Sarah Palin, the self-appointed spokesperson for the Tea Party, has been using the language and symbology of violence in almost every one of her speeches, and she has no right to try to duck her responsibility for inciting violence with the extremist members of her group or the fringes of society in general. Indeed, she's been deliberately whipping them up for the last 2 years.
Palin's given campaign speeches that repeatedly demonized Obama as "not a real American" and accused him of "palling around with terrorists." (Conveniently ignoring the fact that John McCain counts G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted felon and a man who's proudly talked about killing political enemies, as a "good friend" instead of a domestic terrorist -- which is what he is.) Audience members at these rallies screamed "terrorist!" and "kill him!" The Secret Service has said that death threats against Obama would skyrocket after every one of Palin's speeches.
Members of the phony grassroots "Tea Party" and their supporters, like Glenn Beck, have repeatedly demonized their opponents and danced on the edge of calling for outright violence. They want crazy people to do their bidding, while they themselves wash their hands of responsibility for it.
This is called "blowing the dog whistle."
They make coded statements that "normal" people will just regard as angry hyperbole, but people on the edge of sanity will regard as genuine calls to "take action." Then when some nutcase like Loughner follows them up on these calls for violence, they accomplish 2 things: they get what they want -- which is their opponent removed by any means necessary -- yet they retain plausible deniability for inciting these idiots to do their bidding, and they duck responsibility for it.
When Tea Party member Sharon Angle said "we might need 2nd Amendment solutions" to address our political issues, she was making it crystal-clear to her followers what she was willing to accept as a political solution.
When Michelle Bachmann said she wanted her supporters to be "armed and dangerous," she knew exactly what she was saying.
When Sarah Palin called her own Giffords "target" map a "bullseye" map in a Twitter message after the last election (which she tried to deny yesterday -- yet another pathetic Palin lie), and told her supporters "don't retreat -- reload," she knew exactly what she was saying.
These people are playing with fire. They are preaching hatred and violence as viable solutions to political issues, and subjects worthy of "jokes." They have been characterizing "liberals" as evil, despicable, un-patriotic un-Americans since the days of Richard Nixon, and the right-wing talking heads like Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter (who thinks it's "funny" to "joke" about poisoning Supreme Court justices), Malkin, O'Reilly (a man too dumb to understand that the moon's gravitational pull causes the tides) have been amping up the hatred-filled rhetoric ever since.
There is NO equivalent on the left. There aren't dozens of left-wing talk show hosts calling daily for violence against political figures as a viable option. But people on the right think this kind of talk is just fine to "rally their base."
If these people think that this rhetoric is just "talk," might I remind them of something Rush Limbaugh himself has said: "words mean things." Calling repeatedly for violence against people with whom you disagree isn't the mark of a civilized democracy; it's the mark of a sick, dysfunctional society more suited to a 3rd-world banana republic.
Yet these people constantly characterize themselves as the paragons of virtue, "family values" and "Christian morals," while labeling anyone they disagree with as an un-American, un-patriotic degenerate.
If a "liberal" put out Sarah Palin's or Bill O'Reilly's picture on it with a crosshair (oops -- a "surveyor's mark," according to Palin) over it, Fox News would go ballistic and demand that person's arrest.
If a former Black Panther had shot a white male GOP Congressman, Limbaugh would say that Obama was somehow to blame for "creating a culture" where this would happen.
I used to be middle-of-the-road conservative (and a card-carrying Libertarian Party member for a while), but what the GOP has descended to makes me sick, and Giffords' shooting this weekend was the last straw.
It makes no difference if Loughner was a lone crazy; he and every other crazy out there has been given encouragement for years by the dog whistles of the entire right-wing propaganda machine and actual GOP candidates, who are now desperately trying to backtrack from their own culpability in this crime -- a crime that includes the death of a 9-year-old girl (born, sadly enough, on 9/11/2001.)
These people have blood on their hands, and I will not back down from that argument with anyone, period.