In the End, Palin’s Followers Will See Her as Tucson Tragedy’s Ultimate Victim

Glad the news media is quickly recognizing who the real victim of this week’s shooting is: Sarah Palin.

– Teresa Kopec, via Twitter.

It is fair to say that, upon learning about the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday, most regular Americans assumed that a deranged tea partier had been pushed over the edge by one anti-government, anti-Democratic Party dog whistle too many from the GOP’s Fox channel personalities and hate radio propagandists.

That’s certainly what people close to Giffords assumed. On Saturday, as he rushed to his daughter’s side at the hospital, Spencer Giffords, 75, was asked if Gabrielle had any enemies. “Yeah,” he replied, “the whole tea party.”

Over the ensuing three days, it has become clear that the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, suffered from delusions, at least, and, at worst, was in throes of mental illness that was untreated, perhaps even undiagnosed.

It is equally clear that Loughner planned the attack and specifically targeted Rep. Giffords, a Democrat, because she was a member of Congress. When police searched Loughner’s home, they found an envelope on which he had written, “I planned ahead,” and “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.”

And witnesses say Loughner ran through the crowd at the congresswoman’s event in Tucson and opened fire when he spotted her talking with constituents.

What is still murky, however, is whether or to what extent the toxic political environment, which is especially acute in Arizona, home to nationally known Republican hatemongers Sen. John McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer, played a role in his rampage.

There is plenty of circumstantial evidence it did. Loughner had recently posted screeds to YouTube laced with anti-government and pro-gold phrases that could have been lifted straight from GOP-Fox propaganda. This, of course, points a finger. No one is more closely associated with anti-government paranoid propaganda and gold than Fox’s Glenn Beck.

Plus, after it was revealed that Loughner had a personal beef with Giffords — at a constituent event in August 2007, he’d been dissatisfied with her response when he asked, “What is government if words have no meaning?” — it also seemed plausible Loughner could have been responding to GOP-tea party candidate Sharron Angle’s barely veiled threat of violence during her U.S. Senate campaign last year when she said that if tea party candidates lost in the midterms, their followers might resort to “Second Amendment remedies” against the candidates who won.

After all, Rep. Giffords had defeated a tea bagger, Jesse Kelly, a former Marine who had released an ad for a fundraiser that read: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

However, from the first minutes after the attack, it was the tea party’s putative leader, Sarah Palin, who bore the brunt of suspicion. It was, after all, Palin who led the radical corporatist attack on members of Congress who’d voted for the Affordable Care Act last year. After the law passed in March, it was Palin who released a U.S. map showing the 20 districts of Democratic House members, including Giffords, who had voted for the law, marked by icons designed to resemble crosshairs on a rifle. (Palin has referred to it as her “bullseye map.”)

As part of the marketing of the map, Palin tweeted, “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’ Pls see my Facebook page.”

Palin took a lot of criticism over the dog-whistle message implied by the crosshairs, including from establishment Republicans, which forced her to issue a denial that was so laughable it was almost painful. Speaking at a campaign event for McCain in Arizona, Palin said, “We know violence isn’t the answer. When we take up our arms, we’re talking about our vote.”

But it wasn’t just regular Americans who assumed on Saturday that Palin’s constant barrage of toxic rhetoric had finally taken its toll. Based on the reaction from the Palin camp that day, it’s clear that they, too, assumed a nightmare of their own making was coming true.

For one thing, they knew there was video of an interview with Giffords last spring in which she criticized Palin for publishing the crosshairs map.

“Sarah Palin has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” Gifford said in March, “and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”

The record shows that Team Palin jumped the gun on Saturday and went into into damage control too early. Based on an initial false report on Fox that Giffords had died, a Palin underling posted “sincere condolences” to Giffords’ family on Palin’s Facebook account — because, you know, there’s nothing more “sincere” than condolences posted to Facebook — while other Palin assistants saw to it that the website built around the crosshairs map was scrubbed.

The false report that Giffords had died must have had Palinistas — pardon the metaphor — sweating bullets. And rightly so. Palin and her political team deserved whatever panic they experienced on Saturday, and then some. They only had themselves to blame for the predicament they were in.

Leaving aside whether Sarah Palin is complicit in this tragedy, publishing the crosshairs map last spring was, in a word, stupid. No responsible political operative would allow a client — especially one whose career rests on a foundation of vitriol, who constantly sucks up to gun nuts and is not above wounding an animal in a pretend hunting episode on a reality show — to publish a map marking opponents’ districts with crosshairs.

Why? Politics 101. Given the environment and this particular pol’s deranged fan base, it is as likely as not that one of the opponents she marked on her map could shot — might even be killed.

And that would be political suicide for the client. As a political tactic, releasing that map was either irresponsible and amateurish or deliberately and dangerously provocative.

Fortunately for them, however, it appears that Palin, her corporatist-extremist puppet masters, the GOP’s Fox propaganda outlets and their tea party dupes will escape accountability for this tragedy.

Since Saturday, the establishment media has been helping Palin and the corporatist extremists slough off blame by pushing the equivalency meme — both sides do it. On the “View,” Barbara Walters, who has named Palin one of her “most fascinating people” a record three years in a row, even went so far as to say she feels sorry for Palin.

In fact, it appears now that, in the end, Sarah Palin will profit from the massacre in Tucson. Inside the bubble of her adoring anti-government, anti-establishment and, really, anti-American fans, any criticism of Palin, warranted or not, is perceived as an attack.

With each new attack, Palin accrues more victimhood, and, for reasons that are lost on regular Americans, Palin’s followers find her victimhood to be inspiring.