In all calm honesty, how many of us predicted this? How often was it discussed that someone could/probably would die from all the rabble rousing that Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, etc have been indulging in lately?
What if Jared Loughner tells the FBI that Sarah Palin motivated him? Could there be legal ramifications for her?
Should there be any legal ramifications for this? Someone on another website pointed to this:
Your title and your OP don’t seem to have anything to do with one another. Which is it that you were hoping to discuss?
ETA: The article you link to provides 0 information on the shooter, let alone what his motivation was. Why do you think it has something to do with Palin and Beck? For all that article says, it could have been a jealous lover who did the shooting.
We live in a country where one President was shot to impress a movie star, another was shot because some crackpot thought he deserves to a diplomatic post for no particular reason, a congressman was killed for investigating a violent cult, etc. Why don’t we wait a bit and find out the motive was before we go blaming Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, etc?
I swear, the rush to pin the blame on republican talking heads is downright disturbing. Some people seem to view the Congresswoman’s death as just another chance to get in some partisan bashing. Christ, the woman was shot point blank in the head. Can you at least let the corpse cool before spewing the usual ‘republicans are evil’ bullshit?
Almost every single sentence in the OP ends with a question mark. I am trying to promote civil discussion, and you’re trying to stir up a shouting match.
We were talking about this before anyone died, and now that the congresswoman has been shot, it is an appropriate time to continue the discussion, whatever Mr. Loughner’s motivations were.
No. Why would the Republicans change their strategy when it’s working? If anything they’ll ratchet up the rhetoric even higher in hopes of more attacks upon Democrats. You’ll see it get toned down if and when Republicans start being targeted for murder, not before.
Why? Even if the blame is unfair, it’s not going to cost the nation much, in fact it’ll improve the national discourse to crucify some of these know-nothings.
They wield the sword daily, why the heck shouldn’t they die by it?
If it later turns out that some were unjustly pilloried, we can say ‘oops, sorry’.
That’s their way after all, without the ‘oops’ and the ‘sorry’.
Politicians entire job is based on talking people into things. They talk people into voting for them, talk contributors into giving them money, talk other politicians into voting for their bills, give talks to convince people of the rightness of their ways.
Politicians, of all people, know the power of words, and they don’t get a free pass by saying, “That? That was just hyperbole!”
Other people are. It’s murder all the same if you kill someone standing next to your intended target.
I have to throw a nitpitck in here though; the phrase as coined by Sharron Angle was “second amendment remedies.”
Okay, but what politician called for the assassination of Rep. Giffords, whether hyperbolic or not? Little targets on Sarah Palin’s web page? Targets have been used as a metaphor for what… forever? If in the 2012 Presidential race, Barack Obama’s campaign says they’re targeting Georgia as a swing state, and somebody blows up Atlanta with a nuke, is the campaign staff responsible for that?
Damn, I was just going to start a similar thread. So my question is: Do Republican or Right Wing Pundits acutally stir up violence? I know all about the Sarah Palin reload quote, but in my 30 seconds of searching I was not able to find other examples of pundits, talking heads, politicians, national leaders, etc… actually advocating “second amendment solutions”. So can we at least come up with some evidence that this is common?
On edit, OK, I found the Angle Quote and a Quote by Bachmann. Any others?
Have the pix of tea party demonstrators all been taken off line? It doesn’t seem such a hard task that you are incapable of doing it yourself. Do you really need a liberal to supply you with examples?
Were you so happy that you had a chance to bash Palin and others that you got a hard on when you heard she was shot?
Hey, there’s a question mark. This is an attempt to promote civil discussion. After all, anything with a question mark clearly isn’t leading, insulting, or defamation.
Fuck I need to find better news sources. God damned one paragraph misleading ‘breaking news’ stories. Thank you for the correction. Hopefully she’ll recover, although if the news is right on her wounds, that’s unlikely.
Well, gee, I am completely cognizant of the tea party demonstrators. It is clear to me that many of them are a bunch of violent racists I believe in my heart that if President Obama was a nice old white man, they would never have formed. They are not who I am talking about. In all the Giffords threads (and in the comments on the various news sites), there is widespread blaming of conservative talking heads, pundits and politicians for inciting this violence. My question is whether this meme is based in facts, how prevalent are cases of right wing calling for “second amendment remedies?”
So far I have:
Sharon Angle (Tea Party/ Republican Candidate for a Nevada Senate Seat):
Sarah Palin (Republican VP canidate):
Plus she uses crosshairs (i.e. rifle sites) on her website to target Democratic districts to retake.
Michele Bachman (Republican House Member from Minnesota):
My guess is there are a lot more examples and I would like to see them. I also guess that we would be hard pressed to find similar examples from left wing politicians, pundits, and talking heads.
I will stay out of the Pit thread on this topic, it is simply too wild and emotionally charged.
I will say that I think people are massively jumping the gun in ascribing political motivations to this shooter. All of the talk of blaming this on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party just makes the people doing it look like opportunists.
This perpetrator seems to be of the Charles Whitman/Squeaky Fromme/John Hinckley variety.
Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard.
It’s not as if it was a tough call.
Argent:
Gunman doesn’t need to have political motivations. He need merely be susceptible to the massive outpouring of violent political rhetoric from the right since Obamas election.
Possibly, but as these sort of shootings have happened in the past without that kind of violent rhetoric from the right, I’m hesitant to blame it on that without knowing more about this shooter and what kind of man he was.
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