Should we be surprised by the shooting in Arizona?

Many of us are stunned by the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman in Arizona, but should we be? The intended victim, Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), had already spoken last year about being on Sarah Palin’s infamous “hit list.”

You may recall, this list showed 20 members of Congress that Palin wanted to be removed. It included  a map of the country showing where their districts were located. The icon used to show each district was a set of crosshairs, like the type you would see in a sniper’s rifle. I guess a star or something similar just wouldn’t do for plain talkin’ Sarah. She also helpfully provided guidance in a Tweet which said, ‘Don’t retreat, RELOAD.”

Congresswoman Giffords was well aware of her presence on this hit list. In an interview last year she said:

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘targeted’ list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we’re in the cross-hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.”- U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, March 25, 2010

Supporters of the commentators on the right who provoke violence are already firing back against critical comments from more moderate thinkers. But the reality is that there is no place in the national discourse for calls to violence against political opponents. 

National best sellers are published on almost a monthly basis that compare being a Democrat, or God forbid a liberal, with being a traitor and committing treason. In whacko easily brainwashed minds violence against such people becomes justifiable.

No one yet knows what provoked the shooter in Arizona. He is likely a lone deranged individual as assassins often are. But one fact is irrefutable, the right-wing blogospere has gotten itself so lathered up over its hatred of all things Obama that, unfortunately, violence is the inevitable outcome. We ignore that fact at our own peril.

UPDATE

Following the shooting, Palin’s people tried to scrub her Facebook and Twitter accounts clean of any references to shooting current members of Congress. Do they not realize that once something is on the Internet it lives on for all eternity? Don’t forget that these are the same people who want to run the country in a few years.

In a further attempt at damage control, Palin advisor Rebecca Mansour was interviewed by like-minded radio host Tammy Bruce. Mansour said the graphics on the map were ”never, ever, ever intended to be gun sights. It was simply crosshairs.”  Oh, that clarifies things. However, when I fired an M-16 in the Army “gun sight” and “cross hairs” were kind of interchangeable. In the land of Palindrones up is down and down is up.

Bruce tried to help her guest out by suggesting that they were in fact surveyor symbols. Mansour readily agreed saying, “It is a surveyor symbol.”  (Maybe the Masons were involved. Paging Dan Brown.) So Rebecca Mansour tries to cover up her poor judgment with blatant lies. Just file this one in the “They must think we’re idiots” folder.