Right-Wingers Rush to Label Arizona Shooting Suspect a Liberal While Simultaneously Accusing Left of Politicizing Assassination

Giffords shooting leads nation to introspection and political finger wagging
In the wake of the shooting in Arizona this weekend that critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and that killed and injured more than 20 people, many pundits and politicians are pointing fingers. Others are hoping the incident will serve to ratchet down rancor. Yet emerging details make it clear the shooter wasn’t primarily motivated by politics, right or left. Jared Lee Loughner seems mainly to have been struggling with Mental Illness and was angry at being thrown out of Pima Communi...

Clyburn Calls for Reinstatement of Fairness Doctrine
Clyburn said he thinks vitriol in public discourse led to a 22-year-old suspect opening fire Saturday at an event Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords held for her constituents in Tucson, Ariz. Six people were killed and 14 others were injured, including Giffords. The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free Speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a re...

Obama: Arizona Shooting Has America Shocked & Grieving
(AP) WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said the nation is still shocked and grieving after Saturday's deadly shooting rampage in Arizona that killed six people and left a congresswoman in critical condition after being shot point-blank in the head. Speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Obama said Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is "still fighting". In total, 19 people were shot in the attack; among the six people killed were Arizona's chief Federal Judge, a 9-year-old girl interested in gov...

Fidel Castro Has an Opinion on the Arizona Shooting
Photo: Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photo/Getty Images In a column entitled "An Atrocious Act," Cuba's former leader offered his take on Saturday's shooting. Castro condemned accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner's actions, writing: "Even those of us who don't share his (President Barack Obama's) political or philosophical ideas in the least sincerely hope that no Children, judges, congressmen or any U.S. citizen should die in such an absurd and unjustifiable way." But he also took the opportunity to tak...

Jared Lee Loughner: what is known about Tucson, Arizona, shooting suspect
Jared Lee Loughner is refusing to tell investigators anything about a motive for the Tucson, Arizona, shooting, but he appears to be a familiar character in American life: a disturbed outsider with a gun....

What Riverdaughter said
There seem to be two major camps regarding this tragedy: Sarah Palin is a monster and the Tea Partiers must be blamed. Or, Sarah Palin is the scapegoat and her picture had nothing to do with this tragic incident. I prefer the third way. .... In the past 18 years, starting with the advent of Rush Limbaugh, we saw a ratcheting up of Right Wing Extremism. ... And it is into this environment that Sarah Palin steps as the champion of a new set of people. A group that even the Right Wing Republicans ...

Did Fox News Blow It? DHS Source Says NO Loughner Tie With "American Renaissance" Hate Group
Yesterday I began to see blog posts spring up declaring that Jarrod Laughner may have attacked Gabrielle Giffords because she was Jewish. Those posts were based on a Fox News report saying that they had seen a DHS memo saying that Laughner was associated with an Antisemitic, anti-Black group called the American Renaissance. Besides the hatred this Renaissance group has similar positions to Laughtner in terms of currency and gold. According to a Law Enforcement memo based on information provid...

Giffords environmental advocacy
By now you know the basic story: Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head on Saturday while appearing at a "Congress on Your Corner" event in Tucson. The shooting killed six, among them a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Giffords herself seems to be responding to stimuli despite being gravely injured. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, is in custody, and while we don't know anything definitive about his motives, many Democrats are pointing out that Giffords -- a Blue Dog in a re...

Massacre in Tucson A Sad Day for America: Salzburger Nachrichten, Austria
How responsible is right-wing Rhetoric for the Assassination attempt against Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords? According to columnist Thomas Spang of Austria’s Salzburger Nachrichten, where to pin the blame couldn’t be clearer. For the Salzburger Nachrichten, Thomas Spang writes in part: For months, the political right has been turning up the heat in the United States. In this poisoned atmosphere, a young man reaches for his gun. In the political discourse of the United ...

Get your story straight, MEPS.
I'll have more to say about the tragedy in Tuscon that killed a 10 year-old girl, a Federal Judge, several others, and critically wounded U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ-8) over the weekend. But in the mean time I think DoD needs to figure out which story they are going with. This: In one of a handful of anti-religious, anti-government videos on Loughner's YouTube page, he says "every United States Military recruit at MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) in Phoenix is rece...

Quote Unquote: Question from the Audience
Jared Lee Loughner's question to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a rally of hers several years ago… "What is government if words have no meaning?" Yikes? ...

Arizona's Eighth Congressional District Epitomized Over-The-Top Demonization Of Liberals
While it is critical to understand that Jared Loughner's Terrorist Attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and dozens of her constituents over the weekend was not directly caused by the words of her political opponents, the tragedy in Arizona presents an opportunity to examine the nature of our political discourse. Giffords' district, the Arizona Eighth, is a prime example of overheated Rhetoric. Her 2010 campaign was plagued by Vandalism and death threats from anonymous citizens, as well as hyperbol...

No Credibility, No Class-The Giffords Shooting and the American Left
Back in November 2010, in the wake of the massive defeat suffered by Democrats in the Midterm Elections, former Bill Clinton pollster Mark Penn said this: Mark Penn:  “Barack Obama needs an Oklahoma City bombing-type event to reconnect with the American People.” Hmmm. Now look at how quickly Progressives and their compatriots in the Mainstream Media jumped to blame Conservatives for the shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and several others wounded, including

The Tragedy of the Arizona Shooting
The Tragedy of the Arizona Shooting Monday, 01/10/2011 - 1:47 pm by Mike Konczal | Post a Comment There are many ways to look at it, but all say disturbing things about the country. This weekend’s tragic shooting at a Safeway district meeting in which United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was seriously hurt and a dozen more injured and a District Court judge John Roll, a nine-year-old girl born on September 11th, and a congressional aide were killed has left us all stunned. Her...

Arizona Massacre Prompts Political 'Cheap Shots'
When Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords collapsed outside the Safeway in Tucson Saturday morning, felled by a hail of bullets that killed six and wounded another 13 innocent people that had come to see her, some were quick to claim that the carnage was the product not merely of the tortured mind and trigger-happy fingers of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Rather, many on the American Left said the horror could be traced to the malign influence of American Conservatives; members...

Liberal website Daily Kos put bullseye on 'dead to me' Giffords
Some are wondering if incendiary Rhetoric on progressive website Daily Kos is responsible for the weekend shooting that left six dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) critically injured. Just days ago, the Far Left website posted a column -- since removed -- slamming the conservative Democrat. The author said Giffords was “dead to me” in the post’s title and comments. Giffords’s offense in the eyes of the Daily Kos Left Wing community was her relative...

1995: Bill Clinton blames talk radio for Oklahoma City bombing. 2010: Tucson Sheriff blames talk radio for Arizona shooting
The Democrats are a Green Party. They are pro-recycling, including false political memes that don't work. From a prior post of mine last April when Bill Clinton tried to tie the Tea Party to the Oklahoma City bombing, a flashback: Back in 1995, Clinton used the tragedy to lash out at Talk Radio. From the New York Times via American Spectator: "I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. Well, people like that who want to sha...

Lawyers For 'Unabomber,' White Supremacist To Represent Jared Lee Loughner
The Federal Public Defender's Office on Monday requested that the court appoint Judy Clarke and Mark Fleming to represent Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect allegedly behind the Mass Shooting on Saturday that killed a Federal Judge and gravely injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Clarke previously represented "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and assisted in the case of confessed al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui. Fleming represented Aryan Brotherhood defendant Travis Dally in a federal capital mu...

Russ Belville: Arizona Shooter Loughner Used Marijuana... So What?
As you may know by now, in a tragic act of insane violence, Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords was targeted for Assassination, but survived the point-blank gunshot allegedly fired by Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old man whose rambling Internet paranoia calls his sanity into question.  Loughner also allegedly fired into the crowd, killing a 9-year-old girl (born on 9/11/2001, incidentally), a federal Circuit Court judge, a Giffords Staffer, and three others, and wounding several more.  All of us at...

alicublog
WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE WingnutS? Since I wrote about it at the Voice, it's just gotten worse: The entire Right Wing is in mourning over the recent Assassination of their reputations. (I hear some Democratic Congresswoman got shot, too, but they don't have much to say about that.) The Corner is one long blubber-fest. Brian Bolduc repurposes a Glenn Beck Press Release "decrying" -- get this -- "political opportunism of all stripes." Yeah, let's get past these sideshows and fight the re...

Paul Krugmans Libel Against Conservatives: Its All About Forcing A Return Of The Fairness Doctrine To The Media
Left-wing New York Times columnist and Economist Paul Krugman is exploiting the tragic shooting in Arizona Saturday, which claimed six lives, including the lives of a federal District Court judge and a 9 year-old girl, and which critically wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. In a disgraceful op-ed column today entitled “Climate of Hate,” Krugman pinned the blame for the shooting on the Right. Krugman’s discredited spend-and-borrow economics are bad enough. But h

Rhetorical Reality
In “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Randy Newman’s wistful, Bush-era song about the end of the American empire, there is a line about “the leaders we have/are the worst we’ve ever had/but they’re not the worst this poor world has ever seen.” Words to take to heart as we debate whether or not Hate Speech on the right—above all, on Fox News, in the blogosphere, and on Talk Radio—has made events like the attempted Assassination of Congr...

Neal Boortz Attacks AZ Sheriff Dupnik
Looks like someone hit a nerve with the right wingers. Don Lemon brought on Wingnut radio host Neal Boortz to attack Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for his remarks at the Press Conference on Saturday. That's one major case of projection we got from Boortz here. I expect we'll see a push to get that sheriff fired now for daring to tell the truth about his state being a bastion of Right Wing hatred and fear mongering....

Nonsensical Attempt to Tie Loughner to Conservatives Is Deliberate Strategy
To the extent Jared Loughner's psychotic views have any political coherence, they are decidedly Left Wing. Yet liberals have raised a deafening chorus attempting to blame Conservatives for the incomprehensible horrors he inflicted. This may be a reflexive reaction by truly unhinged moonbats like Hanoi Jane Fonda and Clarence Dupnik, who can be counted on to blame their ideological opponents for any and all misfortunes. But for others, it is part of a deliberate political strategy. Timothy McVeig...

Rep. Giffords still critical after deadly shooting spree
TUCSON — Shooting suspect Jared Loughner is scheduled to appear in court Monday afternoon charged with two counts of Murder and three counts of Attempted Murder in Saturday's Mass Shooting that left U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords clinging to life. Doctors were breathing a "collective sigh of relief" Monday about Giffords, who was critically injured during what authorities called the targeted attempt on her life by a gunman. Six people died in the attack. "No change is good and we have no cha...