Six people died in Tucson including a a 9-year-old girl and federal judge John Roll. A total of 18 were injured including Arizona Dem Gabrielle Giffords who remains in critical condition with a head wound.
When asked if his daughter had any enemies, the congresswoman’s father, Spencer Gifford, told the New York Post, "Yeah. The whole tea party." But he said, "We don’t really have any information."
In March, the door to Giffords' office was smashed after Obama's health care reform passed. At the time, Giffords was featured on Sarah Palin's "cross hairs" map, which identified legislators who voted for Obama's health care bill. Of the map, Giffords said, "The rhetoric is firing people up. We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they've gotta realize there's consequences to that action."
But Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips refuses to accept any blame. He warns supporters:
"While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing."
Translation: we don't want people placing the blame where it belongs with us. Instead, we want to put it onto that useful fictional entity we call "the hard left".
So what the hell is the American hard left anyway? Who are they? Where do they hang out? The hard right might be all over the place, in every podunk town and major city... we hear them every day on Fox News and talk radio, their spokespersons are legion... but the hard left? Where are the anti-Becks? Where are the reverse Palins? Where are the demagogues stoking hatred and violent insurrection from the left? They don't f*cking exist. That's where.
It's awkward I know but the right wing nuts bear clear responsibility for firing Jared Lee Loughner up into a murderous frenzy. True, not every 'bagger is a psychotic insurrectionist bent on mayhem. But some clearly are. Some will inevitably parse those anti-[insert collective noun here] word bombs from Palin/Beck/Limbaugh/Hannity as calls to action. And so it behooves responsible conservatives to 'fess up and take their share of the blame for the incautious words they've thrown around instead of blaming a "hard left" that doesn't even exist. You can't duck the responsibility and still hope not to look like an amoral sh*t who's tacitly on-side with murder.
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Palin's handlers are now saying they were not crosshairs but instead, "It is a surveyor symbol."
ReplyDeleteThey are also saying the gunman holds "liberal views. But that is not to say I am blaming the left."
Despicable.