The Questions We Never Ask

I was startled to learn that in two major surveys released right after the crazed lunatic sprayed death-seeking bullets at a sparse crowd in front of a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona it was determined that most Americans don't think that the toxic language of the right had anything to do with the carnage.

I guess if you ask Americans now what the best newspaper is in the U.S., they will tell you USA Today. The New York Times would be at the bottom of the list.

The point I'm trying to make here is that in most surveys people will respond to the question according to what they think SHOULD be true and not what IS true. Unless you confront them with a closed-end question, where there is no escape from a clear choice between what people want to believe and their closest approximation of the truth, you will not get a valid survey result.

Americans are fascinated with guns, so if you ask them if the ease with which people access guns had anything to do with the Tucson rampage, they will most likely tell you that the very liberal gun laws had nothing to do with it. Most Americans are screamers. We scream at our political opponents when we disagree with them, so there must be nothing wrong with screaming. We are merely stressing a point and exercising our right to free speech, including the right to threaten our political opponents' lives.

The first poll that came out, the CBS poll, asked responders the question: "Did harsh political tone have anything to do with the Arizona shootings?" 57% of Americans said no, that harsh political tone had nothing to do with the Arizona shootings.

The second poll, conducted by Gallup, asked if the inflammatory language from the right had anything to do with the Arizona rampage. Again, a majority of Americans rejected this charge, only 35% said yes.

The problem with polls is that one can elicit a desired response by the way the question is framed, or the exact wording used.

Most Americans who say that the conservative right's rhetoric led directly or indirectly to the Arizona rampage actually have three events in mind. They are not pointing fingers at the very general and fully-diluted "inflammatory language" of the Gallup poll or "the harsh political tone" in the CBS poll. What liberals and progressives have in mind, when they accuse the right-wing hate machine of complicity in the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords are three statements in particular:

1. Sarah Palin's exhortation to her followers to pull the trigger on the elimination of Gabrielle Giffords from the U.S. Congress. Palin put cross-hairs on twenty congressional districts in the last elections, one of which was Gabrielle Giffords', which included Tucson. Palin now claims that the cross-hairs were similar to the Democrats' bulls-eye on some states that the Dems had targeted for election victories in the past. The language may be similar, but the approaches are vastly different. Palin in her speeches consistently referred to targets as gun targets. She exhorted her followers to not give up in the face of temporary setbacks, but instead to "reload" and keep firing, until the targets are hit.

2. Jesse Kelly, one of the top leaders in the Tucson Tea Party movement and Gabrielle Giffords' Republican opponent last year, habitually referred to Gabrielle Giffords as the opponent who must be eliminated, by implication with a gun if necessary. Jane Hamsher of the "firedoglake" website tweeted on January 8,2011:
Giffords Opponent, Jesse Kelly, Held June Event to “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16″ to “Get on Target” and “Remove Gabrielle Giffords.”

3. Sharron Angle, Nevada Senator Harry Reid's Republican opponent in the last senatorial elections, famously quipped that there are always "2nd amendment remedies" to get rid of political opponents, obviously referring to using guns, if necessary, to rid the country of people who she and her followers deemed unpatriotic, i.e., Democrats.

In the immediate aftermath of the Arizona rampage, Democrats charged that Sarah Palin, Jesse Kelly and Sharron Angle were inextricably linked to the Arizona shootings through their inciting language. The Democrats never said that the vague "inflammatory language" or the even more vague "harsh political tone" had indirectly or directly led to the shootings. Therefore, the CBS and Gallup surveys should not have framed their questions in such a manner.

What the surveyor should have asked but what the bosses in CBS and Gallup would not have allowed them to ask was this:

"Given that Sarah Palin had put gun cross-hairs on Gabrielle Giffords for 'elimination' in the last elections, and that Giffords' opponent, Jesse Kelly, had exhorted his followers to "shoot a fully automatic M-16" to "get on target" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords" and Sharron Angle had exhorted her followers in Nevada to resort to "2nd amendment remedies" to get rid of political opponents, do you think the language of those political campaigns eventually led, directly or indirectly to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the gun rampage by one Jared Lee Loughner?"

If the survey question had been couched in those terms, there is no doubt in my mind that Americans would have answered, resoundingly, that yes, the toxic language and atmosphere had something to do with the attempted assassination.

What you get out of surveys is predetermined by the questions you ask. Both the CBS and Gallup polls asked the wrong questions. We need another survey that asks the right question.

Of course, if Americans overwhelmingly answer "yes" to the question that I believe should have been asked by the Gallup and CBS surveys, it does not automatically mean that Loughner was in fact influenced by Sarah Palin's, Jesse Kelly's and Sharron Angle's rhetoric. We don't know and we may never know.

But, with all the heat and vitriol being generated by the campaigns all over this land, and especially in the congressional district that includes the wild, wild west where Mexican wetbacks are routinely cursed, vilified and gunned down, it would take a leap of faith to conclude that none of the electoral noise influenced Loughner, that Loughner in fact acted on the basis of what was going on inside his head.

To say this, which is what a lot of right-wing commentators have said about the deranged Loughner, is to ignore the fact that even insane people see and hear the same things that we sane and borderline-sane people see and hear.

I once had a conversation with someone who I judged to be insane. He complained to me that he no longer watched World News Tonight on ABC because the late news anchor, Peter Jennings, kept lecturing him and was staring at him as he (Jennings) spoke. He also said that the moon was following him because everywhere he went, the moon was there.

I did not reveal this to entertain any of you. It was a sad turn of events when this person flipped and became divorced from reality. It is even sadder now because this individual has been helped, can be helped by medications but refuses to take his medications regularly. I only want to demonstrate that the deranged see and hear the same things that we see and hear. The difference is that deranged people react very differently to what they see and hear.

Loughner had access to TV, to Internet news, to the vitriolic political conversations going on in Arizona. In a large part of the Tucson society, Giffords was perceived as an evil woman intent on turning the U.S. into a socialist state. This image of Giffords, I'm convinced, was helped along by Sarah Palin's cross-hairs on Giffords and her exhortation to "reload" (and fire away if not successful the first time) and by Jesse Kelly's violence-inspiring "shoot a fully-automatic M-16 rifle" to "get on target" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords" and Sharron Angle's "2nd amendment remedies."

You let an insane man hear those words and see those images of cross-hairs and M-16 rifles and 2nd amendment remedies and you have the perfect recipe for an assassination plot when fully cooked in Loughner's mental oven.