It's very tempting to throw up my hands and say, "to hell with it!" However, it's no longer a purely academic matter where we can afford to just agree to disagree (if it ever was that). Nineteen people were shot and six of them, including a nine year old girl, are dead. It's fairly clear Loughner was apolitical, but with a MySpace and Facebook account to complement his violently anti-government conspiracy theories it's absurd to say he was obvlivious to all the paranoid extremist hate mongering of the past two years. Sure, he may not have aligned with the political right OR left, but the sad truth is the Tea Party couldn't have directed their rhetoric at him any better if they'd tried.

Yet instead of acknowledging the near certainty their rhetoric nudged an already violent and unstable mind over the edge we're told that's libel. It's dishonorable and exploitive to say the far right influenced him at all--especially when he was OBVIOUSLY a liberal. Let's see, political checklist:

1) Reads Ayn Rand (like Ron Paul, who named his son after her): Conservative

2) Reads Hitler: Conservative

3) Reads Nietzsche, whom Hitler claimed as a primary inspiration: Conservative

4) Vehemently opposed a woman who may be the most liberal Congressman in the state that produced Goldwater and McCain: Conservative

5) Supports the Second Amendment as an absolute invioable right: Conservative

6) Reads Marx: Liberal

Yeah, how could anyone fail to see he's a liberal...?

It's fairly clear Loughner was an apolitical whackjob; he seems to have thought anyone even indirectly affiliated with government was part of a dehumanizing conspiracy against the human race, and had he been told one of the people he murdered was a conservative Republican it wouldn't have slowed him down for a minute. But this didn't happen in a vacuum, and the conceit he was utterly uninfluenced by all the paranoid militant hatred, not to mention inaccuracies and outright lies, spewed against Obama and his supporters over the last two years is worse than disingenuous: It's catastrophically dangerous. Palin and Co. wash their hands of him and say there's no way their inflammatory and often false rhetoric accusing Obama of everything from faking his birth certificate to treason to being a madrasa trained terrorist encouraged this. That frankly reminds me of non-violent Klansmen insisting strident demands for racial purity had NOTHING to do with the latest lynching, that "race war" is just a colorful term, not an invitation to murder--except Palin and her ilk go one step further and accuse those who say otherwise of libel.

I'm not saying anyone but Loughner should be prosecuted; he's the murderer here. But if there's even the SLIGHTEST chance all the inflammatory right wing rhetoric, the portrayals of Obama as a treasonous terrorist, the quotations of "extremism in defence of liberty is no vice" like it's gospel contributed to this, isn't it past time we toned it down a bit? Isn't it a bit irresponsible to shrug off that suggestion and continue business as usual, let alone indignantly call it libel, play the victim when six people are dead and 13 others injured? I submit that, deep down in their hearts, past the political bias where objective truth slumbers fitfully, the reason the demagogues attacked that suggestion as vehemently and belligerently as they've unceasingly done with Obama is because they know they played a role and are too locked into a "never retreat" mentality to admit it.

Meanwhile, my main point in THIS thread stands: Whether or not calling Palins crosshairs imagery dangerous IS "blood libel" it is a matter of FACT that Gabrielle Giffords called it that AND that Sarah Palin (among others) call THAT "blood libel". Once again, anyone convinced that kind of rhetoric didn't put her in danger should take it up with the woman who was shot.