Half-Baked Alaska and "Blood Libel"

On the Sean Hannity program the other day, Half-Baked Alaska (HBA) defended her use of the term "blood libel" to describe the suggestion that maybe, in light of the tragedy in Tucson, she should turn down the gun-related rhetoric a bit. (No, of course crankjewishguy doesn't watch Hannity; he reads about it later.) Responding to critics who suggested she might not have understood the historical, anti-Semitic implications of the term, she asked, "how would they know if I knew what the term meant or not," or words to that effect. Note that she didn't claim to know the origin of "blood libel," she just questioned how others would know whether she did or didn't. Crankyjewishguy (CJG) is going to answer that question in just a moment, but in CJG's humble opinion HBA really stepped in her own poo here, because either she knew what it meant and still believed it was an apt comparison for the way she was being treated by "liberals" and the "lame-stream" media in which case she's delusional, or she didn't know what it meant and she's just as ignorant as many of us suspected.

Now, CJG considers HBA proof positive of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a psychological theory that posits that incompetent people overestimate their level of skill and fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. Even so, CJG doesn't think she believes that the knocks she's taken over Tucson are the equivalent of a centuries old canard that Jews drink the blood of murdered children during religious ritual. But to answer HBA's rhetorical question, the reason people can make an educated guess about what she knew or didn't about the term "blood libel" is that when people use words or phrases in wildly inappropriate ways, or make words up, chances are they don't know what they are talking about. For example, take HBA's use of the word "refudiate" when opining about what New Yorkers should do about that Islamic Center some want to build in lower Manhattan. CJG doesn't believe HBA uses her spare time to think up new words she'd like to add to the English language, so it's pretty safe to assume that when she used the word, she thought it was a real word. Except, of course, that it isn't. If a stranger walks up to you while you're walking your dog, looks at your dog, pats it on the head and asks you if your bird talks, you can assume they can't tell the difference between a dog and a bird. So, CJG would say that those, like himself, who think HBA didn't have a clue what the term "blood libel" refers to are actually being charitable, given the other option.

By the way, readers of CJG will recall that he named HBA, also known as She Who Shall Not Be Named, as the most annoying person of 2010 last year, and on January 1, 2011, the most annoying person of this year...and that was before her latest "it's all about me" moment. Boy, does she make CJG cranky. But let's move on to one final point.

CJG thinks 99% of the debate over the last couple of weeks about the connection, or not, between overheated political rhetoric and the Tucson tragedy misses the point. HBA has a long history of over-the-top rhetoric. If you accuse someone, as she accused Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, of "paling around with terrorists" while the country is fighting a war on terror, that's incendiary. When you put crosshairs on a map and list the congressmen you want to send packing, that's more than "targeting certain congressional districts," a commonplace phrase in politics, especially if you are prone, as she is, to inflammatory, gun-related rhetoric. For example, when you rouse a crowd and tell them not to retreat but to "reload," and immediately feel compelled to remind those same people that you are not calling for violence, then you obviously know there are nuts out there with easy access to guns who might just hear it that way. Let's remember that some in the anti-abortion movement label doctors who perform the procedure "murderers," and some of those doctors have paid the price with their lives, as have other abortion clinic workers. In short, it's no single poster or phrase, it's a politics of incitement that may be the spark for some nut case. (There were no "government death panels" in the health care bill, for example, but wouldn't you be angry as hell if there were?) We may never know if political rhetoric played any role whatsoever in the Tuscon shootings, but the fact that the gunman was deranged and deeply disturbed doesn't mean we shouldn't choose our words with care. To the contrary. In a country where getting a gun is easy as pie, we need to realize words fall on the delusional, and the heavily armed, too.

The point is this: when your most ardent supporters look like this...

and you fancy yourself like this...

maybe you need to be a little more careful about what you say and how you say it.