Giffords' office was one of several members of Congress who had their office vandalized just hours after the Health Care vote.
Giffords' Republican opponent in the 2010 midterm campaign was Jesse Kelly. She narrowly defeated him. During the race, he held a campaign event for which in an
ad for the event invited supporters to shoot a machine gun.
"Get on Target for Victory. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully a automatic M16 with Jesse Kelley."
"The way that she [Palin] has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that." - Gabrielle Giffords
Consequences. You betcha people have got to realize there are consequences to that. People try and dismiss the consequences saying it was an isolated incident, a nutjob on the rampage, not politically motivated. Be that as it may, an assassination attempt of a political figure is inherently political, isolated or not, nutjob or not.
This particular shooter's lunacy ran the gamut from crazy right-wing, crazy left-wing, Libertarian, Communist, and Nazi fixations, along with heavy paranoia about mind control and some twisted obsession with literacy. So it would be difficult to peg Loughner's behavior to his allegiance to any political movement or his influence by any particular pundit or politician, as was noted in
this Blog:
Loughner was a disturbed and frightened man looking to blame someone for everything. And that is maybe the whole point. When Sarah Palin says to "reload" in an effort to
take back the 20, or Sharon Angle suggests the need for "
Second Amendment solutions" to take back the government, sane people don't hear that as an explicit call for armed insurrection. They recognize it as charged political rhetoric intended to engage and polarize an audience. But if your mind is a little less balanced... if your predisposition is toward paranoid fear... if you are basically a walking bomb in search of a detonator, then such messages resonate somewhat differently than mere rhetoric.
The political right has a particular penchant for militant and violent political rhetoric. Their opponents are often positioned as evil and bent on destruction of the country. Labels of communists and fascists, political regimes the country has previously been at war against, are thrown about. Guns are frequently brandished at political events.
On the flip side, you can't hold a Republican Convention without the political left rioting in the streets. The fact is, at the heart of pretty much all political violence lie left-wing ideas, even the violence that is committed by the wacko right. At the core of political violence is either radical change, or radical status quo, both of which are left wing.
The media on the left, and the media on the right, have for years been stirring the vitriol. Political figures themselves have joined in the fray. It certainly makes for better television. People have been showing less and less respect for others when discussing the issues. And it's because the issues are rarely discussed without the use of ad hominem attacks, either directly to en mass to large groups of people, and even entire political parties.
I don't merely disagree with you, but rather you are wrong, and an idiot, and you're wrong because you are <insert political party here>.
The hate we are seeing of late is generated by the hateful way American politics is carried out these days, both by politicians and by "news" organizations panning for ratings. If you don’t think Fox and Friends, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Olbermann, Madow, Matthews, et al, bear any of the responsibility for this, then you are being naive. The nutjobs are the least likely to be immune to the influence of this stuff. They are likely the most gullible, malleable, and primed to be incited to violent action. Perhaps your words don't make you criminally negligent... but they still matter.
We have people filled with such hate, spurred by the rhetoric of hate, who don't even have the common courtesy to refer to the president and Congressmen by name, and must instead use some derogatory and/or demeaning euphemism or characterization. It's ubiquitous. If we keep going down this road and keep poisoning each and every well we pass, more and more of this is going to be the norm, routine, commonplace. When attacked, people will defend themselves. That includes the government. Whether it be in increased security for elected political leaders, or something else, the defensive blowback from the government may very well be in a manner in which you don't agree.
I keep pounding away at how people need to response to what was posted, rather than to who posted it. If you can stick to the issues then you can have a fruitful discussion. If you attack those involved in the discussion, it quickly denigrates into name calling and hate. The same thing is true in politics on a national scale.
You know, they’re using this thing...apparently there was a map from one of Palin’s things that had her (Congresswoman Giffords) targeted district. So, we looked at the internet and the first thing we found in 2007, the Democrat Party had a targeted map with targets on it for the Palin district. These maps have been used for for years that I know of. I have two pictures of myself with a bull's-eye on my head. Listen, I have a picture of Sarah Palin hanging from the end of a rope. They made a doll up like her and hung her.
This is just bull****. This goes on... both sides are wrong, but they both do it.
I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually.You don’t have to do it with bombast.I hope the other side does that.
The above quoted text is from Roger Ailes,
President of Fox News.
