Sarah Palin is asking people to put politics aside. Wait, what?

"Hold on there folks. let's not talk politics when the politics are not in our favor."

Courtesy of Hypocritical Hattie's Facebook page:  

Why can't politics be put aside in the wake of South Carolina's mourning? Politicians - please try. It would be in honor of them and the leadership provided by those most tragically affected. Let us follow the wisdom of the people of Charleston who lost their loved ones. The kind and beautiful family members who spoke at the court hearing on Friday know that this is a deeply personal human tragedy. Their words of grace reminded us that the only remedy for evil is the Lord who casts out the darkness in our hearts and offers us mercy. Charleston has been called “The Holy City” because of its skyline of church spires. Now all of America knows the truth of that title. Please respect their time of immeasurable grief, and let us honor this special city.

Palin is not alone, there are other conservatives who are also pleading with people to avoid talking about racism, politics, and more importantly, gun control.

This from The Daily Beast: 

In the 24 hours after the massacre inside Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, GOP politicians and members of the conservative commentariat have tried to explain Dylann Storm Roof’s motivations on a spectrum that runs from merely murky to the explicitly anti-religious. 

They have taken pains to avoid the abundant evidence that Roof was a sadly familiar figure: a young man motivated by racism to violence.

The attempts to white wash (Pardon the pun) the reasons for Roof's heinous act are pretty clear. The guy was almost certainly partially inspired by the Right Wing rhetoric.

In fact there is evidence to suggest that he started his racist education by visiting a website called the Council of Conservative Citizens:  

After noting his animosity over the Trayvon Martin protests, Roof writes: 

"But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders."

The website has since been taken down, but as we know nothing really ever disappears from the internet, so online sleuths have found the site and discovered that it is chock full of "re-written media stories with facts either twisted or fabricated to give the viewer an impression that there is a constant barrage of black-on-white crime."

Knowing all of this it makes perfect sense that conservatives are desperate to turn the attention away from politics, and toward something like mental health or religious intolerance that shifts the target away from them.

However the very fact that Sarah Palin, a woman who literally makes EVERYTHING about politics, is also jumping on this bandwagon underlines just how frightened the Right Wing is that this will land solidly in their laps.