Reading a piece on Think Progress about Giffords, I noticed the “related stories” list at the end. In some cases, I followed the links. In others, I went directly with the original story. here’s a sampling. More after the fold:
- After Obama’s Election, Right-Wing Extremists ‘May Be Gaining New Recruits’;
- Woman stomped on the head outside Conway-Paul debate;
- Republican candidate says violent overthrow ‘on the table’;
- Man posts bomb instructions on Facebook, is charged in plot;
- Boehner embraces tea party, admitting some are “anarchists who want to kill all of us in public office”;
- Tea Party Sells ‘America’s Most Wanted’ Playing Cards With Pictures Of Federal Lawmakers;
- Democratic Party offices vandalized across the country;
- Pentagon Shooter Was Right-Wing, Anti-Government Terrorist ;
- Rep. King Justifies Suicide Attack On IRS: Sympathizes With Hatred Of IRS, Hopes For Its Destruction ;
- GOP congressional candidate pretends to shoot at Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. ;
- Calls For Violence Repeatedly Stoked By Conservative Voices ;
- FBI Arrests White Supremacist Blogger Hal Turner For Threatening To Kill Federal Judges;
I am livid, beyond belief, and having trouble forming coherent thoughts about this. So I will just say two things. This is a comment I left in another piece:
The more pictures of someone you have with a target over their face, the more rhetoric you use indicating that someone is a Manchurian candidate, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, etc., the more chance there is that when some random person goes off the deep end, they’ll pick the target that you marked.
You don’t need to pull the trigger. You don’t need to be directly responsible. You just have to say the right things in enough places and coyly claim you were just being rhetorical before someone with easy access to a weapon decides to pull the trigger.
And I will end on a note of hope and possible inspiration: an intern with the campaign, who’d been there for just five days, may have saved Giffords life by running directly towards the gunfire and applying emergency medical care.
You don’t need to pull the trigger. You don’t need to be directly responsible. You just have to say the right things in enough places and coyly claim you were just being rhetorical before someone with easy access to a weapon decides to pull the trigger.
Been interesting to watch people go into dissonance/apologist mode: hey, those crosshairs were just metaphors, the dude is nuts, not political, there are extremists on both sides, etc. But the truth remains that as people ratchet up the bile and hate, the window of what’s acceptable shifts, and whether suffering from schizophrenia or not, more people will see this as the only solution to whatever problems real or imagined we face.
Last night I watched Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s news conference .Dupnik (I believe said two of the victims were his friends)remained impassive but clearly felt a great deal as he offered the following thoughts and chilling warning.
Its amazing and alarming to hear a law enforcement official take the time and feel the need to issue a warning such as this.
http://crooksandliars.com/karo…
Why not hold the music industry accountable for songs like “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”? We don’t know that the gunman had any connections to the Tea Party or to Sarah Palin. But we do know that he was fond of that song.
George Packer:
The massacre in Tucson is, in a sense, irrelevant to the important point. Whatever drove Jared Lee Loughner, America’s political frequencies are full of violent static.
Dylan Ratigan:
Whatever is to be said about the state of the gunman today, whether he had psychological issues or not, he was angry. Across America today, people are angry. They may choose to channel that anger in a number of either self-destructive or destructive ways. But whatever any of our feelings are, our challenge and our obligation is to channel that energy into a path based on resolution. For a path based on destruction is just that, destruction.