--- In [email protected], "seventhray1" <steve.sun...@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > Steve, Joe's right. BillyG's comment was about as mindless > > as they come. That doesn't necessarily put him in a box, but > > it sure does tell us something about him, as your approving > > response to it does about you. > > The impression I got from Joe's post was that he was chomping at the bit > to make a connection that was not warranted, at least by the current > facts. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps if I went back to the post and > reread it, I would come to a different conclusion. But right now, that > sounds too much like work, and at the moment I just want to chill.
Next time chill before you make a dumb comment. It's only natural for Palin's map with gunsight crosshairs targeting Giffords to leap to mind when Giffords was shot. That's what leaped to *Palin's* mind, for pete's sake; that's why she immediately took down the graphic. Tea Party types, especially in Arizona, have been increasingly using violent rhetoric against those who disagree with them. Again, it's only natural for that fact to leap to mind when a congresscritter who opposes Arizona's anti-immigrant law is shot. But obviously we don't have enough information yet to know whether there was any connection. It turns out the guy is a nutcase who apparently had no particular partisan axe to grind, so he most likely wasn't trying to further a political cause by shooting her (and 17 other people, killing six of them). HOWEVER, loose talk about solving problems with guns that's sort of "in the air" can affect disturbed people regardless of whether they have specific political goals. It's entirely possible, in other words, to criticize the Tea Party rhetoric on an occasion like this without necessarily painting the shooter as a Tea Partier.
