No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords. Update!

From Frank Rich for the New York Times:

In her MSNBC interview that Wednesday, Giffords said that Palin had put the “crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” adding that “when people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.” Chuck Todd then asked Giffords if “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” She responded that colleagues who had been in the House “20, 30 years” had never seen vitriol this bad. But Todd moved on, and so did the Beltway. What’s the big deal about a little broken glass? Few wanted to see what Giffords saw — that the vandalism and death threats were the latest consequences of a tide of ugly insurrectionism that had been rising since the final weeks of the 2008 campaign and that had threatened to turn violent from the start.

Giffords’s first brush with that reality had occurred some seven months before her office was vandalized — in the red-hot health care fever of August 2009. She had held another “Congress on Your Corner” meeting, at a Safeway in the town of Douglas. There the crowd’s rage and the dropping of a gun by one attendee prompted aides worried about her safety to summon the police. The Tucson Tea Party co-founder, Trent Humphries, told The Arizona Daily Star afterward that this was a lie, that “nobody was threatening Gabby.” After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding “an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

Others on the right spent last week loudly protesting the politicization of tragedy. What was most revealing was how often they tried to rewrite the history of previous incidents having nothing to do with Loughner. A Palin aide claimed that her target map was only invoking a “surveyor’s symbol,” not gun sights. A Tucson Tea Party leader announced that the attack on Giffords’s office (never solved by the police) was probably caused by skateboarding kids. Mike Pence, a potential G.O.P. “values” candidate for president, told the C-Span audience that those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events (including one in Arizona that August of 2009) were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators “waving placards.”

This article is well worth your time.  Frank Rich dismisses the idea that "both sides do it," and gets to the meat of the problem. Which is that the vitriol and viciousness of those on the far right has not only intimidated many on the left, it has also managed to frighten those more moderate voices on the right from challenging the hateful rhetoric and encouraging a more cordial dialogue between both sides.

This is the world that Sarah Palin has gone out of her way to help create, and that is why she deserves to have her words attached to ANY act of violence which might have taken its inspiration from the heated political environment that we find ourselves in today.

Update: Sarah Jones of Politicususa has written a very compelling piece on this subject as well.  In my opinion it is a must read.  Here is a sample to whet you appetite:

Imagine if it were Islamic anti-government radicals who had been spreading the sort of lies and propaganda the GOP has when this brutal massacre occurred. How would the nation react to their attempts to distance themselves from their own words and graphics? How would the media and the American people respond to the rage of the Right if they were dressed as fundamentalist Muslims?