While January 8 will mark eight years since a mentally ill gunman killed six and nearly murdered then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), there are still far too many who have tried to tie opposition to ObamaCare, our country’s discourse, and Republicans to that tragedy and Thursday’s Hardball shamefully did just that.
Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly was alongside when host Chris Matthews went even further by comparing America to the 1960s and how, according to him, our discourse led to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, brother Bobby Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The segment ominously began with a news clip of Giffords from March 2010 speaking about overheated “rhetoric” and being placed in Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs.” Of course, Democrats and the media egregiously tried to directly blame Palin for the gunman’s actions (even though he was not only mentally disturbed, but also a fan of the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf).
Matthews then appeared on-screen to note that Giffords “call[ed] for more civility after there was a rise of heated rhetoric following the passage of the Affordable Care Act” less than a year before her shooting.
The MSNBC pundit used Giffords to transition to the violence over the past week and, by extension, blame conservatives and Trump supporters:
A new poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist found that more than 82 percent, more than four in five of us, of likely voters say they are concerned a about the lack of civility they're seeing in Washington and how it's going to lead to violence. This comes on the heels of numerous high-profile domestic attacks in just the past weeks, including a politically-charged campaign of mail bombs, the murder of two African-Americans by a white man in Kentucky, and the murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last weekend.
Matthews asked Kelly to explain how rhetoric and his wife’s shooting were “connected” and Kelly obliged.
Kelly maintained that there were “a complicated number of reasons why this happens, but when she was injured back in 2011, it was also a time, it was around, just after the passing, a year after the passing of the Affordable Care Act, and there was a lot of heated rhetoric politically about this and she certainly, you know, she was targeted because she was a member of Congress, that's clear and the words and the language we used do matter.”
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of people at some pretty high levels that don't seem to — they don't seem to realize that yet, but it certainly does have an impact,” Kelly added.
This gave Matthews the segue to comparing 2018 to one of the most chaotic decades in American history and how, in an attempt to warn of future violence, tensions led to all those awful assassinations (click “expand”):
You know, you and I have lived through it. I've lived through maybe more history and I — I remember during the November period of 1963, and all of those weeks that we were hearing about the violent attitudes down in Dallas, Texas, and how people were out to get Kennedy, there were ads in the paper, horrible stuff, calling him a traitor. Adelaide Stephenson, the ambassador to the U.N. was spat upon. There was all of that atmospherics and then, a guy on the hard left, a communist sympathizer, Lee Harvey Oswald comes and shoots Kennedy. Somehow, there seems to be a kind of almost electrical atmospherics that sort of creates something that may not be related — the same thing happened in the spring of ‘68, Dr. King is shot then Bobby is shot. It does seem to be atmospheric. Your thoughts about that? That when it gets into our systems and people who are a little nutty to begin with or a little far out politically think, oh, here’s my permission slip to shoot somebody.
Before moving onto the group he and Giffords helm dedicated to promoting gun control, Kelly admitted that he was born in 1964, so he couldn’t exactly comment on Matthews’s sentiments but agreed that the level of partisanship was “pretty bad.”
Kelly added that people should realize that “words do matter and if they say certain things, they are giving certain individuals who, you know, probably have some, you know, possibly mental health issues or somewhat unstable” a level of “political cover” to commit violence.
So, without naming them directly, the rhetoric from the President, his supporters, and the right writ large have and could potentially lead to more deadly violence. And tell us again how the right have a fear-mongering problem?
To see the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on November 1, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s Hardball
November 1, 2018
7:15 p.m. Eastern [TEASE]MATTHEWS: Plus, Trump continues on the campaign trail with his divisive rhetoric, in spite of the violent tragedies of the last week.
(....)
7:31 p.m. Eastern
THEN-ARIZONA DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSWOMAN GABBY GIFFORDS [on 03/25/10]: We need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there’s consequences to that action.
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to Hardball. That was then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords back in 2010, calling for more civility after there was a rise of heated rhetoric following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Well, Giffords was shot the following year while campaigning in her home district and as we discussed, a new poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist found that more than 82 percent, more than four in five of us, of likely voters say they are concerned a about the lack of civility they're seeing in Washington and how it's going to lead to violence. This comes on the heels of numerous high-profile domestic attacks in just the past weeks, including a politically-charged campaign of mail bombs, the murder of two African-Americans by a white man in Kentucky, and the murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last weekend. For more, I'm joined by Captain Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords’ husband, and co-founder of the advocacy group, Giffords' Courage to Fight Gun Violence. Thank you so much, Mr. Kelly. Give us a sense of in your head and the experience in — with your family's loss, in terms of the gunfire on your wife and all of that, the recuperation and all of that, and what — how do you see talking and shooting, as connected?
MARK KELLY: Well, you know, Gabby’s — you know, her being shot and six of her constituents being murdered and 12 other people being injured in 15 seconds, you know, it's a complicated number of reasons why this happens, but when she was injured back in 2011, it was also a time, it was around, just after the passing, a year after the passing of the Affordable Care Act, and there was a lot of heated rhetoric politically about this and she certainly, you know, she was targeted because she was a member of Congress, that's clear and the words and the language we used do matter. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people at some pretty high levels that don't seem to — they don't seem to realize that yet, but it certainly does have an impact.
MATTHEWS: You know, you and I have lived through it. I've lived through maybe more history and I — I remember during the November period of 1963, and all of those weeks that we were hearing about the violent attitudes down in Dallas, Texas, and how people were out to get Kennedy, there were ads in the paper, horrible stuff, calling him a traitor. Adelaide Stephenson, the ambassador to the U.N. was spat upon. There was all of that atmospherics and then, a guy on the hard left, a communist sympathizer, Lee Harvey Oswald comes and shoots Kennedy. Somehow, there seems to be a kind of almost electrical atmospherics that sort of creates something that may not be related — the same thing happened in the spring of ‘68, Dr. King is shot then Bobby is shot. It does seem to be atmospheric. Your thoughts about that? That when it gets into our systems and people who are a little nutty to begin with or a little far out politically think, oh, here’s my permission slip to shoot somebody.
KELLY: Well, so 1963 was a year before I was born, so I wasn't really paying attention then, certainly and, you know, but we — we see this over and over again and it seems to go in cycles and our partisanship is somewhat, you cyclic. I think we're at a pretty bad time right now. Probably the worse that I've seen since I’ve been paying attention, you know, perhaps even the worse since the early 1960s and I think — I think people that we elect need to realize that their words do matter and if they say certain things, they are giving certain individuals who, you know, probably have some, you know, possibly mental health issues or somewhat unstable, but it’s not good for us as, you know, people who are in leadership positions to try to give these — or to give these people some form of political cover.
