Politicizing the AZ massacre

No, its because the left side has the holier-than-thou attitude... but they're not as holy as they think they are so it must be pointed out.Remeber, if you disagree with the left, then there is something wrong with your brain

Exactly like hippy chicks! To quote Don King, "Only in America" do the definitions become goofy.- Oni

A lot of people, too, are bring up Obama's "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

No one should jump to such a conclusion. It could cause retaliatory violence; the same thing you guys are now insinuating the "targets" did.Which makes the whole call for less aggressive political rhetoric complete bullshit.Obama called for an "end to the sharply polarised debate that has consumed America," and yet these accusations toward Palin are doing just that, causing everyone to once again turn on each other. Ridiculous.- Oni Edited by onifre, : No reason given.

But they do jump to conclusions. The media should not base their reports on such speculations, but the general population will jump to this conclusion unless evidence shows it otherwise. What I am talking about falls short of accusation. I am talking about the first gut reaction to the news. If it turns out to be wrong then it is wrong.To use an analogy, whenever a woman is murdered they usually focus on the husband/boyfriend first. That is their gut reaction to the crime. If evidence quickly exonerates the husband/boyfriend then they swiftly move on. This is the type of reaction I am talking about.

Which is why ALL political leaders need to be very careful with the language they use. The last thing you want to do (at least in American politics) is to make violent people feel justified in using violence. When you put crosshairs on a map and tell people to "Prescribe the solution" that is irresponsible whether or not this most recent attack is due to this piece of literature.

Without the media broadcasting the speculations about Palin, would people really have remembered a 5 second comment about consequences given 9 months ago by the congress woman? I didn't remember it at all. To be honest, I didn't know she had said it orignially, I heard about it through the media recently.The general public may have speculated that it was in some way instigated by Tea Party rhetoric, on that I can agree. But to specifically call out Palin and those "targets" on the map is something very few, if anyone, would have tried to correlate. If only because no one would have remembered. Yes but they don't blast it through the media that the husband or boyfriend may have done it unless evidence points to that.This media driven speculation on Palin is the very thing the Tea Party is being accused of doing. It's not helping matters at all, and it will continue to divide us.- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

It was irresponsible for the media to play the speculation game. Unfortunately, the news media competes for viewers through sensationalism. I wish it were different, but that is the state of affairs. The line between reporting and punditry has blurred quite a bit.The crosshair map is serving more as a Rosetta stone, IMO. If people deny that there has been violent rhetoric within the Tea Party then all you need to do is point to this map that was produced by one of it's prominent members. As an aside, I do remember this map when it was first being used and had the same reaction to it now that I had then. However, they will report that the husband is being questioned and play video of the husband being brought in for questioning. They will use a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" type language to insinuate the husband in the murder without actually saying it. The media company that doesn't do this will lose viewership, at least in the mind of the media company.

It matters if he never even saw the website! How can he be "influenced" by something he may have never seen??? Fearmongering. Politicking. Pandering. That's all this is about. You have to be able to actually connect the dots from Palin to Loughner for any of this to be reasonable. Anything less is simply blustering. Horseshit. Where's your condemnation of video games and movies? You'd do better to boycott Hollywood than you would building these straw men in a house of cards. I don't even know who that is. Yes, to pinpoint which Representatives were pushing ObamaCare. Yep, so what? I already told you that she's appealing to her demographic. There's also numerous instances where she makes gun analogies that have nothing to do with politics. It's a figure of speech! What's the difference? Both pinpoint locations, that's why they're useful. I have a screen at work that uses crosshairs. you scroll the crosshair to get lat/long coordinates. Does that mean we use it to assassinate people, or to find assist us in a search and rescue?You're blowing this way out of proportion. What are you talking about? Foster's crime is simply existing, and Hinckley thought his dog told him to kill Reagan. In Hinckley's warped mind, he thought he would be impressing Foster. How does she bear and blame? I know. That's what the 2nd Amendment advocates decry. No, you're conflating. What happened in Arizona was a crime. This quote was specifically in reference to you talking about Tea Party members showing up to rallies with guns. Please keep the coversation in context. Thanks. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

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"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it" -- Thomas Paine

I don't see how any of that is relevant or necessary. It's irrelevant whether Loughner followed Palin on Twitter. It's utterly irrelevant whether he was right-wing or just a crazy dipshit. It's utterly irrelevant whether you can draw a direct legal causal chain from Sarah Palin to the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords.None of that matters to the question of how conservative assassination rhetoric contributed to the environment that's been fostering this swell in right-wing violence against government workers, liberal groups, and politicians. No, it's not, because the things that happen on South Park or in the lyrics of a Metallica album aren't reported as true. When Stephen Colbert marries a gun, nobody understands that to be genuine because everybody knows that Stephen Colbert is an actor portraying a character of his own creation called "Stephen Colbert". But people don't perceive Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell, or Michelle Bachman as portraying characters, they perceive them - and more importantly, they're reported on the news this way - as speaking in earnest.The NBC Nightly News doesn't report that Cartman's Mom was embroiled in a paternity scandal, because that didn't happen. They do report that Sarah Palin was talking about death panels in the health care bill, and claiming that the government was going to show up and kill your grandmother and your retarded cousin. They report Sarah Palin saying those things because Sarah Palin really is saying those things and really means it.There's a big difference between conservative murder speech and gangsta rap lyrics, and that is that everyone understands that rap lyrics are entertainment. Conservative murder speech isn't meant that way. It's not meant to entertain you, it's meant to get you to get out there and take action. Political speech is inherently directive; it's meant to persuade and spur action and involvement. When it spurs action in the form of legitimate political involvement, that's fair. But we've seen a marked increase in the number of people who view these political disagreements in such stark terms that they truly believe that the other side is so intractable, they have to be killed for the greater good. And that increase is pretty clearly driven by conservative murder speech. No, Oni, we know that's not correct. Loughner specifically targeted Rep. Giffords in her capacity as a congresswoman. The attack was not random; it was the planned assassination of a targeted political figure to achieve Loughner's political aims. This was most definitely not an indiscriminate or random attack; Rep. Giffords was the specific target.

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leftist, but an anarchist.

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No, one has nothing to do with the other. If we're looking at political ideologies from left/right and top/bottom are statists and anarchists, we have:Top Left: Stalinists (statists to the Left). Top Right: Fascists (statists to the right)Anything in the bottom scale are minarchists (libertarians) and anarchists. Left/Right doesn't even factor in to it. All that matters is no government at all, to anarchists, because governments corrupt.

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"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it" -- Thomas Paine

I can't help your inability to see it, I can only present the argument. In the case of Palin and the targets, and ONLY in the case of Palin and the targets, it is obviously relevant to prove that Loughner was motivated by it if everyone is claiming that he was. Obviously. Do you have evidence that Loughner was motivated by Palin, Angle, O'Donnell or Bachman? Umm, rap lyrics, many of them, represent true reality. I have no clue what you're talking about. Many claim rap to be the motivation behind a lot of the violence seen in the black community. Any evidence for that other than pure speculation?- Oni

...that sound everyone in North American is hearing is the ground crumbling up and away from a deep sleep somewhere in the lonely distant hills of Montana as Chet Huntley comes roaring back to life to yell out "That's NOT the way it is! It most definitely is NOT the way it is!! My buddy David would NEVER EVER do such a thing! EVER!"

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oh, that's just a Mercator Projection - it's more like Stalin & Hitler are close enough to shake hands at the North Pole...along with Idi Amin and Pol Pot and Nero and many other sad defects of Homo Sapiens. (Let's have some more Global Warming already!)BTW - many mention that the AZ shooter had a copy of the Communist Manifesto. He also had a copy of Mein Kampf. He seemed infatuated with the North Pole.Oh - and how appropriate that the Anarchists are in Anarctica, on the only landmass in the world not claimed by any country!Edited by xongsmith, : Anarctica

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

But we're not claiming he was "motivated by it." We're claiming that the Paranoid Style of Politics, as practiced by headlining conservative voices and leaders, leads some people to have paranoid ideas about politics. Jared Loughner believed that the Democratic government was out to control everybody's attitudes, perceptions, and actions. Don't you think that repeated claims by top political leaders of the conservative mainstream, including former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, that Democratic liberals including the President want to control everybody's attitudes, perceptions, and actions might have contributed to that view?Nobody thinks that Sarah Palin ordered anybody to kill Rep. Giffords. Obviously she meant to do nothing more than rally her base with "fightin' words." But a responsible - and presidential - person who used that language would apologize in the light of Loughner's actions, even if they had no direct responsibility. They would apologize for how a crazy person might have taken them out of all context, and hope that nobody would ever use violence to settle electoral scores.But, tellingly, no conservatives are doing that. They're doubling-down with conservative murder language. Sarah Palin is making anti-semetic claims of "blood libel", and portraying herself every bit as much the victim of Tuscon as the people who were killed there. Why are conservatives and their leaders suddenly under attack in the aftermath of this shooting? Because their response to it has been so abominable and blinkered. It's like they just have no fucking idea what matters. I mean, look at Coyote in this thread. Oh, come on. Almost none of them represent any reality at all. Those guys are MBA's, middle class guys making rap for suburban white youth. Gangsta rap is for white kids.And again - nobody treats the claims of hip-hop music like real claims. When Jay-Z says he has 99 problems but a bitch ain't one, that's not reported and repeated as something true. When Sarah Palin says the heath care reform bill has death panels, that's taken as an earnest claim of fact. Everybody understands that rap is entertainment. Sarah Palin may be entertaining but a considerable number of people consider her, Rush, Hannity, Beck, and other conservative bullshit artists as though they were engaged in a genuine act of truth-saying.Do you understand that? That when Sarah Palin says "death panels", millions of Americans believe her? Loughner's journals contain notes about his plans, which he refers to consistently as an assassination of Rep. Giffords. She's targeted by name in his letters and journals. We know he had previously visited Rep. Giffords at another event, probably to scout her security (if there even was any.)We know he planned ahead, Oni. This wasn't a random act of violence by a crazy person who snapped; this was a premeditated, planned act of political assassination of a specific member of Congress.