NO ASSASSINS EXIST IN A VACUUM /// Obama acknowledged that the "simple lack of civility" did not cause the murders, then called for more civility in our public discourse. And there's murder in the discourse.

So if we are being asked to choose between two alternative explanations of the vast public slaughter in Tucson and neither of them make much sense, which one should we pick?

And if we can't accept either of them — if we can't accept that an attempted political assassination was carried out without a political component, or that a mass murder was carried out because Sarah Palin put crosshairs on a map — is there any explanation that counts for anything at all? We have been told by no less an authority than the president of the United States that the very need to seek explanations is something of a human failing, and that "none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack." We have also been told, by no less an authority than the president of the United States, that we ought to be nicer to one another, because the victims of the attack would have wanted it that way, and because "only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation."

I applaud and agree with him, and his point — that our political polarization prevents us from addressing, or even talking about, the issues that really came to the fore Saturday morning in Tucson: gun control and mental illness — is the point I was trying to make in this space on Wednesday. Still, his speech, graceful and moving as it was, raises a question with an unfortunately binary answer: Did political polarization and excessive partisanship contribute to the Arizona massacre or not? And if it did not, why does the massacre serve as an occasion for undoing it? If, as the president acknowledged, the "simple lack of civility" did not cause the murders, then why did the president call for more civility in our public discourse? Why has no less a partisan provocateur than Roger Ailes supposedly told his anchors to "tone it down," and no less a bomb-thrower than Matt Taibi pledged to stop calling everyone he writes about a complete asshole?

Why should Jared Loughner change the discourse, when there's no evidence as yet that he was affected by the discourse?

The answer, of course, is that there's murder in the discourse, and everyone knows it. Over the past few days, it's been instructive, in the usual way, to watch the left retreat from its original prosecution in the absence of proof — to read George Packer at the New Yorker opine that "the massacre in Tucson is, in a sense, irrelevant to the important point," and to hear that the important point is that it would be nice if we were all nicer. But it has been more instructive — also in the usual way — watching the right try to paint Loughner as a leftist, and to interdict the use of the word "assassination" as motive for the murders even as it encourages the use of "blood libel" as cause for its critics. I have been skeptical, from the start, of the characterization of Jared Loughner as a product of the right. But while it is the rare assassin who can boast of political coherence, it is also the rare assassin who exists in a political vacuum — and what the left fears is not what the right seems to require as an evidentiary standard: Rand Paul with an Uzi. No, what the left fears is what America got: a deranged person breathing an atmosphere of derangement until his fantasies find a target. And so while I have been willing, more or less, to accept now the prevailing idea that we will never know what caused Jared Loughner to murder — no, to attempt an assassination, and then to murder — I am nagged, hell, haunted, by something somebody said to me back in November, after Glenn Beck aired his three-part series on George Soros.

You see, the somebody is a friend of mine. He's a good sort, smart and funny and irredeemably good-natured, even when he's engaging in the wild-eyed political speculation that is his métier as a self-described "movement conservative" and political operative. He knows everyone in the Republican party, and he helps get people elected and unelected in his part of the world; in a word, he's as "mainstream" as self-described movement conservatives generally get. My friend explained Fox News to me in terms of its relation to the mainstream... and so in its relation to American perceptions of sanity and insanity. Fox, he said, was successful because it assured a significant portion of the American population who felt that they had been marginalized by the national media that they weren't crazy after all; more importantly, it assured them that anyone who called them crazy were, by definition, the crazy ones. "You can't imagine what a relief this was," he said.

And so when I watched Beck's Soros special and it wasn't just crazy but indeed the darkest three hours in the history of American television — a program that was rife with anti-Semitic symbology and stopped just short of calling for Soros's elimination for the good of the republic — I called him.

"Did you see Beck's show on Soros?" I asked him.

"I did," he said.

"And do you still think that Fox represents the real American mainstream, and that most of its views are views that 60- to 70-percent of Americans hold?"

He took a breath, and said, "Here's what I think. I was once alone in a room with George Soros. I will go to my grave regretting that I didn't kill him when I had the chance."

I kept waiting for the punchline, but that was the punchline, and so the laughs never came. And when I asked him to explain himself, he answered that if this country collapses over the next five or ten years, it will be because of George Soros. "And so it's like the Germans and Hitler," he said. "How many of them had the chance to stop him, and never did?"

Now imagine my friend, alone and crazy.

Now imagine him with a gun.

EARLIER: Tom Junod on the Real Cost of Our Political Polarization >>

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