@missingbite
Either hate the DNC for using the ad as much as you hate Palin or drop it.
But what you’re saying is just as problematic; it’s advocatory of hate, provided the hate is spread around evenly. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?
Of course everyone’s to blame for the violent political climate; the politicians and the media for producing it and the people (i.e., us) for finding entertainment in it, for basically consuming it, for participating by ‘joining sides’. But I should hope that most people here are ‘targetting’ the ‘target rhetoric’ and not the Republican party, not the vaguely defined (or undefined) Right or Left, not Sarah Palin…
If they are, I think they’re mistaken.
I’d suggest it’s also a mistake to say, ‘There go the liberals again, blaming everything on the Right. Look how bad they are, using this event as a platform!’ Obviously both ‘sides’ are guilty of using it as a platform. It’s despicable when – for example – a liberal appropriates the tragedy to propound some exaggerated politicization or polemical. But it’s just as despicable when a conservative responds with his own irresponsible (and probably irrelevant) indictments against the Left. If the Left is blaming the Right, then the Right is blaming the Left for blaming the Right,, and each side is only trying to make the other look bad. What good does this do? It distracts people from the real issue, which is that a crazy person got ahold of a semi-automatic pistol and took a taxi into Tucson and killed a bunch of people.
And here we are, on the Internet, shouting that ‘so-and-so did it, too’ and digging up images more than 6 years old just to make a petty point.
It’s no less disappointing to me to see the 2004 bullseye map that @missingbite linked to. It’s no less disappointing to hear Obama talking about guns and knife fights. All of it is irresponsible and unnecessary. But no ‘side’ is any more or less guilty than another, and it’s simply not possible to make sense of this event politically.
Or so I think.