Team Palin goes on the defensive with this absurdity:
“We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you’d see on maps,” said (Palin aide) Rebecca Mansour on the Tammy Bruce radio show. Moreover, there was “nothing irresponsible” about the image…
Like on a map? What kind of map has crosshairs?
It’s clear this incident isn’t going to quiet the scary fringe of the tea party movement, as embodied by Sarah Palin. Self-examination, reflection, and rational introspection are not qualities this crowd is interested in. Enraged ignorance and extreme, absolutist self-righteousness are considered virtues among that set.
What it will do is crank the battle for the soul of the GOP up to 11, and as partisan a type as I often am, I have to believe that compassion and reason will rule the day. I may seem like a grouch much of the time, but I really do like my fellow human beings. A lot. And I like them because, at the end of the day, I believe in us as a species – even those with whom I viscerally disagree – despite the bad eggs (and yes, there are plenty, but still…).
BTW, Talking Points Memo is really the place for fleshing out this story in more depth. They’ve doing their usual great job.
Here’s the image folks are talking about, that I linked to in a previous diary:
Palin stlye
http://encyclopedia.thefreedic…
Someone needs to tell Sarah that maps have crossroads. Guns have crosshairs.
Palin even tweeted about ow great her ‘bullseye’ graphic was. Any statement coming from them that they didn’t think it was a gunsight is an intentional lie.
Not that being lied to has any effect on the Republican voter. Indeed Republican voters want to, expect to, demand to be lied to by their politicians, since they have a visceral hatred of the truth.
Why else do they watch Fox ‘News’ and listen to hate radio?
Link to Palin’s tweet:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
I see the hatewingers and apologists contorting themselves to deny crosshairs mean anything. Sure, they can be used in a variety of instruments and contexts, but first and foremost it represents aiming shots at people (just as a laser sight could be used for range finding in golf, but most likely on a weapon).
They are desperately trying to separate the graphic from the other rhetoric so they can muddy the waters a bit. If you just look at the crosshairs in isolation, one can make a almost-plausible argument that they represent something else. But combined with all the other shit, the violent meaning is clear.
Assholes.
that we’re all as stupid as she is. Bonus: shooter may have ties to white supremacist group. I hope so. If anything good is to come out of this, it needs to be that it is so irrefutably linked to the right wing that this false equivalency crap the media pushes finally has no quarter, and all those American on the fence will see what they’re really all about. My own rant here.
Aren’t really called crosshairs when used in the survey sense (on a map). They may be any of a few different symbols, but they are usually called benchmarks, or even data points.
Now in a surveyor’s instrument, his scope, one could call them crosshairs, as it is what you line up when you are actually out surveying. Like a scope on a rifle for shooting caribou.
I just want to take this moment and express my deepest thanks to John McCain. Thanks for putting country first.
indeed – give these folks a piece of our minds – we will not stand by and watch innocent people suffer. Crosshairs and targets on our politicians clearly mean what they were intended to mean. Let us speak up against this horrible act: info@sarahpac.com
Yeah, the Fox news gang is in real damage control mode. The spin that is coming out from them is incredulous. I saw one article already from the tea party that the gunman was influenced by liberal and marxist propaganda. They are really trying to cover their butts now that what they have spewed out has come back at them.
We haven’t heard anything from the media about this quote from Barack Obama: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
We have Obama’s direct quote about knives and guns, which I did not misquote. We have two Democratic maps targeting Republicans with bullseyes (as shown at http://www.verumserum.com/?p=1… We have Senator Manchin shooting a copy of the cap & trade bill. We have Markos Moulitsas saying that Rep. Giffords will be under a bullseye because of her FISA vote. And we had Hillary Clinton sticking around in the presidential primary race because, well, you know what happened in 1968.
My point is that we shouldn’t be looking to blame a particular party and make a partisan issue of this tragic event. But those who throw around blame in such a manner risk it coming back on their party.
Is it okay to stereotype the entire religion of Islam every time there’s an al-Qaeda attack?
Is that there is zero evidence that this kid ever saw this Sarah Palin graphic, or the similar one by the DLC, zero evidence that he ever listened to any incendiary rhetoric from either side of the political spectrum.
But soon after it happened someone made up the theory that he was provoked by all the “violent” right-wing talk, and the left so desperately wants that to be true, that they’ve taken this THEORY and they are arguing it as though it were fact. How did the graphic shown above ever become connected to this case? How did incendiary rhetoric ever become connected to this case? Certainly not from any evidence we’ve heard. Someone had the idea, made the connection and now everyone is just running blindly with it.
The anecdotal evidence we’ve heard so far seems to indicate that, if anything, he was left-leaning. That’s what the people who knew him said, and we know little else at this point.
What appears most evident, however, is that this person is severely mentally disturbed. You want to believe that the state of his mental condition caused him to be so influenced by right-wing talk radio and Sarah Palin’s graphic that the Saturday attack was inevitable. Yet at the same time you believe that he was somehow competent enough to differentiate between the underlying meanings of cross-hairs versus targets, and could never have been influenced by a graphic of a target, otherwise he would have been throwing darts on Saturday. It’s just ridiculous, you’re just making it all up.
As for the title of this thread, if you’re looking for stupidity, you might start with the very premise of the thread itself.
It is profoundly shameful that the left is unconscionably exploiting this tragedy like this. The responses to this tragedy from people on both the right and the left speak volumes as to their respective characters.
Up on the Stranger’s website (Seattle News / Arts Weekly) – riffs on Palin’s ‘surveyor’s map’ with political assasinations:
I can’t seem to embed images:
http://slog.thestranger.com/sl…