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LEFT WING LOONS Title: The unseemly rush to blame Sarah Palin, Tea Party and Republicans for murder in Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, by all accounts an outstanding public servant and person, is battling for her life in hospital after being shot by a 22-year-old man at close range at a “Congress On Your Corner” event in her home district. Six people are dead, including a judge and a girl of nine, and a dozen others are being treated for their wounds. It is, as President Barack Obama said, an “unspeakable tragedy”. It is also, as he added, “a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society”. That much we know and the President wisely did not seek to make political capital out of the carnage or jump to conclusions about the motivations of the gunman, named as Jared Loughner. That, of course, hasn’t stopped some on the Left clamouring to blame Sarah Palin, the Tea Party or Republicans in general for what happened. Paul Krugman of the “New York Times” suggests darkly that Giffords was shot because she was “a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona” and “violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate” (those reponsible for such a climate being, of course, Republicans). TBogg of FireDogLake wades straight in and blames Sarah Palin for the shooting because of a graphic of crosshairs placed on the districts of moderate Democrats who voted for healthcare reform. Was the Palin graphic clever? No. But martial imagery is standard political fare and, as Matt Lewis points out, there’s no shortage of Democrats who’ve engaged in it (VerumSerum has found a Democratic Leadership Committee target map). Jane Fonda pins it on Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party. Even the local sheriff (a Democrat) has been getting in on the act. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik (a Democrat) said: When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry. Well, we’ll see. Personally, I’d be more reassured by a sheriff who concentrated on facts rather than over-heated, sweeping generalisations. So what are the facts we know so far? From what we know about Loughner, he was a deeply disturbed young man who railed about literacy rates, spoke of flag burning and creating a new currency. Former classmates talk of “nonsensical outbursts” and a person “on his own planet”. His favourite reading apparently included “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto”. My colleague Jon Swaine has a summary here of the raving of a person who most people would judge to be a complete nutcase even if he hadn’t gone out and shot people. Oh, and another former classmate said he was “left wing, quite liberal”. Naturally, this doesn’t stop Jacob Heilbrunn, pontificating that the shootings are evidence of that the “radical right is becoming even more radicalised and violent”. Ben Smith sums up the current picture of Loughner pretty well: The obsession with the gold standard and the hostility to the federal government resonate with the far right, the burned American flag with the left, but the discussion of mind control and grammar sound more like mental illness than politics. This is highly inconvenient for certain people on the Left so they ignore it. They would much prefer the shooter to have been a white male in his 50s, the description the sheriff gave of a second person of interest (we’ll see if such a person materialises) but they’ll still try to make hay with a weirdo like Loughner. Giffords herself doesn’t quite fit the likely victim of an enraged Right-winger. She is a Blue Dog Democrat, a deficit hawk and voted to lift the ban on guns in DC and voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. On Thursday, she took part in the reading of the Constitution in the House, reading aloud the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech and peaceful assembly. She’s certainly not the “progressive” that Hanoi Jane tweeted about and provoked as much anger on the Left as on the Right for her political stances. Just the other day, a blogger at DailyKos said that Giffords was “dead to me” for failing to back Pelosi. Plenty more will emerge in the coming days about Loughner’s motivations and those of any accomplice. It seems certain that the attempted assassination was politically motivated but in exactly what way is, at this stage, very murky. This is a time for sombre reflection and a calming (rather than an escalation) of rhetoric. Sadly, however, some see it as another opportunity to score political points and vilify those they hate.
Poster Comment: This is a time for sombre reflection and a calming (rather than an escalation) of rhetoric. Sadly, however, some see it as another opportunity to score political points and vilify those they hate. The above cannot be stated enough.
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#2. To: Rudgear (#0)
I've yet to hear or read a similar statement from the radical right.
Thank you for posting Olbermann's jack booted statist rant against liberty, and our God given inalienable civil rights. It should be enough to convince any red blooded and sane American, that it's time to lock and load. Molon Labe, MF'er! (Come and take them!) The pinhead has outed himself as a Bushbot thug, since hObama took over.
"Centrist hogs swarm the both-sides-do-it trough" edition. The leaders of these societies have absolutely no interest in ever gaining "peace" for their society/citizenry. The thought of "peace breaking out" within their society, terrifies them. This is because they realize that their nation is filled with homicidally enraged torture victims, and unless provided with a steady diet of "demonized foreign societies" to hate and direct their rage against, societal leaders are in mortal terror that their flock of homicidal torture victims will somehow find the rationality and insight to recognize that it is their own society which deserves to be the target of their rage. At the same time, these societies still need to justify their wars on a pretense of morality and legitimacy, as well as to "claim victory" at some point in time, pretending to joyously celebrate the "end of the war", even though in reality societal leaders are already eagerly planning for and attempting to provoke a new war, as soon as they realize that the current war they are engaged in, is nearing a likely end.
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