When President Bush was in office, we had Bush Derangement Syndrome. With Bush out of office, lefties needed a new figure to hate, and they immediately zeroed in on Sarah Palin.
1. It’s all Sarah Palin’s fault
It took only moments after news of the shooting broke for lefties to immediately blame Sarah Palin. While the left pointed the finger at her for her supposedly violent rhetoric, they became more unhinged and violent themselves. Markos Moulitsas — perhaps most famous for cheering the deaths of four American contractors in Iraq and saying “screw them” — was among the first to jump on the Blame Palin bandwagon.
Moulitsas linked to a map that quickly became the center of the “it’s all Palin’s fault” meme:
Of course, as Michelle pointed out, DailyKos could be considered just as much to blame, with a post trumpeting that Gabrielle Giffords was dead to the poster, a second DailyKos post by Moulitsas himself putting a target on Gabrielle Giffords, and that Democrats had their own versions of the target map.
No matter; Moulitsas just dug in even further.
MoveOn.org also jumped into the fray, with an inflammatory e-mail claiming that Palin was responsible.
And violent tendencies have been inflamed by the careless and irresponsible rhetoric of certain political leaders. Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘target list’ displayed Democratic districts, including Rep. Giffords’, in crosshairs, as if viewed through a gunsight.
Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva also blamed Palin:
She – as I mentioned, people contributing to this toxic climate – Ms. Palin needs to look at her own behavior, and if she wants to help the public discourse, the best thing she could do is keep quiet.
Joan Walsh jumped into the fray:
Michael Daly, in the New York Daily News, went so far as to say that Giffords’ blood was on Palin’s hands.
Here is what Sarah Palin said on the Facebook page where she depicted Gabrielle Giffords in the cross hairs of a rifle scope: “Don’t retreat! Instead – RELOAD!”
Well, the guy who shot Giffords yesterday managed to keep firing until he killed six, including a child, and wounded 13 .
Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care.
But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.
This is just a small sampling — the Palin hate completely permeated the left. And what was the result of all of the Palin blaming?
Death threats.
A Palin aide also spoke out, confirming that she was receiving death threats at unprecedented levels.
An aide close to Sarah Palin says death threats and security threats have increased to an unprecedented level since the shooting in Arizona, and the former Alaska governor’s team has been talking to security professionals.
Those on the left called on Sarah Palin and the right to be more careful about their rhetoric, but had no problem with violent rhetoric being thrown at Sarah Palin. This isn’t exactly surprising (see Michelle Malkin’s primer on the progressive climate of hate), but it is revealing. Was the vitriol towards Sarah Palin from the left really about concern for Gabrielle Giffords and public safety, or did they just see an opportunity to try to smear and silence Sarah Palin and jump on it? Considering that there is no evidence whatsoever that Jared Lee Loughner even knew who Sarah Palin was, it clearly is the latter.
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These unhinged reactions show that left will use anything to smear their enemies and promote their sick, twisted agenda. Six people are dead, and all these moonbats could do was try to find ways to pin this on conservatives, engage in race baiting, blame America, and exploit the tragedy to further their own agenda. If one ever needed a primer on the sickness that infects the American left today, all they would need to do is read the examples listed here.
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