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How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin

 
Anonymous Coward
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01/10/2011 07:39 PM
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How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
By Tom Leonard

On a sunny Saturday morning outside the local Safeway in Tucson,­ Arizona, a man pulls out a powerful handgun, opens fire - and engulfs the U.S. in a political ­firestorm.

Six people were killed on ­Saturday, including a nine-year-old girl. But it was the fact that the target was a ­Democratic congresswoman - who is fighting for her life - which has sparked such a furious row, not, as one might expect, over the nature of America’s gun laws, but over the vitriolic nature of its politics.

Defenders of gun rights like to say it’s not the gun that’s dangerous, but the user. Now the argument swirling across the U.S. is whether it’s not the user but violent political ­rhetoric that may have ­ultimately pulled the trigger. In short, did the killer Jared Loughner - who has a history of mental instability and has made a series of bizarre postings on the internet - go out looking to kill because political voices told him to?

Could the inflammatory ­language used by some Right-wing politicians - in ­particular, Sarah Palin - have encouraged the killer to act as he did?

That’s the question at the heart of a febrile political blame game that started even before the most basic details had emerged about the background and possible motivation of the gunman. Already it has drawn in politicians, commentators, police and even the families of the victims.

Gabrielle Giffords was a Democrat and much - but not all - of the badly spelt, incoherent YouTube jumble that passed for the politics of her attacker was broadly ‘Right-wing’.

As a result, many liberal ­commentators and establishment figures have leapt at the opportunity to blame conservative politicians.

The rush to make political capital out of a mass shooting shows just how nasty U.S. ­politics has become. Under Barack Obama, America is more polarised than it has been for 40 years. Conservatives have come to despise liberals, and vice versa, with an intensity the like of which few can recall. Right-wing anger with the high-spending Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, a weak economy and high unemployment has prompted thousands of ordinary Americans to break away from conventional two-party politics to support the Tea Party movement with its call for small government.

As the name (a reference to the 1773 Boston Tea Party) implies, Tea Party supporters see their movement as rooted in the rebellion against George III, and the language has ­inevitably been full of ­military metaphor.

In the fractious lead-up to last November’s congressional mid-term elections - which saw a major victory for the Right - there were scuffles outside town halls, occasional brandishing of firearms at ­rallies and reports of rising membership of armed militias, ‘weekend warriors’ training for the day they believe will come when they will have to defend the U.S. Constitution. Political leaders with an ear for the populist mood ­harnessed that militancy.

As the temperature level in American political debate shot into the red, Washington ­security chiefs reported that threats against Congressmen and women had tripled in a year, many of them coming from furious opponents of the Obama health care reforms.

In Maryland, an effigy of ­Democrat Representative Frank Kratovil was found hanging from a mock gallows.

Gabrielle Giffords’ Tucson office had been vandalised — the door shattered, possibly by shotgun pellets — after the healthcare vote.

Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s former chief of staff and a ­figure compared to Labour’s Alastair Campbell, once said: ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’


And those on his side of the political divide have clearly seen the Tucson tragedy as an opportunity to score points and settle scores.

None more so than with Sarah Palin, a politician who is almost as divisive as the President. The former Republican vice-presidential contender has become a spiritual figurehead for many Tea Party supporters, but is loathed by many on the Left.

So it was that within minutes of the Tucson shooting, anti-Palin internet bloggers and Twitter users were highlighting a so-called ‘target map’ Mrs Palin had posted on her Facebook page last March.

Controversially, it used gunstyle crosshair targets to flag up Democrat politicians whom Palin felt could be vulnerable at the polls: Miss Giffords was one.

Despite the lack of any ­evidence that the Tucson gunman had supported Mrs Palin, let alone seen the graphic, ­critics — including senior ­Democrats in Congress — have decreed she is somehow culpable.

Yet her critics choose to ­forget the crosshairs could be all a part of her image as a hunter of big game. (It is worth noting, too, that Miss Giffords had been photographed ­handling a semi-automatic weapon — no doubt aware it would appeal to a certain ­voting constituency.)

Palin’s favourite maxim — inherited from her father — is ‘Don’t Retreat, Reload’, a ­typically bullish phrase she’s been trotting out for months as an injunction on the faithful to stick to their political principles.

Since the Tucson shooting, Left-wing critics have leapt on the words as some kind of proof that she was encouraging ­supporters to use real weapons.

Other far more loaded Republican comments are being quoted by those keen to make a connection between the ­Tucson shooting and inflammatory political rhetoric. Last year, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favourite who stood unsuccessfully for senator in Nevada, warned that people might seek ‘Second Amendment remedies’ — referring to the right to bear arms — if they didn’t get what they wanted from Congress.

Then there was a campaign poster produced by Jesse Kelly, a former marine who stood against Miss Giffords last year.

It was headlined: ‘Get on ­Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’ It was pure Wild West hokum, but was it really incitement to violence, as is being suggested by the Left?

Liberals have made much of the words of the Tucson sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, who yesterday launched into a diatribe about the ‘vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government’.

Even the actress and activist Jane Fonda waded into the row with a succession of internet tweets blaming Mrs Palin, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, a rabble-rousing broadcaster on Fox News, for the shooting.

The Tea Party leaders have been rushing to condemn the shooting and distance themselves from the gunman.

Whether they should really have to do so is another matter. The reality is that there is as yet no evidence that the political Right, and the Tea Party in ­particular, has — as its opponents say — ‘blood on its hands’ over the Tucson murders.

While some liberals have slyly implied that Loughner was a Tea Party supporter, former classmates remember him as being ‘Left-wing’ and ‘liberal’.

Another said he was ‘on his own planet’, which seems nearer the mark. No existing political organisation - including the Tea Party - comes close to championing Lough-ner’s deranged world view.

Paranoid and nihilistic (he kept a miniature altar with a replica human skull in his backyard), he had clearly surfed the wilder shores of political views on the internet, preaching about the evils of religion, and even picking up and espousing a theory that the government was using grammar as a form of mind control.

History shows how dangerous it is to try to second-guess the motives of political assassins.

John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan because he was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, not because he hated Right-wingers.

Likewise, Lynette Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford because she revered the cult killer Charles Manson.

But those lessons from ­history won’t stop some Democrats exploiting the shooting of a nine-year-old girl and five others at the weekend with precisely the sort of foam-flecked over-reaction for which they love to condemn their opponents on the Right.

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]
Anonymous Coward
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01/10/2011 07:39 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
bsflag
Anonymous Coward (OP)
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01/10/2011 07:42 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
bsflag
 Quoting: Anonymous Coward 1180141

antibs
Anonymous Coward (OP)
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01/10/2011 07:48 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
bump people need to know this bump
p7
User ID: 299049
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01/10/2011 08:18 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
...
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), was shot through the head on Saturday, January 8. Back on March 22, 2010, just hours after Giffords voted to pass the health reform bill, the glass door of her office in Tucson was smashed  The following evening, Sarah Palin revealed her list of 20 Democratic members of Congress she urged her followers to defeat. She illustrated her list with a map of the United States that displayed a rifle scope on top of each of the 20 districts she was targeting. One of the targeted districts was that of Gabrielle Giffords. Palin also tweeted, Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!ť

On March 25, MSNBC invited Giffords to comment on the attack on her office. Giffords noted that We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action....
----


(Shoot them perdy animals in that perdy wilderness, but no dynosaurs yet... Earth you know, is only 6000 years old, the good book says so...The majority of Alaskans (those who can spell their name with 2 X's,) don't care much for buck-shot mouth...
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 1225337
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01/10/2011 08:20 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
The ELites did it.
Pondering Mightily

User ID: 994296
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01/10/2011 08:23 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
Perhaps they did not just "hijack" it, perhaps they PLANNED it.

Just sayin'.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 1222671
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01/10/2011 08:23 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
...
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), was shot through the head on Saturday, January 8. Back on March 22, 2010, just hours after Giffords voted to pass the health reform bill, the glass door of her office in Tucson was smashed The following evening, Sarah Palin revealed her list of 20 Democratic members of Congress she urged her followers to defeat. She illustrated her list with a map of the United States that displayed a rifle scope on top of each of the 20 districts she was targeting. One of the targeted districts was that of Gabrielle Giffords. Palin also tweeted, Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!ť

On March 25, MSNBC invited Giffords to comment on the attack on her office. Giffords noted that We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action....
----


(Shoot them perdy animals in that perdy wilderness, but no dynosaurs yet... Earth you know, is only 6000 years old, the good book says so...The majority of Alaskans (those who can spell their name with 2 X's,) don't care much for buck-shot mouth...
 Quoting: p7 299049

you got a link?
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 1225339
Czechia
01/10/2011 08:26 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
Where is the evidence of this massacre?

Where?

Where is the footage?
Keeper of Light

User ID: 1137934
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01/10/2011 08:28 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
By Tom Leonard

On a sunny Saturday morning outside the local Safeway in Tucson,­ Arizona, a man pulls out a powerful handgun, opens fire - and engulfs the U.S. in a political ­firestorm.

Six people were killed on ­Saturday, including a nine-year-old girl. But it was the fact that the target was a ­Democratic congresswoman - who is fighting for her life - which has sparked such a furious row, not, as one might expect, over the nature of America’s gun laws, but over the vitriolic nature of its politics.

Defenders of gun rights like to say it’s not the gun that’s dangerous, but the user. Now the argument swirling across the U.S. is whether it’s not the user but violent political ­rhetoric that may have ­ultimately pulled the trigger. In short, did the killer Jared Loughner - who has a history of mental instability and has made a series of bizarre postings on the internet - go out looking to kill because political voices told him to?

Could the inflammatory ­language used by some Right-wing politicians - in ­particular, Sarah Palin - have encouraged the killer to act as he did?

That’s the question at the heart of a febrile political blame game that started even before the most basic details had emerged about the background and possible motivation of the gunman. Already it has drawn in politicians, commentators, police and even the families of the victims.

Gabrielle Giffords was a Democrat and much - but not all - of the badly spelt, incoherent YouTube jumble that passed for the politics of her attacker was broadly ‘Right-wing’.

As a result, many liberal ­commentators and establishment figures have leapt at the opportunity to blame conservative politicians.

The rush to make political capital out of a mass shooting shows just how nasty U.S. ­politics has become. Under Barack Obama, America is more polarised than it has been for 40 years. Conservatives have come to despise liberals, and vice versa, with an intensity the like of which few can recall. Right-wing anger with the high-spending Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, a weak economy and high unemployment has prompted thousands of ordinary Americans to break away from conventional two-party politics to support the Tea Party movement with its call for small government.

As the name (a reference to the 1773 Boston Tea Party) implies, Tea Party supporters see their movement as rooted in the rebellion against George III, and the language has ­inevitably been full of ­military metaphor.

In the fractious lead-up to last November’s congressional mid-term elections - which saw a major victory for the Right - there were scuffles outside town halls, occasional brandishing of firearms at ­rallies and reports of rising membership of armed militias, ‘weekend warriors’ training for the day they believe will come when they will have to defend the U.S. Constitution. Political leaders with an ear for the populist mood ­harnessed that militancy.

As the temperature level in American political debate shot into the red, Washington ­security chiefs reported that threats against Congressmen and women had tripled in a year, many of them coming from furious opponents of the Obama health care reforms.

In Maryland, an effigy of ­Democrat Representative Frank Kratovil was found hanging from a mock gallows.

Gabrielle Giffords’ Tucson office had been vandalised — the door shattered, possibly by shotgun pellets — after the healthcare vote.

Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s former chief of staff and a ­figure compared to Labour’s Alastair Campbell, once said: ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’


And those on his side of the political divide have clearly seen the Tucson tragedy as an opportunity to score points and settle scores.

None more so than with Sarah Palin, a politician who is almost as divisive as the President. The former Republican vice-presidential contender has become a spiritual figurehead for many Tea Party supporters, but is loathed by many on the Left.

So it was that within minutes of the Tucson shooting, anti-Palin internet bloggers and Twitter users were highlighting a so-called ‘target map’ Mrs Palin had posted on her Facebook page last March.

Controversially, it used gunstyle crosshair targets to flag up Democrat politicians whom Palin felt could be vulnerable at the polls: Miss Giffords was one.

Despite the lack of any ­evidence that the Tucson gunman had supported Mrs Palin, let alone seen the graphic, ­critics — including senior ­Democrats in Congress — have decreed she is somehow culpable.

Yet her critics choose to ­forget the crosshairs could be all a part of her image as a hunter of big game. (It is worth noting, too, that Miss Giffords had been photographed ­handling a semi-automatic weapon — no doubt aware it would appeal to a certain ­voting constituency.)

Palin’s favourite maxim — inherited from her father — is ‘Don’t Retreat, Reload’, a ­typically bullish phrase she’s been trotting out for months as an injunction on the faithful to stick to their political principles.

Since the Tucson shooting, Left-wing critics have leapt on the words as some kind of proof that she was encouraging ­supporters to use real weapons.

Other far more loaded Republican comments are being quoted by those keen to make a connection between the ­Tucson shooting and inflammatory political rhetoric. Last year, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favourite who stood unsuccessfully for senator in Nevada, warned that people might seek ‘Second Amendment remedies’ — referring to the right to bear arms — if they didn’t get what they wanted from Congress.

Then there was a campaign poster produced by Jesse Kelly, a former marine who stood against Miss Giffords last year.

It was headlined: ‘Get on ­Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’ It was pure Wild West hokum, but was it really incitement to violence, as is being suggested by the Left?

Liberals have made much of the words of the Tucson sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, who yesterday launched into a diatribe about the ‘vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government’.

Even the actress and activist Jane Fonda waded into the row with a succession of internet tweets blaming Mrs Palin, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, a rabble-rousing broadcaster on Fox News, for the shooting.

The Tea Party leaders have been rushing to condemn the shooting and distance themselves from the gunman.

Whether they should really have to do so is another matter. The reality is that there is as yet no evidence that the political Right, and the Tea Party in ­particular, has — as its opponents say — ‘blood on its hands’ over the Tucson murders.

While some liberals have slyly implied that Loughner was a Tea Party supporter, former classmates remember him as being ‘Left-wing’ and ‘liberal’.

Another said he was ‘on his own planet’, which seems nearer the mark. No existing political organisation - including the Tea Party - comes close to championing Lough-ner’s deranged world view.

Paranoid and nihilistic (he kept a miniature altar with a replica human skull in his backyard), he had clearly surfed the wilder shores of political views on the internet, preaching about the evils of religion, and even picking up and espousing a theory that the government was using grammar as a form of mind control.

History shows how dangerous it is to try to second-guess the motives of political assassins.

John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan because he was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, not because he hated Right-wingers.

Likewise, Lynette Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford because she revered the cult killer Charles Manson.

But those lessons from ­history won’t stop some Democrats exploiting the shooting of a nine-year-old girl and five others at the weekend with precisely the sort of foam-flecked over-reaction for which they love to condemn their opponents on the Right.

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]
 Quoting: Anonymous Coward 1075405


your whole theory is stupidly flawed.

Last Edited by Feerlyss on 01/10/2011 08:29 PM
p7
User ID: 500946
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01/10/2011 08:49 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
----------



EXCLUSIVE photo of Palin's hunting dog [link to www.angelfire.com]
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 1217012
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01/10/2011 09:22 PM
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Re: How America's elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin
palin encouraged him to kill.. everybody knows it now





GLP