A clear and present danger

Vitriol might be free speech, but it's not without consequences.

- Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, Jamuary 8, 2011

We don't yet know what was in the assassin's mind before the horrific shooting in Tucson, but we know there are at least six dead, including a child and a federal judge. We know that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at close range. We know that Sarah Palin sent out this tweet:

and then deleted it after the shooting, in an unsurprising gesture of hypocritical gutlessness. Not just reload, but RELOAD.

We know that this tweet appeared after the shooting.

AFTER the shooting. What map was he referring to? This one, sent out by SarahPac (Palin's political action committee, which is designed to finance her next election campaign) during the 2010 election.

Can't see it clearly?  It's targeting 20 House Democrats who voted for the Health Care bill. And by targeting, that's precisely what it was doing. The targets are gunsights. Bullseyes. Three of them were located in the state of Arizona, and one of them had Gabrielle Giffords' name on it. She was shot in the head today.

In case you don't think the direct incitement to violence on the right is explicit enough, there's the now infamous quote from Sharron Angle, the Republican, Tea Party-backed Senate nominee from Arizona's neighboring state of Nevada. When asked by host Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon where she stands on the 2nd Amendment, she had this to say:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.
I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Second Amendment remedies. Today, a Federal judge was killed. A Congresswoman was shot in the head, and as of this writing is in critical condition. For the past few years, there has been a growing, menacing drumbeat, all from the loudest spokesmen of the political right, implicitly and explicitly suggesting violent solutions to what they perceive as social and legal injustices. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Michelle Bachmann have all been reading from the same hymnal. It hasn't been just one voice. It has been a chorus.

Actions have consequences, and I think it's high time that the political right is held to account for its behavior, its rhetoric, its insistence that rational action and thought aren't sufficient. Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Palin et al didn't pull the trigger today, but they created an environment that made it conceivable. When the right invokes sayings like "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots," it needs to take responsibility for the bloodshed that results. Today wasn't an accident. Today didn't take place in a vacuum.

Six innocent people are dead in Tucson. Wake up, America. More than one man is guilty.

Photo credits: Both weets, twitter. SarahPac map, SarahPac.