The violent attack against Paul Pelosi continues to come into sharper focus, and all of the details are horrible. Not only did the accused assailant break into the household and fracture Pelosi’s skull with a hammer, San Francisco police officials said yesterday that zip ties were found at the scene.
By all accounts, the accused attacker demanded to know where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was and planned to wait in the home for her return.
Much of the political world is still coming to terms with the violence, though the Republican response has been, for lack of a better word, inconsistent. Many GOP leaders and prominent voices within the party have condemned the attack in no uncertain terms, with unambiguous language and in a tasteful and appropriate tone. There are, however, notable exceptions.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin went in an unfortunate direction on Friday afternoon, for example, and several prominent Republicans didn’t bother to say anything at all — including Donald Trump, who maintained a robust publishing schedule over the weekend, without commenting at all on Friday morning’s attack. Others in the party, including Donald Trump Jr., thought it’d be a good idea to peddle conspiracy theories about the violence.
But it was Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s appearance on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday that stood out, in large part because she was so eager to frame the larger issue as a “both sides” problem. Axios highlighted the on-air interview, including this quote from McDaniel:
“Violence is up across the board. Lee Zeldin was attacked, we had [an] assassination attempt against Brett Kavanaugh, and Democrats didn’t repudiate that. Joe Biden didn’t talk about the assassination attempt against Brett Kavanaugh.”
Let’s unpack this a bit, because McDaniel’s rhetoric was wrong in important ways.
First, in recent months, a man came at Rep. Lee Zeldin with some kind of key-chain ring, and a sick man called 911 on himself near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. To hear the RNC chair tell it, President Joe Biden ignored both incidents. That’s plainly false: Biden condemned what occurred with Zeldin and denounced the threat against Kavanaugh.
Second, the effort to turn this into the latest in a series of “both sides” controversies is a mistake. Yes, it matters that there has been violence against prominent Republicans — House Minority Whip Steve Scalise was shot and nearly killed in 2017, for example — and those attacks must be condemned in no uncertain terms.
It’s also true that in the larger context of the conversation about extremists and political violence, the scales hardly appear even. The Jan. 6 attack, the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and right-wing intimidation campaigns against election workers, educators, and public health officials come to mind.
Writing in The Atlantic on Friday, David Frum added, “[I]f both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a ‘both sides’ affair in 2020s America.”
Max Boot added in his latest Washington Post column: The New America think tank found last year that, since Sept. 11, 2001, far-right terrorists had killed 122 people in the United States, compared with only one killed by far-leftists. A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year found that, since 2015, right-wing extremists had been involved in 267 plots or attacks, compared with 66 for left-wing extremists. A Washington Post-University of Maryland survey released in January found that 40 percent of Republicans said violence against the government can be justified, compared with only 23 percent of Democrats.
And finally, let’s also not forget that only one party is eager to downplay the significance of the threat posed by domestic violent extremists. Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who’ll likely soon chair the House Judiciary Committee, has accused FBI leaders of trying to exaggerate the domestic violent extremist threat — and Jordan’s efforts are poised to intensify after the midterm elections. “Both sides” problems might exist in American politics. This isn’t one of them. Update: On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” yesterday host Margaret Brennan reminded Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, about his social media post last week that featured a video of him firing a gun at a shooting range with the hashtag #FirePelosi. The GOP congressman said he was celebrating the Second Amendment. Emmer soon after tried to shift the conversation back to — you guessed it — a “both sides” framing.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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