LITTLE ROCK — For one, brief shining moment last week, I thought Nancy Pelosi must be the bravest American politician of the century, standing up to her own nutball constituency in the interest of American political politesse. After all, when she tearfully told a press conference that the partisan bombast should be dialed down several notches lest it turn bloody-"I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric . . . it created an environment in which violence took place"-she had to be talking about left-wing violence, right?
Because when you talk about political murder and mayhem in San Francisco 30 years ago, the trigger was almost always pulled or the cyanide Kool-Aid poured by a leftist. There were the revolutionary nihilists of the Symbionese Liberation Army, assassinating an Oakland school superintendent, kidnapping Patty Hearst and finally shotgunning an innocent bystander during a bank robbery.
There were the cop-killing drug dealers of the Black Panthers, who began murdering their own sympathizers to keep them quiet. And of course the Black Liberation Army, a Panther offshoot that bombed a church where a policeman's funeral was being held. We think it was the BLA, anyway; in San Francisco those days, you couldn't tell your bombers without a scorecard. The Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, the Revolutionary Army, they were all blowing something up on practically a weekly basis.
But, no, Pelosi wasn't thinking of any of those examples. Soon after she quelled her theatrical sniffles, her spinmasters clarified that she was referring only to the 1979 murders of liberal politicians George Moscone and Harvey Milkby a conservative rival, Dan White, dramatized in last year's film Milk.
Now that's the Pelosi I know.
Unfortunately, Pelosi is alone in neither her equation of conservative politics with bloodlust nor her willingness to shade the truth to make her case. Lately, the favorite talking point of America's chattering classes has been that to oppose President Obama's policies is to court presidential assassination. MSNBC's Chris Matthews and the New York Times' Frank Rich have even gone so far as to say that it's happened before.
Rich compared the anti-Obama tea-party rallies to "the walk-up to the Kennedy assassination, [when] there was all this hate talk about Kennedy." Matthews chimed in that "the mood we're in right now" reminded of him of when "Jack Kennedy was killed in an open car in Dallas."
Neither Rich nor Matthews offered a plausible explanation of how right-wing hate could have triggered the death of Kennedy, killed by a Marxist who six weeks before the assassination was begging for visas from Cuba and the Soviet Union. There's no need. The idea that conservatives (especially Christian conservatives) are a homicidal mob eternally poised on the verge of bloodshed is an article of faith on the left.
The unavoidable fact is that there is a rich history of violence on the fringes of both sides of the American political spectrum. The right, as liberals are fond of pointing out, has Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray. The left has the Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire on the floor of Congress, animal-rights nuts and eco-terrorists. If Nancy Pelosi really sees trouble coming, she needs to look in both directions.
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Glenn Garvin is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 09/26/2009