Minnesota Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty wants us to think he's nicer than Sarah Palin.

When asked this week about Palin's infamous rifle scope crosshairs website, which some have indirectly linked to the politically motivated slayings in Tucson, Arizona Jan. 8th, Pawlenty said, "I wouldn't have done it."

Of course he didn't explain why not and much of his time this week was spent defending Sarah Palin – even after Jewish civic leaders described as anti-Semitic her use of the term "blood libel" to describe the ensuing criticism of her consistent use of strident, gun-slinging language to attack her political opponents.

Indeed, his defense of Palin continued after her self-serving Facebook video seemed to sidestep the atrocity in Tucson and make herself out as a victim.

Pawlenty knows how to use incendiary political rhetoric against his opponents as well as Palin, however. In mid-November, Pawlenty joined in with a number of Republican governors to gang up on public school teachers and public employees.

"Frankly," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, "the public employee unions would stick a shiv in all of us if they could."

Shiv? In case you don't know, a shiv is any crudely made knife and is usually regarded as the weapon of choice of violent criminals in prison.

So what is Pawlenty saying about public employees? Is he saying they are like violent criminals that should be imprisoned? How does a person or a society deal with a person or group of people who are likely to "shiv" you? Is this an example of reasonable political rhetoric.

And what about the possible racist undertones of the "shiv" allusion? Pawlenty may know that a significant proportion of public employees are African Americans. As Brian Miller, author of a new report from United for a Fair Economy, shows, African Americans are 30 percent more likely to work in the public sector than the workforce in general. Pawlenty also may know that African Americans disproportionately are pushed into the prison system where his "shiv" remark is made possible.

Perhaps he wouldn't put rifle crosshairs on anyone on a website, but he isn't above invoking ancient racist imagery of violent criminals out to get  "us."

He laughed along with the other Republican governors when one of them described as "crap" the opposition in their states to slashing public services or the wages of public employees and public school teachers. Ah, the next Abe Lincoln.

The violent imagery Pawlenty used to attack public employees isn't new. Former Bush administration Education Secretary Rod Paige described the National Education Association, the second largest teachers union in the country, as "a terrorist organization."

Two well-known practitioners of reasoned political discourse, Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity, joined the hyperbolic and violent fray when in a back-and-forth in 2007 they echoed Paige's inflammatory remark:

    SEAN HANNITY: Alright, let me ask you. Because, you – when you said about the Department of Education – you want to abolish it – when you said that the teachers unions is more dangerous to this country in the long term –

    NEAL BOORTZ: In the long term, yeah.

    HANNITY: Than al Qaeda.

    BOORTZ: Right. Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people with a well-placed nuke somewhere. Ok. We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation.

    HANNITY: They are.

    BOORTZ: Well, they are destroying a generation.

    HANNITY: They are ruining our school system.

    BOORTZ: They’re much more dangerous. We worry about al Qaeda and we should. But at the same time let’s not let the teachers union skate.

    HANNITY: They destroyed our school system, and we don’t do anything. The parents — why there aren’t people rising up against it is unbelievable.

What are you supposed to do in response to rhetoric like that? Sign a petition? Shake your head? This isn't metaphoric language. It's designed to invoke hate, to silence reasonable discussion, and to get the crazies stirred up. And one of them did on Jan. 8th. Just as one of them did in response to violent language about a woman's right to choose on May 31, 2009.  And another who fretted over his 2nd Amendment rights and imagined Jewish control of the White House on June 10, 2009.

Because he is a public employee who wants to gut public services that benefit all of us and scale back wages and benefits for some public employees that oppose him politically, Pawlenty's "shiv" remark feels more like a threat than an accusation.

Photo by FibonacciBlue, cc by 2.0/Flickr.