DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

My phone rang in the early morning hours on Dec. 27. It was my colleague Carol Cizauskas. "Benazir Bhutto was killed about an hour ago," she said.

Public radio reporter Cizauskas knew Bhutto, having interviewed her when the Pakistani leader visited Nevada in 2004. In that interview Bhutto talked about a lesson the U.S. government has not yet learned: "And it's the values of freedom that can best undermine the forces of terrorism."

Bhutto's assassination prompted restraint in public comment from some U.S. public figures. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was not one of them, using it to score points on U.S. primacy. He said, "On this sad day, we are reminded that while our democracy has flaws, it stands as a shining beacon of hope for nations and people around the world who seek peace and opportunity through self-government." Aside from how these little pronouncements of U.S. superiority are received overseas, they rely on an ignorance of our own history of political violence.

In 1970 a presidential commission on violence drew attention to 81 major assassinations and assassination attempts in the U.S. from 1835 to 1968, including eight attempts on the lives of presidents (and one on the life of a U.S. senator from Nevada). The list was almost certainly incomplete.

The commission also found that violence had been routinely used for religious purposes in the United States, which does not suggest that we have much to lecture Pakistanis or Muslims about: "Violence has been used by successive generations of native Americans (primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) ... to reinforce the moral values of fundamentalist protestantism." The commission's reference was not just to early times in the nation's history. It was describing the 20th century.

The commission's report on political violence also said that "only a very small portion of the deadly attacks against officeholders was rationally calculated to advance political aims of the assassin." Of the eight presidential assassination attempts, for instance, only an attack by Puerto Rican nationalists on President Truman could be described as undertaken to accomplish a political purpose.

In other words, rational thought did not often characterize the actions of assassins. More often, they were afflicted with mental illness, obsessed by delusions or religion. That makes the culture and climate of the times in which they lived important. We saw a demonstration of this in Nevada. After the attempted assassination of Nevada District Judge Charles Weller in June 2006, it became known that his accused assailant had gotten plenty of reinforcement from dark web sites that were filled with venomous attacks on Weller, some of which rejoiced after the judge was shot ("He needed a little killin," read one message).

Brooklyn College sociologist Feliks Gross once wrote, "Before the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz in 1922 in Poland, a vituperative defamation campaign was launched against him by the parties of the right... [I]n the climate of vilification, once the political actor was 'morally' branded, eliminated, and destroyed, psychological restraint and controls of a potential assassin were weakened or even removed, and in his view assassination was justified."

Both left and right wield extreme language. Not long ago someone posted a message on the Blogs for Bush web site expressing a wish for the death of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. In 1996 after a liberal leader at an anti-Klan rally in Ann Arbor told the crowd to "look for people who may be identifying themselves with the other side and deal with them appropriately," protestors began chasing a Confederate flag-wearing man, knocking him to the ground and kicking him (an African American woman threw herself atop the man to protect him from the angry liberals).

Words have power. Words can kill. Words can encourage weak and susceptible minds to kill. After the first presidential assassination attempt, against Andrew Jackson in 1835, the New York Evening Post commented, "We cannot forget the execrations we have heard yelled out in our streets against Andrew Jackson; we cannot forget the language which has been used by the Bank-Tory press concerning him; we cannot forget the speeches of Senators describing him as a cut-throat and a villain, the scourger of the people, a despot, a usurper."