January 11, 2011--"Don't Retreat, Reload"
This is precisely what Jared Loughner was doing on Saturday--reloading after he murdered 6 and wounded 14 at a Tucson shopping mall.
He had fired 30 rounds from his Glock semi-automatic pistol and was struggling to insert another clip so he could continue his slaughter when three brave citizens jumped on him and held him down until the police could arrive and arrest him.
"Don't retreat, reload" as you may recall is Sarah Palin's tag line. With her movie star smile she intones it at all her rallies and cash-up-front speeches; but she and her people are rejecting any notion that heated rhetoric of this kind could have had any effect on someone like Loughner, potentially inciting him to violence.
Nor, she is defensively claiming, did the map of the United States on her SarahPac Website with the the image of crosshairs of a gun sight superimposed on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' district have anything more than symbolic meaning--that Giffords was simply being "targeted" (Palin's word) for electoral defeat.
In spite of these claims, Palin has removed that map from her Website. In case you never got a chance to see it, from the Huffington Post I have linked it below.
Politicians from both parties do not know what to do with this horrific event. And by "with" and "do" I mean take political advantage of it. The Democrats' problem is not to be seen trying to do that--take advantage of the tragedy (which of course they are attempting to do); but Republicans have a much bigger problem--they and their media flacks have various kinds of metaphoric blood on their hands.
Newly installed Speaker of the House, John Boehner went on television on Sunday to forcefully denounce the shootings, but this statement has to be seen in the context of his larger hypocritical behavior because during the recent midterm election campaign Boehner himself was responsible for using violent and inflammatory language.
For example, in an Ohio race he said that the Democrat candidate, Steve Driehaus, by voting for Obamacare "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town." After these incendiary remarks, Driehaus, like Gabrielle Giffords, began receiving death threats, his district office was attacked, and a right-wing website published directions to his house.
Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, members of both parties attempted to tap dance around the issue of how much heated political rhetoric such as Palin's and Boehner's contributes to the climate of violence that characterizes so much of American culture.
Democrats called for more civility (though at their extreme left things can get pretty aggressive and ugly) and called on Sarah Palin to apologize; while Republicans such as Senator Lamar Alexander found themselves staking out very surprising positions. Usually, Republicans represent themselves as tough on crime (as opposed to liberals who, they claim, blame society rather than perpetrators for crimes); but in this case, rather than acknowledging that they and their Tea Party colleagues have used excessive and symbolically violent rhetoric in many of their political attacks, they are claiming that the alleged shooter has "psychological problems."
This may be true but that does not excuse political players from using language and imagery that could set off someone like a Loughner.
To quote an advisor to Sarah Palin, Rebecca Mansour in an interview over the weekend with conservative radio talk show host Tammy Bruce, said, “I don’t understand how anybody [Palin] can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this.”
Bruce, of course, failed to follow up by asking Mansour if this true, why then did Palin cleaned up her Website.
I think we know the answer:
Mansour with a straight face also said the crosshairs were not crosshairs at all but rather "surveyor's symbols." Which means that Palin, who wants everyone other than herself to take responsibility for their actions, must have completed her surveying.
He had fired 30 rounds from his Glock semi-automatic pistol and was struggling to insert another clip so he could continue his slaughter when three brave citizens jumped on him and held him down until the police could arrive and arrest him.
"Don't retreat, reload" as you may recall is Sarah Palin's tag line. With her movie star smile she intones it at all her rallies and cash-up-front speeches; but she and her people are rejecting any notion that heated rhetoric of this kind could have had any effect on someone like Loughner, potentially inciting him to violence.
Nor, she is defensively claiming, did the map of the United States on her SarahPac Website with the the image of crosshairs of a gun sight superimposed on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' district have anything more than symbolic meaning--that Giffords was simply being "targeted" (Palin's word) for electoral defeat.
In spite of these claims, Palin has removed that map from her Website. In case you never got a chance to see it, from the Huffington Post I have linked it below.
Politicians from both parties do not know what to do with this horrific event. And by "with" and "do" I mean take political advantage of it. The Democrats' problem is not to be seen trying to do that--take advantage of the tragedy (which of course they are attempting to do); but Republicans have a much bigger problem--they and their media flacks have various kinds of metaphoric blood on their hands.
Newly installed Speaker of the House, John Boehner went on television on Sunday to forcefully denounce the shootings, but this statement has to be seen in the context of his larger hypocritical behavior because during the recent midterm election campaign Boehner himself was responsible for using violent and inflammatory language.
For example, in an Ohio race he said that the Democrat candidate, Steve Driehaus, by voting for Obamacare "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town." After these incendiary remarks, Driehaus, like Gabrielle Giffords, began receiving death threats, his district office was attacked, and a right-wing website published directions to his house.
Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, members of both parties attempted to tap dance around the issue of how much heated political rhetoric such as Palin's and Boehner's contributes to the climate of violence that characterizes so much of American culture.
Democrats called for more civility (though at their extreme left things can get pretty aggressive and ugly) and called on Sarah Palin to apologize; while Republicans such as Senator Lamar Alexander found themselves staking out very surprising positions. Usually, Republicans represent themselves as tough on crime (as opposed to liberals who, they claim, blame society rather than perpetrators for crimes); but in this case, rather than acknowledging that they and their Tea Party colleagues have used excessive and symbolically violent rhetoric in many of their political attacks, they are claiming that the alleged shooter has "psychological problems."
This may be true but that does not excuse political players from using language and imagery that could set off someone like a Loughner.
To quote an advisor to Sarah Palin, Rebecca Mansour in an interview over the weekend with conservative radio talk show host Tammy Bruce, said, “I don’t understand how anybody [Palin] can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this.”
Bruce, of course, failed to follow up by asking Mansour if this true, why then did Palin cleaned up her Website.
I think we know the answer:
Mansour with a straight face also said the crosshairs were not crosshairs at all but rather "surveyor's symbols." Which means that Palin, who wants everyone other than herself to take responsibility for their actions, must have completed her surveying.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:32 AM
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