Those spinning the Pelosi home invasion could learn from the Tucson shooting
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On a blue-sky Saturday morning in 2011, a gunman at a Tucson grocery store shot and killed six people and wounded 15 others, including Arizona U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Instantaneously, the Democratic left began to spin the news to score points against the Republican right. The Democratic sheriff of Pima County, a decent man named Clarence Dupnik, became a prisoner of the moment.
He lost it.
He blamed the shooting on the incendiary speech of right-wing talk radio and politicians.
Arizona is a “mecca for racism and bigotry,” Dupnik said. “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”
“And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry,” Dupnik said. “This has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in, and I think it’s time we do the soul-searching.”
American liberals carried Dupnik’s message, what the left today calls “misinformation,” to the air waves. Meanwhile, the truth was still putting its pants on.
Mental illness was behind the Tucson shooting
The truth was that Jared Loughner had no strong political convictions. He was a mentally ill young man, as much a victim of the Tucson shooting as the people he shot.
Right-wing rhetoric didn’t provoke the shooting, a broken mind had decided that Giffords’ bad grammar was reason enough to try to assassinate her and kill those around her. At least that’s what we learn from Jared Loughner’s barely coherent words on the matter.
Tucson shooting: The story you didn't hear about slain federal judge John Roll
This past weekend we saw similar themes play out with the hammer attack on the husband of Nancy Pelosi at their San Francisco home. The alleged assailant, a homeless man named David DePape, 42, is accused of viciously assaulting Paul Pelosi, 82, with a hammer, fracturing his skull and putting him in the hospital.
DePape had written some crazed things online about the Trump-based conspiracy theory QAnon and antisemitism and stolen elections, but as I write this on Monday morning, there is still not enough information to make broad conclusions, as the Atlantic Monthly did, with its Friday headline “Jan. 6 never ended”.
More information is starting to come in. DePape has been drug-addled and deranged for years, says his former significant other.
His family says accused Pelosi attacker is mentally ill
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, the former longtime partner of David DePape, said that his mental illness and drug use had caused him, as the newspaper put it, “to deteriorate profoundly.”
A nudist activist and mother of two of his children, Taub also told San Francisco’s ABC-7 News that DePape “has been mentally ill for a long time.”
Some time ago when he disappeared and returned a year later, “He came back in very bad shape,” she said. “He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”
When they were a couple “he was very much in alignment with my views, and I’ve always been very progressive. I absolutely admire Nancy Pelosi.”
If they once agreed, David DePape apparently no longer does. He’s accused of saying, “Where’s Nancy?” after breaking into the Pelosi home.
In an election year, the hype exploded
His story is now part of the 2022 midterm elections. Left-wing media has effortlessly grafted it into a key Democratic talking point, that no less than American democracy is at stake in this fateful election.
On Sunday morning, Politico treated the break-in and assault of Pelosi’s husband with the stop-the-presses treatment you give a Russian nuclear attack on the United States.
Here is the unbroken list of headlines Politico featured that morning on its home page:
Law enforcement agencies rush to assess new threats to lawmakers
Attempted attack on Pelosi raises questions on motive, family protections
Pelosi's status as GOP campaign-ad villain faces new scrutiny after violent home invasion
Pelosi assault is latest in series of threats, attacks against political figures
Pelosi's San Francisco home has long-drawn unwanted attention
Paul Pelosi told attacker he needed to use the bathroom, called 911 from there
Magazine: Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s
I particularly like that last headline that turns the Pelosi’s posh Pacific Heights home into Fort Sumter.
Both parties play this game. Can we wait for facts?
Now let me stop here and just say that liberals and their water carriers in national media aren’t the only ones who do this – exploit every tragic or blood-splashed story for maximum political gain. Conservatives do it all the time. Ever watch Fox News?
Both Republicans and Democrats are jungle cats waiting to pounce on any news morsel they can devour and spin against the other party.
The Pelosi story isn’t going to define this election, because no matter how much Democrats spin their democracy-on-the-brink narrative, motorists are still forking out nearly four bucks a gallon in Dubuque.
But if we ever get to a place where we start fixing what is broken in America, let’s do something about our hyperactive political culture.
Do we have to politicize everything in an instant? Can we wait for the facts to roll in before we exploit the hell out of a hammer attack on a politician’s husband?
Can we talk about this and self-correct?
Because we don’t want to correct this with government.
This is the price we pay for free expression
We don’t want to muzzle Supreme Court protesters because some pro-abortion-rights nut carried a Glock and a tactical knife to the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, intending to murder him.
And we don’t want to silence the Trump right because a drug-deranged lunatic attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
Unless you want to control speech Xi Jinping-style, unless you want to monitor and crush it on the internet, or imprison the offenders, there’s not much you can do.
We pay a price for living in a free society. We put up with a lot of pollution – a lot of lies, fables and slanders – so that we can enjoy our own free expression.
Some of that political talk can set off some of the sickest people in our society.
But as we learned in Tucson 11 years ago, so can a split infinitive.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Pelosi attack is being spun just like Tucson shooting. Will we learn?
