Saturday, January 08, 2011

Prayers up - For Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and all the other victims of the senseless shooting in Tuscon, Arizona. Information is trickling in about the shooter but he appears to be a garden variety nutcase.

Update (1/9) - Legal Insurrection: "Two sicknesses on display in Arizona."

More - Glenn Reynolds: "But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder."

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2011-01-08-palinstargetingofgeffordsdistrict300px.jpg

Anonymous said...

"The same impulse [for scapegoating] can be observed in attempts to lay the sins of yesterday’s shootings in Arizona on Sarah Palin. It is no more rationally justifiable to blame her for inciting political violence (on the basis of the Facebook election map) than it is to arraign President Obama on the same charge (on the basis of the Univision interview in which he urged voters to “punish” their “enemies”)."

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256682/beware-dangers-scapegoating-michael-knox-beran

Bloody hands said...

Mmmm, yes... "all of us" need to "come together" and temper our "respective" rhetoric, because there have been ever-so-unfortunate excesses "on both sides." We're going to be hearing that pathetic, defensive bleat for a long time.

March 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs75zKxJxVY

Eric said...

I look forward to your evidence that this fan of the "The Communist Manifesto" who was described by an acquaintance as "left wing" and "quite liberal" was motivated by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

If you haven't heard such excesses from "both sides" it's because Daily Kos has been scrubbing their pages:

http://twitter.com/jtLOL/status/23839578917961728

... said...

This is just pitiful...

"I worked like a dog for her elections when she was in the Arizona House, [but that woman] is now dead to me"?

And "If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder"? ("Punish"/"enemies" cited by the National Review.)

THOSE are the moral/rhetorical analogies to gunsights labelled "We aim for these races and many others... Don't retreat, instead - RELOAD!" and "The nation is arming. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step? "/"If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?"

That's really the premise? That's what you're selling?

And what if it turns out that the Arizona killer took his orders from an eggplant named Zargox the Destroyer and thought he was shooting at his own clones? Would his insanity validate the legitimacy of the GOP's many shoot-'em-up quotes?

Speaking of false equivalencies: a Governor, V.P. candidate and national party leader is indistinguishable from the world-famous blogger "BoyBlue"? Honestly?

Anonymous said...

I think I'm far healthier for having purposely avoided the news all weekend and concentrating on football. I don't get too upset about 40+ year-old people I don't know being killed.

A 9-year-old girl murdered by an idiot makes me see red. The needle can't hit this guy's vein fast enough.

Anonymous said...

I look forward to your evidence that this fan of the "The Communist Manifesto" who was described by an acquaintance as "left wing" and "quite liberal" was motivated by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Registered Republican voter. Worked up about the gold standard. (As if that explains anything, either.)

It's just a little extra detail to counter the nonsense: "Those rotten liberals, unfairly leaping to conclusions instead of waiting for all the facts... and I know that's the case because I saw his reading list on Facebook!"

Eric said...

Getting caught up:

If the DailyKos quotes were innocuous, why the need to toss them down the Memory Hole?

But you're right: BoyBlue is insignificant to Sarah Palin who coarsened the national discourse with her call to arms: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun!"

My bad, that was Obama, 2008. Bush Derangement Syndrome is a distant memory.

Mother Jones, of all sources, reported that probably his only friend in the world said he had no political leanings. Which is where everybody, including those objective marvels at the New York Times, should have left it.

Eric said...

Did you see that? Steve agrees with me. Thank you, Steve.

Anonymous said...

Loughner was registered as an independent, didn't vote in the last two elections, and had no political leanings except for some weird thing about hating Giffords.

Ratch said...

Looks like someone in cyberspace whipped up a fake voter's registration, to go along with the enhanced Daily Markos Moulitsas column with Photoshopped bullseyes added in, and the fake news reports of Giffords' death this weekend.

Anonymous said...

Barack Obama was quoting dialogue from a movie. You know, like the time Ronald Reagan used the I-just-shot-four-guys punchline, "Go ahead... make my day." (Was he the Great Communicator, or the Great Coarsener?)

More to the point, Obama's rhetorical record bears NO relation - not in volume, and not in kind - to the gun-happy slang Sarah Palin uses. Drawing an equivalency is a garbage assertion. It's a lie, and is beneath any serious person.

Speaking of equivalencies, a round of applause to Legal Insurrection for correctly spotting the "two sicknesses on display": a psychotic who was able to buy a gun and shoot 20 people, and liberals reviving the complaint they'd put on the record a year ago about Palin's words. Thankfully, it's not a direct equivalency, because the writer concedes the killings were "far more serious" in the second sentence. Only then does he move on to 16 additional paragraphs about the Democrats' "hateful," "every bit as delusional" "frenzy."

Eric said...

Thanks for the lesson on the distinctions of rhetoric. I'll file this with the NY Times article from the guy urging for civility who, a couple months ago, said a Republican candidate should be "put up against a wall and shot."

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2011/01/and-speaking-of-krugman-and-double-standards-at-the-times.html

Talking heads from George Will to Jon Stewart to Rachel Maddow have said to "cool it." Maybe you should heed that advice.

Anonymous said...

Yes, yes... NOW is the time for all Americans of good conscience to temper their comments. Last year, not so much.

While Paul Kanjorski's words are also contemptible, it's funny to see the right delving for quotes after having dined out on shoot-em-up rhetoric for some time. You'd think they'd be just as prominent and easy to find as the GOP ones.

At least Kanjorski is finally a good find. But surely if some other Democrat somewhere said "I'm going to give it my best shot," the left's vicious hypocrisy will soon be further exposed.

Good luck with the two-pronged strategy: "We have NEVER said or done this thing you've accused us of doing... and besides, you do it too!"