I knew the staffer, Gabe Zimmerman, who died Saturday in the Giffords assassination attempt. Not as a friend, just on a professional level. But it still made me look at the shooting and its aftermath in a different light. Like so many Hill staffers, he was smart, hard-working, earnest, and anonymous.

I actually felt consciously less safe walking around Capitol Hill today.  I really wasn’t expecting that.

One reason — aside from the obvious — that congressional political assassinations are so heart-wrenching (and so rare) is that they serve virtually no plausible political purpose. That is, to say, there’s simply no rational political explanation for the motives. You cannot change a legislature by assassinating a single legislator; heck, you cannot effect any substantial political change by assassinating ten percent of a legislature. That’s one of the often-overlooked geniuses of the institution, the political safety and stability of distributed power. And thus, the global history of assassination is littered with Kings and Dictators and Rulers and Presidents and Presidential candidates and  leaders of social movements. But not legislators.

And so it bothers me that we even need to have a debate over the political motivations of Giffords’ assassin. Of course he’s insane (in the non-clinical sense) if he’s a political assassin; his methods are utterly irrational if he is seeking political ends.

But that’s not what I find most strange in all of this. That title would go to the structure of the political debate currently going on over the role of political rhetoric in the assassination attempt. I’m going to make four statements, all of which I believe are unarguably true, but which I have not seen a single writer/blogger/pundit/commentator accept in aggregate. Continue reading →