Posted on 01/10/2011 10:11:53 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Almost instantaneously the horrific shooting in Tucson, Ariz., became the occasion for partisan hatred.
It’s one thing to charge your opponents with increasing the debt or serving the interests of the rich; it’s quite another to say they are accomplices to mass murder. In the ostensible (and always worthy) cause of civility, prominent liberals rushed to blame conservatives, and especially Sarah Palin, for the mayhem in Tucson.
Palin’s offense was posting a map on Facebook with a bull’s-eye marking the districts of 20 Democrats she wished to see defeated. On the list was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the target of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. To connect Palin’s map to Loughner’s criminal act requires a massive leap that her detractors executed with ease, since they feel they have warrant to say anything about her without regard to evidence, logic, or — ahem — civility.
Palin’s martial imagery wasn’t just innocuous, it was a tattered cliché. American politics runs on metaphors drawn from war, and has at least since the 19th century. What journalist didn’t write about “targeted” districts or candidates in the last midterm election? Why do we say “campaign” and “rank and file,” or refer to “battles” and “war rooms”? None of this has ever before been taken as an incitement to violence. Then again, never before was it a club with which to bludgeon the hated Sarah Palin, while nattering on about how our politics should be less venomous.
All indications are that Loughner is a pitiable, sick young man whose rampage defies reason. He is anti-government the way schizophrenics who believe the government is controlling their minds are anti-government — think of the pre-treatment John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, not the Milton Friedman of Free to Choose. You could rummage through the detritus of his diseased mind and, with enough ingenuity and malice, use it to discredit any number of causes.
Was postmodernism responsible for his obsession with how the rules of language determine thought? Is monetarism to blame for his mad obsession with currency? Should secularists begin soul-searching, given his militant atheism? All of these connections have as much plausibility as the notion that he took deadly marching orders from a Sarah Palin Facebook posting (which there’s no evidence he ever saw).
Loughner may have been obsessed with Representative Giffords as much as three years ago, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin, before the Tea Party, before the rise of our alleged “climate of hate” in response to Pres. Barack Obama’s election. Loughner attended an August 2007 town-hall meeting and left angered at her inability to answer a nonsensical question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
Loughner’s profile fits that of the Virginia Tech shooter — a disturbed individual whose strange behavior frightened his classmates and his friends. The chances are his case will be another in the sad annals of the untreated mentally ill doing harm to themselves and others. Except ghoulish political opportunists have latched on to this crime.
The political use of Tucson is the latest blast against a Tea Party that the Left will never consider legitimate. First it was astroturf, then it was racist, now it is murderous. It’s hard to see what could be next in this progression. Perhaps Palin really intended her targeted congressional districts to be wiped out in their entirety in an act of genocide? By calling conservative rhetoric “eliminationist,” the Left is already on the cusp of this escalation.
It is a time for deep breaths all around. The Tucson shooter shattered lives and, in targeting a public official, attacked our democracy. The stories of the victims are unbearably sad, and of those of the heroes unbelievably inspiring. In its horror — another mass shooting — and in its uplift — the pluck of the grievously wounded Giffords, the miracles of modern medicine, the kindness and courage of strangers — it’s an event that should be larger than tawdry partisanship and unsupported finger-pointing.
Our new era of civility is off to a rocky start.
The liberals know damned well that Palin had nothing to do with this. I know many liberals. Their first impulse is to satisfy their hatred, and they HATE Sarah Palin.
I have experienced this type of hatred before. When I was stationed in Germany I could not believe how many of the old guys still hated the Jews and blamed them for everything.
They believed in big government too.
Trying to pin this tragedy on Palin, the Tea Party, or any other group is failing badly for the Democrats...
That they are trying this is in itself hate filled vitriol.
Liberals/democrats/communists all have something very important in common...they are mentally ill.
Unfortunately, America is doomed because of their illness.
The bought propagandists were launching their rants five minutes after the shooting happened. Their charges, directed at Palin and Republicans in general, were not connected to any specific facts because there weren’t any.
This is what they do. They are never not accusing Palin and Republicans of something awful. Remember, we’ve just come off of eight years of Bush-Cheney as Hitler. They have never stopped screaming about Palin and the “tea party” Repub rank and file... when have they ever stopped accusing them of whatever spills out of their word processors?
When the permanently outraged are outraged, how do you really logically tie one particular spasm of outrage to one specific event? They are always outraged. If someone got shot by yet another permanently outraged nutcase, they are outraged, and if someone didn’t get shot, they are still outraged and still accusing Palin and the Repubs of whatever awful thing they can think of in the moment.
Permanent continuous outrage is not real. Real outrage ebbs and flows; their fake outrage never stops and it bears only superficial connection to any real events. Talking to them, trying to convince them of your innocence and good intentions is a stupid waste of time. They aren’t listening; they aren’t reasoning, they are making noise in the hope that if their noise is loud no one can hear you.
We need to develop our own information networks and more past them.
thats “and move past them”.
Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is blaming it on the health care vote last year.
Loughner may have been obsessed with Representative Giffords as much as three years ago, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin, before the Tea Party, before the rise of our alleged “climate of hate” in response to Pres. Barack Obama’s election. Loughner attended an August 2007 town-hall meeting and left angered at her inability to answer a nonsensical question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
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I’m not sure if this is straying from topic or not, but it’s buggin’ me.
I’ve read that she DID answer his crazy question— after a few minutes of thought—she answered him in Spanish.
That was the answer, no? He did or didn’t understand Spanish (I suspect didn’t) and her answering in Spanish— either way— proved words have meaning. It burst his bubble.
He later posted “Eating a Chicken Pot Pie in a voting booth with the option for a Spanish vote...” (Tucson voter folk told us he only voted in 2008, that question to Gifford was in 2007)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2653776/posts
I think she somewhat embarrassed him with her clever solution/answer. Then she marries an astronaut, Loughner obsessed over NASA.
I wonder if being paranoid he somehow thought she did these things to/against him?
The Fourth dimension of warfare: Intelligence, subversion, resistance
First I quote from Mao Tse-tung on the relationship between war and politics: War cannot for a single moment be separated from politics; politics are bloodless war, war is the politics of bloodshed.1
...”Except ghoulish political opportunists have latched on to this crime”...
YES! And, “ghoulish” is the best word I have seen to describe what has gone on.
And they really do think that Loughner was driven to it because they don't believe in the existence of evil.
Their twisted godless black hearts always accuse others of that which they are most guilty of, which is unreasoning rage at their opposition.
The irony of their own vitriol obviously escapes them. Twitter yesterday made me ill.
It's like Ann Coulter says, liberalism is a disease, and boy are we getting a good look at it right now.
The liberals know it’s not true, but they con anot accept it, so they continue to repeat the same lie. Now who said if you repeat the same lie over and over again, it becomes a truth? Either Lenin or Goebbels.
Mike Malloy was in fine frothing at the mouth form last night. In his delusional mind, Fox News, Sarah Palin, all conservatives, and all Freepers where dancing with joy over the shooting. Freepers where praying for more shootings (uh, Mike? Do you have us confused with the Westboro scum? Ooops, silly me, I forget. Facts are inconvenient for you.) If anyone is fanning the flames on this, it is the Hard Left. The Hard Left wants to and is desperate to escalate the situation. Yes, there is talk of violent repercussions here on FreeRepublic, but in the context of consequences if this continues to escalate - with nearly all of us here hoping and praying that this does NOT come to pass. (Ooops, silly me, I forget. Context does not matter to the Hard Left.)
Good point.
K frame S&W or Taurus?
I used to carry a .38 Special S&W when I was a security policeman at an Air Guard base. Lately, I’ve been using a Hi-Point C9 9mm as that was what my company was using. Good gun for just over $100.
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