns, because we have the First Amendment but also have more of a history of commercializing the spectacle as entertainment. You don't need TV to incite political murders (they happen in Russia even if the subjects over which people are shot are self-censored by most TV coverage) but the mentally-ill form this takes does seem to be an illness facilitated by the media.

Of course, no one will ever, ever blame the media for mass murder; that can't happen.

Yet the ability of the media, especially "new media" to rapidly convey the rhetoric and incitement of both left and right -- as well as the ability of the media to fracture and divide people now that they have many sources for their news-and-views diets -- is an accomplice of sorts in the tragic events in Arizona.  Of course the media amplifies what is human agency - you cannot lose sight of that. What's different about the situation now than 50 years ago is that we don't all experience the same amplification at the same time anymore. It's interesting that the creation of McLuhan's "global village" has led to the creation of a lot of global villagers in a lot of separate and backward villages now, each with their own channel on Youtube.

There is no one place for the country to get the news anymore, and there is no one trusted figure that people of different political persuasions can still agree will convey this news.

The gulf is widening between the Twitter-informed and the Internet-educated youth (and their semi-educated elders) who very rapidly pick up Internet cultic ideas inciting hatred of government, institutions or people, whether the Tea Party, the socialists, the Jews or the Muslims -- and those who still patiently watch and read news as it is prepared formally and think about it in some traditional way (despite its non-traditional delivery).

The increase of people fed news like an IV drip without consciousness of what it means, how to evulate it, how to judge it  -- this is beginning to make itself felt. It is no long possible to reason with some people; they have become unreasonable due to the media -- and frankly, I don't mean only the right, particularly its extremes, I mean the left as well, indeed, I see their belief in the "science" of their positions more scary than anything.

This is a phenomenon far faster than the five hours that it took to move from one president to another, one city to another due to the jet plane describe in Chet Huntley's report, above and contrasted, lamentingly, with the train more slowly taking the coffin of FDR across the nation to Washington so that people had a chance to think.

When I was a child of four, I distinctly remember riding my bike along the sidewalk as the sun began to set at about 6 pm, and a teenager self-importantly telling me to go home, because "Huntley Brinkley was on". Huntley and Brinkley, the main prime-time news show that everyone watched at the time, defined our daily schedule -- we had to get home by then because the dads were coming home to watch the news, dinner would be ready soon, and you had to wash up. You had no doubt that in millions of other homes in America, everyone else was sharing the same news space of "Good night, Chet, Good night David"; everybody watched the same TV about the assassination of Kennedy; everybody watched the same TV with the Warren Report, something I remember riveting my grandma for a summer when I stayed at her house.

Nowadays, we don't have the same TV anymore. Some are watching Glenn Beck (that wouldn't be me -- I don't even have a TV); some are watching Jon Stewart (I might catch up occasionally on the Internet -- I don't care for him, either). Millions watch Palin; different millions read Krugman, and maybe on their mobile phones.

Then there's Twitter and Facebook splintering us further, and I have to say I'm getting most of my news from those containers, mindful that they aren't the best.

Part of the unease and fear I feel with this latest tragedy is that I feel that I can no longer get the news. There is no "turning on CNN". That is, one could turn on CNN, but it isn't the CNN it once was.

Here's what happened: