Bullseye

"They're not crosshairs, they're surveyor's marks!"

I don't care if they're Norden bomb sights, Palin is as guilty of murder as if she had bought the gun, loaded it, and showed the psycho how to use it.


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In a few days, it will be the thirtieth anniversary of John Hinckley, Jr.'s attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, which also wounded two Secret Service agents and left James Brady disabled for life. For this despicable act, Hinckley has been confined at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Politically Inconvenient, the former home of Fascist collaborator and modernist poet Ezra Pound. Hinckley's stated reason for the shooting was a wish to make himself known to the actress Jody Foster. He admired her performance in the film Taxi Driver, which concerns an attempted political assassination. At the time, there was much debate over the role played by media, including fictional movies, in political violence -- in bringing out the inner Travis Bickel, so to speak, in disturbed individuals.

I have spent the evening scouring the Internet for reports of acts of violence committed against right-wing politicians and pundits in the past thirty years. (Acts, not words.) I found a picture of Pat Buchanan moments after someone hit him with a custard pie. Demonstrators hurled eggs at George W. Bush's car as he drove to his inauguration after his bitterly disputed and probably illegal election; it is not clear if the car was hit. An Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference, and missed. On a visit to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Dick Cheney had his feelings hurt when someone greeted him with the words he had addressed to Pat Leahy on the floor of the Senate: "Go fuck yourself." The terrorist was quickly arrested.

No guns. No bombs. No fatalities.

If I missed something, I apologize and await correction from the "followers" I think of as the Faithful Five.

Until then, I reject the lunatic notion that left-wing rhetoric is just as bad as that of the entity I think of as Limbeckitty, that "everybody is to blame" for the horror in Tucson, that the perpetrator is a liberal because he owned a copy of The Communist Manifesto as well as Mein Kampf. (No disconnect there, because as Jonah Goldberg has conclusively proved, Nazism and Socialism are one and the same.) I reject every lying, weaseling excuse the Rightzis trot out, and everything they say except "I'm sorry, I'll shut the hell up now."

As for ex-part-time Gov. Palin, I don't believe she needs to reinforce her perimeter fence or hire Blackwater thugs. Mama Grisly's personal arsenal should more than suffice to protect her young from the hordes of shoe-, egg- and pie-wielding liberals advancing on Wasilla. Also.