[Real]

One privilege denying idiot copying talking points from another.  Seems entirely plausible, in fact probable...

[rtpoe]

You know,  I have to find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin on this point.

"...journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn."

We SHOULDN'T go around saying "this group of people is responsible for this crime, and should therefore BURN IN HELL!!!" without any evidence at all. Did the rhetoric from the "right" use a lot of shooting metaphors? Yes. Did it have any affect on the criminal? Who knows? The guy's a nutcase who was apparently planning it for some time.

Look, instead of blaming the media/pundits/politicians; why not blame someone like, oh, I don't know, the guy who actually fired the gun? And maybe, just maybe, instead of weeping over the state of mental health care in this country, perhaps one might take an easier and more practical step to make such crimes less likely in the future by reintroducing the ban on oversize magazines that let you turn handguns into pocket-sized submachine guns?

[pedonbio]

Look, instead of blaming the media/pundits/politicians; why not blame someone like, oh, I don't know, the guy who actually fired the gun? And maybe, just maybe, instead of weeping over the state of mental health care in this country, perhaps one might take an easier and more practical step to make such crimes less likely in the future by reintroducing the ban on oversize magazines that let you turn handguns into pocket-sized submachine guns?

Excellent point, except that mental health care in the U.S. is pathetic.

I'm digging around for an article, apparently not yet on the internet, published about ten years ago that published the results of interviews with about 80 assassins and would-be assassins that concluded that they virtually never acted from political motives, but usually targeted politicians because of the publicity involved.

EDIT: It's here: www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ntac_jfs.pdf

Incidentally, the most common unifying factors of assassins are: maleness; whiteness; childlessness. Females and people with children don't try to assassinate folks.

EDIT Again: And nobody is suggesting that she burn in Hell, just that she STFU.

[pedonbio]

On the other hand, a reasonably convincing argument can be made that a number of politicians, including John Boehner, deliberately exploit the illnesses of paranoids, from one of the few psychiatrists who has consistently treated them:

www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/13/loughner_working_with_paranoids

[3deroticer]

We have put NAZI war criminal behind bars for what Palin did, at the tribunal, for Inciting the people to kill a group base on hate. What is interesting is that if the black Panther had made a hit-list with cross-hair symbol on a political party member, would have we give them the same leeway that some of you give Sara Palin?

[pedonbio]

We have put NAZI war criminal behind bars for what Palin did, at the tribunal, for Inciting the people to kill a group base on hate. What is interesting is that if the black Panther had made a hit-list with cross-hair symbol on a political party member, would have we give them the same leeway that some of you give Sara Palin?

3d, Julius Streicher would have been grateful to be behind bars. We hanged the fucker.

[3deroticer]

Good follow-up and example!

[TheZookie007]

Look, instead of blaming the media/pundits/politicians; why not blame someone like, oh, I don't know, the guy who actually fired the gun?

Show me the person who is NOT blaming the dude for shooting those people. All I am saying is that, the incendiary speech of Sarah Palin and others on the right is also to blame.

New York Times Op-Ed: "No One Listened to Gabrielle Richards"

...If we learn nothing from this tragedy, we are back where we started. And where we started was with two years of accelerating political violence — actual violence, not to be confused with violent language — that struck fear into many, not the least of whom was Gabrielle Giffords.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s stipulate that Loughner was a “lone nutjob” who had never listened to Glenn Beck or been a card-carrying member of either the Tea or Communist parties. Let’s also face another tragedy: The only two civic reforms that might have actually stopped him — tighter gun control and an effective mental health safety net — won’t materialize even now.

...Did Loughner see Palin’s own most notorious contribution to the rancorous tone — her March 2010 Web graphic  targeting Congressional districts? We have no idea — nor does it matter. But Giffords did. Her reaction to it — captured in an interview she did back then with Chuck Todd of MSNBC — was the most recycled, if least understood, video of last week.

The week of that interview began with the House passing the health care bill on Sunday. Within hours, on Monday morning, vandals smashed the front door of Giffords’s office in Tucson. The Palin “target” map (and the accompanying Twitter dictum to “RELOAD”) went up on Tuesday, just one day after that vandalism — timing that was at best tone-deaf and at worst nastily provocative. Not just Giffords, but at least three other of the 20 members of Congress on the Palin map were also hit with vandalism or death threats.

In her MSNBC interview that Wednesday, Giffords said that Palin had put the “crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” adding that “when people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.” Chuck Todd then asked Giffords if “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” She responded that colleagues who had been in the House “20, 30 years” had never seen vitriol this bad. But Todd moved on, and so did the Beltway. What’s the big deal about a little broken glass? Few wanted to see what Giffords saw — that the vandalism and death threats were the latest consequences of a tide of ugly insurrectionism that had been rising since the final weeks of the 2008 campaign and that had threatened to turn violent from the start.

Giffords’s first brush with that reality had occurred some seven months before her office was vandalized — in the red-hot health care fever of August 2009. She had held another “Congress on Your Corner” meeting, at a Safeway in the town of Douglas. There the crowd’s rage and the dropping of a gun by one attendee prompted aides worried about her safety to summon the police. The Tucson Tea Party co-founder, Trent Humphries, told The Arizona Daily Star afterward that this was a lie, that “nobody was threatening Gabby.” After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding “an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

Others on the right spent last week loudly protesting the politicization of tragedy. What was most revealing was how often they tried to rewrite the history of previous incidents having nothing to do with Loughner. A Palin aide claimed that her target map was only invoking a “surveyor’s symbol,” not gun sights. A Tucson Tea Party leader announced that the attack on Giffords’s office (never solved by the police) was probably caused by skateboarding kids. Mike Pence, a potential G.O.P. “values” candidate for president, told the C-Span audience that those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events (including one in Arizona that August of 2009) were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators “waving placards.”

For macabre absurdity, it would seem hard to top Newt Gingrich, who wailed about leftists linking Loughner to the right as if he had not famously blamed a psychotic double-murder of 1994, Susan Smith’s drowning of her two sons in South Carolina, on “Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” But Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, did top Newt. On “Meet the Press” last Sunday he implored us to “treat each other as fellow children of God” without acknowledging (or being questioned about) his 2009 diatribe branding Obama as “an enemy of humanity.”

As the president said in Tucson, we lack not just civil discourse, but honest discourse. Much of last week’s televised bloviation was dishonest, dedicated to the pious, feel-good sentiment that both sides are equally culpable for the rage of the past two years. To construct this false equivalency, every left-leaning Web site and Democratic politician’s record was dutifully culled for incendiary invective. If that’s the standard, then both sides are equally at fault — rhetoric can indeed be as violent on the left as on the right.

But that sidesteps the issue. This isn’t about angry blog posts or verbal fisticuffs. Since Obama’s ascension, we’ve seen repeated incidents of political violence. Just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last year’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Beck.

Obama said, correctly, on Wednesday that “a simple lack of civility” didn’t cause the Tucson tragedy. It didn’t cause these other incidents either. What did inform the earlier violence — including the vandalism at Giffords’s office — was an antigovernment radicalism as rabid on the right now as it was on the left in the late 1960s. That Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda, does not mean that a climate of antigovernment hysteria has no effect on him or other crazed loners out there. Nor does Loughner’s insanity mitigate the surge in unhinged political zealots acting out over the last two years. That’s why so many — on both the finger-pointing left and the hyper-defensive right — automatically assumed he must be another of them.

Have politicians stoked the pre-Loughner violence by advocating that citizens pursue “Second Amendment remedies” or be “armed and dangerous”? We don’t know. What’s more disturbing is what Republican and conservative leaders have not said. Their continuing silence during two years of simmering violence has been chilling....

[onion_writer]

I don't disagree with most of the above. But I've had about as much as I can stand of "both sides are to blame."

When a card-carrying Republican (see earlier posts) kills a Democrat who complained about hate language, I think we can begin to place at least some blame upon those who put forth violent imagery.

[3deroticer]

2 of the strongest word to me are "God" and "Country"
You can get crazy people to do anything by invoking those words!
The arms force can get sane people to do anything by invoking those 2 words!

Let's be clear that words usage can have consequence, even my "R" word are too much to be handle and result some into rage of anger over a single word. I have learn my lesson that words are just more than freedom of speech. But how you use them, will have to consider the result of how people will perceive it emotionally if it's too controversial or inciting hate.

[TheZookie007]

LeftAction: "Ignore Sarah Palin Week! 2/28-3/4"

We've tried debating her, arguing with her, boycotting her, voting against her, and yet... she keeps coming back.  Much like a vampire or a nasty fungus. 

So for just one week, we're going to try something new:  Ignoring her.   

That's right -- February 28-March 4 is officially, "Ignore Sarah Palin Week."   For just one week, signers of this petition pledge to do the following:

• Change the channel if she comes on TV
• Surf to another page if she pops up on the web
• Turn to another article if she appears in a newspaper, magazine, comic book, etc.

Will you join us?  Will you take the pledge?  If so, sign the pledge in the right-hand column, add your thoughts if you want, and help spread the word.   Can we ignore her for a week?  Can we get our friends, neighbors and co-workers to do the same?   You betcha!

Now, we understand that it might be tough to go cold turkey, and completely stop paying attention to Palin.  Thus, we offer these helpful tips:

• If a friend mentions "Sarah Palin," reply as if he or she said, "Para Sailing."  And keep doing it. Para sailing is way cooler.
• For your dose of gossip, consider switching to someone far less annoying.  Like Snooki.
• Visit "Telling Sarah Palin She's Full of Crap" on F__eb__k, and join 100,000 other people who will be talking about everything else BUT Palin.
• Refer to her as "she who shall remain nameless" for the duration of the week.
• Have other conversation topics ready to go

It's that simple.  We really can ignore her for a week.  We really can help pop any trial balloons being floated for 2012. 

We really can enjoy a glorious week, free of Sarah!  You betcha!

[SwitcherX]

`

[DruulEmpire]

Oh, and while I'm on this thread, and addressing Q, and rather desperate to try to lighten the tone here a little, all I have left to say on the titular subject of this thread is -- SHE'S NOT THAT INTO YOU.  I'll place a gentleman's bet -- or hell, even a monetary one -- that Palin will either not run or that if the GOP does back her she'll lose.

Palin reminds me a little of a little girl playing the "Why?" game -- that's when some jerk kid asks you a question "Why?" and then keeps right on asking "Why?" over and over.  She does it not out of genuine curiosity but just to have fun getting a rise out of you.  In either case, I feel I owe myself the luxury of simply ignoring her.  She had her shot, and she's fading away.  Far scarier persons are in actual seats of power.  I'm more interested in them. 

I'm just glad someone's agreeing with me.

[gOOber]

Superhero

[Palomine]

I'm not saying she's stupid (she's not) but she's either frighteningly uneducated or just so desperate to be in the public eye that she's willing to be needlessly careless with basic, easily verifiable facts:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/01/sarah_palins_weird_sputnik_sto.html

...in that latter respect, she reminds me of a couple of posters here.