John Daly: The Media Can’t Bring Themselves to Detach Palin from Giffords

John Daly posted an article on BernardGoldberg.com last night, about the ridiculous trick that the media keeps trying to fool their audience with by linking Governor Palin to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Daly calls out those in the press who once again, tried to assign blame to Governor Palin, as if she had anything to do with the violent actions of the crackpot who committed the crime. He wrote:

Now, it’s lame enough when the media speculates on influences to murderers based on who authored the books that sat on their shelves at home, or who sang the songs they enjoyed listening to. But this was far more of a stretch. At the time the Palin connection was being suggested, the media knew practically nothing about the shooter. They had absolutely no idea of his political leanings. They had no idea if he even had access to the internet, let alone had ever visited the website of Palin’s political action committee.

And despite the concept of targeting districts being used for decades by numerous political strategists (often accompanied with visual representations off cross-hairs, targets, and bulls-eyes), its metaphorical context was selectively disregarded by many in the mainstream media for the purpose of creating a link to Palin. In their well-documented disdain for the former Alaska governor, many despicably went ahead and suggested that she could have been some sort of spiritual accomplice to the shooter.

In the end of course, Loughner was found to be a complete nut-case who former friends actually described as a “liberal” who regularly welled up in anger at the sight of George W. Bush. His longstanding, dangerous fixation on Congresswoman Giffords predated the Tea Party and Sarah Palin’s introduction onto the national scene. Palin was of no influence on him, nor was any coherent political ideology.

One would have thought that the revelation would have put to rest the reckless and politically-motivated media assault on Palin, but as we’ve found out over the last two weeks, it didn’t.

On November 15th, ABC ran a widely praised special on Giffords’ inspirational recovery. The special featured the congresswoman’s grueling rehabilitation and the strength of her marriage. Gabrielle Giffords’ story was a testament to the human spirit, but host, Diane Sawyer chose to cap off the program with these final comments: “After she [Giffords] voted for healthcare, she faced people in her district calling her a traitor, booing her in townhalls. Someone even fired a gun into her office door. And you may remember Sarah Palin targeted her district with an ad that had a gunsight on it.”

Unbelievable. What relevance did any of that have to what happened to Giffords? Did ABC decide that Giffords’ amazing story of triumph after tragedy couldn’t stand on its own? Did they feel the need to concoct a few more villains? A few more hurdles? The answer is no. They just saw another opportunity to take a few political cheap shots (while they had the attention of a large audience) at the supporters of an ideology they abhor.

But it didn’t end there. On November 23rd, Piers Morgan brought up Palin again in a CNN interview with Gabrielle Giffords’ husband, astronaut Mark Kelly.

“Sarah Palin doesn’t come out of this very well, I don’t think, because there was a woman who at the time had been putting these cross hair things on her website and stuff, including Gabby”, said Morgan. “And in her haste to take responsibility didn’t even bother to pick the phone up, to write, do anything.”

When Kelly confirmed that he and his wife were indeed not contacted by Palin, Morgan responded, “I find that extraordinary.”

Extraordinary? Really? Is it customary for someone falsely accused of a crime to reach out to the victim? If anyone owed the Giffords an apology, wouldn’t it be those in the media who used the horrific tragedy to fuel a witch-hunt against those they see as their political opponents?

Sarah Palin didn’t contact the Giffords for the same reason that I didn’t, Piers Morgan didn’t, and hundreds of millions of other Americans didn’t: We didn’t know her or her family. We kept them in our thoughts and prayers instead. Any notion that it would have been responsible for Palin to contact them is absurd. If she had, fine. But she had no moral responsibility to do so. She had no more to do with the Arizona shootings than the very people who unjustly yanked her into the story in the first place.

You can read the entire piece here.

The Extremism of Roger Cohen

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen engaged in the depraved practice of using the tragic violent deaths of others to gain political advantage over those with whom he disagrees. On Monday, he wrote the following in association with the recent massacre in Norway:

We’ve seen the movie. When Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords this year in Tuscon, Arizona — after Sarah Palin placed rifle sights over Giffords’ constituency and Giffords herself predicted that “there are consequences to that” — the right went into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner whose crazed universe owed nothing to those fanning hatred under the slogan of “Take America Back.” (That non-specific taking-back would of course be from Muslims and the likes of the liberal and Jewish Giffords.)

Now, I tend to consider a person who says and does extreme things, while also viewing the planet through a distorted lens of reality, as extreme. This latest column by the Cohen qualifies under both counts.

Tammy Bruce responded to Cohen on her site by writing:

And just as with Tucson, the Left put its target (again) on American conservatives and Governor Sarah Palin. This horrific and ghoulish use of mass murder to score political points is moved today by a Roger Cohen column in the New York Times. Through this column, which gives this obscene meme the NYT Seal of Approval, Cohen blames the Oslo attacks on American conservatives, Palin and Republicans in general, but also repeats the lie that Tucson shooter Loughner was the product of all non-liberal concerns.

Clay Waters from NewsBusters also points out some key items of information while addressing Cohen's article:

"Take America Back" is a slogan of ethnic hatred? Somebody better tell Democrat Howard Dean, who spouted the slogan during his 2004 campaign for the Democratic nomination.

There’s no evidence that the mentally disturbed Loughner even saw Palin’s graphic, much less was inspired by it to violence. Whatever politics or views he had seemed a mish-mash of leftist anarchism and atheism -- not exactly Palin's demographic. Is Cohen truly not aware that this is standard issue political rhetoric done by both sides during American political campaigns? A similar target graphic was issued by the Democratic Leadership Council in 2004. And does Cohen realize the word “campaign” is itself a term borrowed from war?

Roger Cohen should also know by now that it wasn't the "right" going "into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner," he actually was and is. Those are called "facts," Mr. Cohen! If you don't believe me, go here and watch Jared Loughner film himself walking around his college campus muttering insanity, before his shooting spree last January.

It is becoming all too common practice these days for the ultra-left members of the Democrat party and their press agents (international or otherwise) to paint conservatives as "extreme." From Harry Reid applying the term to those who seek a balanced budget, to Roger Cohen who tries to pin the blame of a deranged killer on Governor Palin, their tactics are designed to tear down opponents instead of having to debate them.

The left didn't learn anything from Tucson. In their minds, the ends justify the means and if that involves blaming innocent people for playing a role in the deaths of other innocent people, well then so be it. And if they feel they have to sink to this level in an effort to advance their political cause, then just maybe their cause has become too extreme to sell to the public through a rational dialog. You often hear President Obama say "let's have an honest debate." The left should consider Obama's words and remember that an honest debate begins by not falsely accusing your opponent of inciting murder.

 

(H/T Karen & Whitney)

The Media Owe Sarah Palin an Apology

Last night, after Governor Palin was interviewed by Sean Hannity, the left desperately sought something from the exchange to feign outrage over. Some seemed to latch on to a sentiment expressed by Anderson Cooper during his show, when he said:

"She seems unwilling to apologize or back off of anything."

Then later:

"I don't think I've ever heard her back off anything she's done."

Telling isn't it? Anderson Cooper wanting Governor Palin to "back off." That aside, it is absolutely outrageous to suggest that she owes anybody an apology after last week. Everybody knows that the media starting throwing the blame for the horrible massacre in Tucson upon her shoulders immediately after the incident took place, and before ANY facts where known. A massacre that took the lives of six people, including a nine year-old girl.

The media then spent the next few days after the shooting, egging her on from their anchor chairs, asking "where is she" and "when is she going to apologize!" After an appropriate amount of time had passed, she respectfully and rightly defended herself and others who the media had smeared with a manufactured blood libel. A truth the press has tried to absolve itself of by discrediting the term "blood libel" on the basis that is has a historical root belonging to a different religion than that of the governor's. Their efforts to do so have been ridiculous and nothing more than a diversionary tactic.

The left is attempting to get Governor Palin to apologize, for no other reason than to get some of the mud they have thrown at her to stick. By apologizing for anything in relation to what happened in Tucson, Governor Palin would solidify the linkage the media created, between her and the killings. The press would love nothing more than to be exonerated for their cruel and disgusting, politically charged, exploitation of this tragedy.

Governor Palin has no doubt been put through a lot over this entire ordeal. She stated during the interview with Sean Hannity, she and her family have been receiving death threats. She has be maligned as an accessory to murder, along with the Tea Party, and certain talk radio hosts. She never said or did anything to provoke such a heinous crime, but then again, she never has done anything to merit the amount of hatred the left throws her way either.

She doesn't owe anyone one an apology. The media, and the Democrat party owe apologies to everyone they linked to the blood spilled in Arizona. Most importantly, they owe an apology to the victims and their families for making a political circus out of their grief. Sadly, nobody will be receiving any apologies from the press or the left because to do so would solidify the reality of what they have done.

Krauthammer: Massacre, followed by libel

Charles Krauthammer, someone I and other Palin supporters haven't always seen eye to eye with, dedicated his weekly column to the horrible tragedy that took place in Tucson, Arizona last Saturday, and the subsequent political witch-hunt conducted by the left in it's aftermath. Titled "Massacre, followed by libel," he writes:

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

[...]

Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

You can read the whole thing here.