Nineteen people shot in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson. Six dead, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old child.
It was bound to happen. It is probably just the beginning.
Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot in the head at point blank range at a public event at a Safeway grocery store in Tucson today. Early reports that she had died thankfully proved false. She is out of surgery, and her doctor claims to be "optimistic."
Rep. Giffords won re-election for her third term in a tight race in November. She is at most at Blue Dog Democrat, at least a DINO. In other words, she is a centrist, a moderate, but she is a Democrat. She supports immigration reform, embryonic-stem-cell research, a higher minimum wage, and the search for alternative, renewable energy sources. And she did vote for health care reform. Her office has been vandalized since that vote, and she has received many threats, as have all members of Congress.
Before this attempted assassination, Rep. Giffords was in the gun sights on Sarah Palin's campaign map on her website. Shortly after the shooting, this map showing targeted officials in a the cross hairs of gunsights, was taken down from Palin's site, an implicit admission of guilt and shame. People have been congratulating Palin on her Facebook page. "One down. Sixteen to go," said one fan, who said Giffords deserved to die for being a liberal, a Jew, a health care reformer, and lover of gays and other things repugnant to the repugnant. Comments like this this show that this map of crosshairs is no longer a campaign map but a hit list for the lowlifes and the unhinged. This is always the danger of violent rhetoric and gun and murderous metaphors that permeate our culture today. This violent rhetoric is everywhere on the Right: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, oh they are just a start. It is in the mouths of people in the streets.
During the campaign, Giffords' opponent held an event at which people could shoot a fully loaded M16 automatic rifle to "Get on target"to "take out Giffords." Palin says "Don't retreat. RELOAD." During campaign season, it was common to see signs proclaiming "The ballot or the bullet." And one candidate spoke of resorting to Second Amendment remedies should the ballot box let them down. People had been bringing guns openly to events where the President of the United States was speaking. The gas lines at the home of a Virginia Congressmen were vandalized.
My own eyes saw a comment just a week or so ago an internet posting that our president is "the Devil incarnate." Thousands of people on the Christian Right have been praying for the death of this president and their political opponents and invoking Psalm 109:8 as their prayer: "Let his days be few... Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." How unlike God. But how like the Right.
Black and gay Congressmen have been spat upon as they tried to enter the Capitol past Tea Party crowds. And on Thursday, January 6, during the partial reading of the Constitution, at the point that says the president must be native born, a birther shouted out, "Except Obama. Except Obama. Help us, Jesus." As if Jesus would have been a birther.
The sheriff of Pima County, Arizona said at an afternoon press conference that the anger, vitriol and bigotry in our national discourse have become outrageous. Arizona, he said, has become a Mecca for bigotry and he added that all this all may be free speech, but that it does not come without consequences. And now the Right is attacking him for his honest, heartfelt words.
"The Right has been stoking the flames of hatred and rage," said David Fitzsimmons, an AZ political cartoonist, on CNN. "This state is gun-happy."
His mind is running on the same track as mine. This is a federal crime. Killing a member of Congress is a federal crime. I don't know the name of the man who did this, but I am pretty sure I know his mindset. I will update later and apologize if I am wrong.
I was not wrong.
ADDENDUM: See the Mother Jones article that draws Loughner's beliefs into a coherent pattern:
Explained: Jared Loughner's Grammar Obsession by Justine Sharrock
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