Charlie, I agree with pretty much everything you say, as usual. I have been writing against charges of “creating a climate” for a long time. When Rabin was assassinated, liberals blamed Likud. When McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City, Clinton blamed Rush.
I have these arguments down pat.
But let me add a point, very elementary: No man is an island. No one lives in a vacuum. No one is hermetically sealed. What is poured into people’s ears matters. And not just theoretically.
Take the easy example of Germany. (I know you’re not supposed to.) The German people did not wake up one morning and say, “Hmmm. Why not kill all the Jews among us?” For years, they had been told, by people in authority, that Jews were both subhuman and threatening.
In the West Bank and Gaza, kids don’t come out of the womb wearing suicide belts, ready to kill Jews. They are “carefully taught.” They have lies drilled into them from the cradle. They are made into murderers, by all the authority figures in their lives: parents, imams, schoolteachers, political leaders.
Charlie, you are a person with an extraordinarily — extraordinarily — great independence of mind. And you are blessed with an accompanying intelligence. The two are probably related. I hope I don’t sound too Margaret Sangerish when I say that a lot of other people are more impressionable. And the impressions that people leave matter, for good or ill.
This is especially true of impressions left by presidents, attorneys general, mayors, “civil-rights leaders,” and so on — people with big megaphones. Bloggers and tweeters — they (we) have little megaphones.
When Louis Farrakhan admonished those college kids to start a race war, I’m sure that many of them thought, “What a crazy old clown.” But maybe others took him to heart. Who knows? Leaders have followers, and sometimes the followers really follow.
Anyway, you know all this. I agree with your post, almost entirely. I’m just doing a little 101 here. “Infield practice,” WFB used to call it (which was odd, because he was allergic to sports, except for sailing, if that is a sport).