And what about the uber lefties [and not just marginal players but big voices like Krugman and Daily Kos and CNN etc] mad rush to blame the Arizona shootings on right wing vitriol in general and Sarah Palin in particular regardless of any evidence whatsoever that there was some coherent political motive to the shooting or that the shooter had ever visited Palin's website - regardless of fact that according to erstwhile friends he was more pot head liberal than conservative, was more interested in abstract [unhinged] philosophical musings than politics and may have targeted Giffords because in 2007, long before the advent of Palin and Tea Parties, she had not taken an absurd question he had asked her at political gathering concerning the 'nature of language' seriously and that this - again, according to friends - seemed to 'really piss him off'? Add to that the fact Giffords is a Jewish woman in a position of political authority and he apparently suffered from paranoid delusions involving arcane government conspiracies, that his mother is Jewish, that his decline into dementia seems to be have begun with a bad beak up with a girl friend - jumble those ingredients all together in the toxic soup of a sick mind and there's a real possibility that this shooting had nothing at all to do with politics, at least not in any remotely rational or practical way.
But let's assume for the moment there was a vaguely coherent political motive - hell, let's assume he saw the gunsight imagery on Palin's website and was driven by that or had heard the angry rants centered on Giffords' support of healthcare reform or had even participated in the vitriolic spewing by certain blowhards concerning Obama's socialist agenda [although given the shooter's apparent fondness for Marx that seems like a stretch] - let's in short assume the worst - would it matter? What rights to free speech would one be looking to outlaw in such a case? Who would decide? What political party would get to arbitrarily choose, depending on which way the wind happened to be blowing that week, between appropriate political discourse and inappropriate political discourse? The would be assassin, as I said, was a fan of Marx and apparently Hitler's writings as well, not to mention the more outlandish musings of Philip K Dick and the Matrix movies - do we ban reading and going to movies? Since the uber liberals are convinced the only real evil here is right wing vitriol and all the noxious influences I just mentioned are generally associated with the left [yes, I think you could argue Hitler was a lefty - really, really left, but still] deciding which forms of speech are acceptable could take just a wee bit of inventive thinking, no? - but let's be nice and say enlightened liberals would simply intuit right from wrong in these hard to reckon cases. And accordingly if Obama, not unlike Palin, employs again, as he has in the past, an analogical trope that could imply condoning the use of violence to a troubled mind, and I'm speaking here of when in the campaign [a military expression, by the way] he encouraged liberals to bring a 'gun to a knife fight' when dealing with republicans - if some poor demented left addled soul takes him seriously and essays the rhetorical breach armed with an actual gun? - well, I'm sure we will be able to trust democrats to reasonably adjudicate right from wrong in such a tragedy.
You see how the political rationalizations, when you attempt to tie them to an absurdity, quickly become absurd themselves. Look at Aaron Sorkin's recent decline into hysteria concerning Palin's hunting moose on her reality show - yes, Sorkin is not a politician, but he's an influential public figure and was writing on a subject that definitely broached politics in a forum that is decidedly driven by a leftist political ideology, the Huffington Post, and what he had to say was heated to say the least - the point being, a nut job animal rights activist [and there's plenty of those] could easily have interpreted what he said as an invitation to kill or otherwise harm Palin - would liberals have denounced Sorkin for inciting violence? Would they have said the vitriol of liberal animus against certain right wing beliefs was to blame for this theoretical tragedy? I think we all know the answer to that - in fact my guess is most hardcore liberals would privately rejoice at any misfortune befalling Palin [as no doubt many secretly hoped some rogue assassin would take out Bush] and then entirely ignore the bitter irony of such a thing, convinced as they are in the absolute verity of their dreams.
But I wander with a Quixote-like dissolution - what about this mad, even reckless dash by the Obamaphiles to assign blame? Not surprising. As I've always maintained, ideologues believe what they believe not because of some well reasoned approach to the harsh realities of the world, but rather because they have an emotional and psychological need to believe certain things - therefore, that their response seems rashly emotional is not surprising: insomuch as Palin in particular and the Tea Party in general seem to, because they're popular, threaten these beliefs is motivation enough to go feeding frenzy even with only the faintest hint of blood in the water - in other words, better to utterly and ruthlessly demomize your enemy then ever admit that maybe what you believe is flawed because to admit flaws is to undermine identity and identity is the master of one's emotions.
addendum: George Will has an article up that puts things in a way that I can't. Also, I was thinking: the way things are trending - and it's all very uncertain at this point - but the way things are trending Palin, if she plays it right, could come out looking the victim here - or among the victims - in that the left wing attack on her could come off looking quite scurrilous and debased - in which case, not only will her reputation with conservatives grow even more, but independents, whose good graces no one with national aspirations can do without, may also start to reconsider her - ie, they may conclude that their negative opinion of her was indeed a result of biased left wing character assassination and decide to give her a second look. That would be an ironic turn of ye old worm, no? Then again the shooter could make jail house confession that implicates Palin et al and then the culture war is definitely on - remember the county sheriff, a democrat, who will be overseeing the investigation, has already gone very publicly on record saying that, regardless of corroborating evidence, he believes absolutely that the killings were politically motivated. The next few weeks could prove quite interesting indeed.
