Morning Jolt - Mourning Tragedies in an Era of Loud, Partisan Idiocy

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 23, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. Mourning Tragedies in an Era of Loud, Partisan Idiocy

2. How Should Penn State Change, Knowing What We Know Now?

3. No Matter Where, No Matter Why, Nobody Spends Money the Way Obama Does

4. Addendum

Here's your Monday Morning Jolt.

Jim

1. Mourning Tragedies in an Era of Loud, Partisan Idiocy

I'm just turning over the opening section of today's Jolt to The Anchoress . . .

How overly-enthralled we are becoming to our ideological tribes? Enough, perhaps, to wonder if our too-passionate engagement with ideas is poisoning our communal well, and robbing us of our humanity. At a moment when we should be united as a people responding to evil in our midst -- and a mass murder is not a "tragedy", it is evil on legs -- it's disheartening to realize that while the dead were not yet cold, the injured were still dying or being treated, the people who are charged with the public trust of telling the nation its stories, (and to do it factually, without passion or prejudice) were so quick to abandon that charge with a smiling possibility that political hay could be made.

On ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday morning, in a segment with host George Stephanopoulos, Ross said James Holmes, the man who allegedly murdered 12 people in the Aurora movie theater, appeared to be a member of the tea party movement based on information from Facebook, which Stephanopoulos said "might be significant."

ABC News has since apologized for that. Some are calling for Brian Ross to be fired. I'm not sure about that; on one hand, he was likely only repeating what some producer told him. On the other, he's an experienced journalist and he should have, perhaps, had the common sense, discretion and maturity to both wait for confirmation and -- here's a crazy idea -- consider whether it was the moment to inject politics into the story, in any case.

Worse, it seems his recklessness has resulted in threats against the incorrectly identified man . . .

Sometimes, just once in a while -- like when human blood is still being cleaned and wounds bandaged, and shocked parents are clinging a little tighter to their children -- it might behoove us all, and perhaps even make better people of us, if we can just resist the urge to score a cheap political point or exploit emotions, and give a bit of respectful silence to the grief in our midst; to acknowledge that sometimes, the only appropriate words are offerings of sympathy and prayers, and that anything further is just rampant ego, giving always-divisive evil yet another assist.

Friday I asked, "Does hearing about other people politicizing a tragedy 'lower the bar' to doing it ourselves?" It shouldn't, but sometimes I look around on our side and wonder if the temptation is hard to resist. Some awful horror occurs, we're in shock, we're angry, we're in disbelief, we're grappling with how something like this could happen in a world with a loving God -- and then some yokel comes along and shouts, "Pro NRA Conservatives like you are indirectly responsible for tragedies like #AuroraShooting. Hope it sinks in today bud."

(How simple that person's world is: If there is a horrific shooting, it proves that I and everyone who thinks like me are the root of all evil. If there isn't a horrific shooting, I and everyone who thinks like me are still the root of all evil; no thought, evaluation, or analysis is ever needed.)

So we see someone on the other side blame us for some evil man's twisted plot, and I suppose there's some fear that if we don't push back, that "narrative" -- ah, what an awfully overused term -- will take root in the minds of the public. But does it? Has it ever? The greate Noemie Emery took a good, long look at "the use and abuse of grief as a partisan weapon" and concluded that attempts to exploit tragedy for political goals are increasingly ineffective:

In 2011 the Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and other liberal outlets ran stories that conceded that the political right played no part in the shootings, while saying in the next paragraph that in some ways it did. "MSNBC was crucial in driving the narrative that the killer was egged on by violent political rhetoric, particularly by Palin," Paul Bond wrote on January 27 in the Hollywood Reporter. "Even after it was learned that the shooter was an atheist, flag-burning, Bush-hating, 9/11 Truther who enjoyed joking about abortion, MSNBC still did not let up." JFK torchbearer "Arthur Schlesinger, in his thousand page history of the Kennedy administration, could not bring himself to mention Oswald at all, but allocated several paragraphs to a description of Dallas's hate-filled atmosphere," as James Piereson tells us. And as Bond has it, "Four days after the shooting, the day Obama cautioned the nation to discuss the issue 'with a good dose of humility rather than pointing fingers,' MSNBC over the course of five hours mentioned Palin in connection with the massacre 166 times, while mentioning the alleged killer only 18."

But this time, however, the old template failed. People did not blame the bloodshed on a "climate of hate." They did not think the assassin had been "given permission" to kill by talk radio or the Internet. A fairly small audience reads political blogs, and those who do take the frequent online calls to arms or to battle as the metaphorical speech that they are. In 1995, when Bill Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party's forebears for inciting the Oklahoma City bombing, the Internet was in its infancy, and no counterattack had been possible. In 2011, the first attacks on Sarah Palin and her target map of the midterms had barely been leveled before conservative bloggers produced similar "target" maps made by Democrats, recalled incendiary remarks from the left, and reprinted frequent calls to (metaphorical) violence issued by liberal bloggers and TV and radio hosts. They also recalled the vitriolic attacks on George W. Bush when he was president, the blogs, films, and plays that had urged his assassination; the wistful appeals for the return of Lee Harvey Oswald; the hanging in effigy of Sarah Palin in a Hollywood enclave on Halloween 2008.

In 1995, people hadn't thought to connect the bombings to conservative boilerplate until Clinton raised the subject himself days later. In 2011, liberal bloggers and hosts were out of the gate so fast - - and so crudely -- that they generated a furious counterreaction, and the White House was forced, ever so gently, to calm them down. Obama won praise for his nice speech at Tucson, but did not get the Clintonesque lift his fans hoped for. Repetition, and crassness, had blunted the impact. The era of making hay out of horror may now be ending at last.

Let the idiots attempt to put political bumper stickers on funeral motorcades. Let them wave signs and posters during mourning ceremonies. Let them show their soulless, ghoulish nature to the world.

2. How Should Penn State Change, Knowing What We Know Now?

In 1987, I wrote a report on Penn State University college football coach Joe Paterno for school. Penn State had just won the national championship, beating the bad-boy University of Miami with Jimmy Johnson and Vinny Testaverde, and he seemed to embody the very best in sports.

His statue is down, now.

Construction vehicles and police arrived shortly after dawn Sunday, barricading the street and sidewalks near the statue, erecting a chain-link fence and then concealing the 7-foot-tall statue with a blue tarp. Workers used jackhammers to free the statue and a forklift to lower it onto a flat-bed truck that rolled into a stadium garage bay as some of the 100 to 150 students and other onlookers chanted, "We are Penn State."

The university announced Sunday that it was taking down the monument in the wake of an investigative report that found that the late coach and three other top Penn State administrators concealed sex abuse claims against Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted last month of sexually abusing 10 boys, sometimes on Penn State's campus.

This morning, the NCAA speaks:

CBS News has learned that the NCAA will announce what a high-ranking association source called "unprecedented" penalties against both the Penn State University football team and the school.

"I've never seen anything like it," the source told correspondent Armen Keteyian.

NCAA President Mark Emmert will make the announcement Monday morning at 9 a.m. at the organization's headquarters in Indianapolis.

Jeff Emanuel:

The "horrors" contained in that report should lead to only one outcome: the doors should be closed and windows boarded up on the Penn State football program, for years if not forever.

The "death penalty" hasn't been seen in college football since the late 1980s, when the NCAA canceled Southern Methodist University's 1987 season and prohibited home games from being played in 1988, while slashing scholarships and prohibiting recruiting until fall of the latter year. SMU's crimes included recruiting violations, paying players from a booster-fed slush fund, and lying to NCAA officials. The penalty, the harshest ever meted out by the NCAA, was imposed for the purpose of "eliminat[ing] a program that was built on a legacy of wrongdoing, deceit and rule violations."

This is without doubt the worst scandal in NCAA history, and the bottom line is simple: the collegiate athletic association must demonstrate that it too understands that child rape is a worse offense than recruiting violations and payments to athletes. It is entirely a football scandal, and justice demands that, as a result, football at Penn State be shut down. The question shouldn't be "whether," but "for how long."

I find myself agreeing with Emanuel. To minimize the punishment to the young men who were not responsible, the current players at Penn State who wish to transfer to play football for other institutions should be given every bit of assistance to help them move elsewhere. (I suppose this could extend to students involved in cheerleading or band or other activities.) If a student didn't want to be at Penn State without a football program, they're free to leave. The college football program so warped the values of that community that its most esteemed leaders covered up the most heinous of crimes to protect its reputation. Pull it out by the roots. But it is time for Penn State to focus, entirely, upon its core mission: educating students.

3. No Matter Where, No Matter Why, Nobody Spends Money the Way Obama Does

The Obama campaign spends money like . . . the Obama administration:

President Obama's sharp turn to the offensive against GOP challenger Mitt Romney last month came at a steep cost: nearly $58 million.

That's how much the president's reelection campaign burned through in June as it pounded Romney's business record and personal finances; its relentless television campaign alone cost $38 million, according to campaign finance reports filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission.

The expensive barrage came even as Romney and his affiliated party committees outraised Obama and his Democratic Party fundraising partners for the second month in the row, $106 million to $70 million.

Heading into July, Romney and his party allies were left with nearly $170 million on hand, while Obama and the Democrats had $147 million.

Last four polls in the RealClearPolitics average: Romney by 2, Obama by 1, Obama by 4, Romney by 1. More important, Obama's total percentage points in those four: 44, 46, 45, 46.

Money well spent?

4. Addendum

If an anecdote in some feature story in the news ever seemed a little too good to be true . . . perhaps it was: "Ryan Holiday could be called an 'expert.' As head of marketing for American Apparel, an online strategist for Tucker Max, and self-styled 'media manipulator,' he can talk social media and modern advertising with the best of them -- he's done so both online and in print on countless occasions. He is not an expert in barefoot running, investing, vinyl records, or insomnia. But he is a liar. With a little creative use of the internet, he's been quoted in news sources from small blogs to the most reputable outlets in the country talking about all of those things."