Gabrielle Giffords Assassination Attempt

The assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords deserves comment. At this hour six are dead and fourteen reported wounded, including Giffords. The killed include a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. This kind of event was bound to happen, given the hate, vitriol and violent images spewed by right wing sources. It will likely happen again.

Conservative and Republican figures are currently saying all the right things. John Boehner, Sarah Palin and Tea Party spokespeople are decrying the act for the horrific crime it was. And yes, the shooter has given evidence of an unbalanced mental state. In this morning's news, alleged shooter Jared Loughner is reported to have put up a paranoiac web site replete with anti government rantings, is characterized by acquaintances as a "pot-smoking loner," is reported to have had five police encounters at community college due to disruptive behavior, and the Army reports having rejected him for enlistment due to "unspecified reasons" protected by privacy rules.

These are certainly all marks of a troubled young man-the kind of young man susceptible to campaign advertising by right wing Arizona politicians such as Giffords' last opponent talking about sweeping her out of office at fundraisers while he blasted away with an M-16 rifle. Several other Republican office seekers ran similar ads in their races. On a national level, extremist and alarmist comparisons of Democrats and health care advocates like Giffords to Communists, Nazis and totalitarians (her Tuscon office's glass door was shot out after her vote on the bill last year), Sarah Palin's breathless talk of "death panels," snarking about "reloading" against political rivals and putting sniper scope targets on a map of opposition congressional districts are calculated to do just what, exactly?

The disavowals are transparently threadbare. Giffords' opponent's former campaign manager used the old politician's dodge of changing the question. "I don't see the connection. We cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign. " Speaking of Palin's sniper scope web page, Giffords at the time said, "For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action."

One of Palin's promotions went like this:

6/12/10, 10:00 AM
Get on target for victory in November
Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office
Shoot a fully automatic M 16 with Jesse Kelly

Kelly's campaign manager said yesterday, "He was just a deranged individual," as though society cannot and does not influence people's behavior. Conservatives as a rule do not believe that themselves. Otherwise why are they so concerned with rewriting school texts and censoring movies and television programming?

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, answering reporters' questions at the murder site, had this to say. "You see it when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous, and unfortunately Arizona has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

We will likely be told that no one will be able to prove a link between incitements like Palin's and Kelly's to what happened in Tucson yesterday. But we need to put a stop to their kind of hate speech right now. They are accessories, in my view.