9) Sarah Palin is blamed for Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting. Early this year, Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by deranged nutjob Jared Loughner. That was a tragedy, but what happened next reached Kanye-West-going-to-an-Occupy-protest levels of irony. Liberals found a map Palin put out several months earlier "targeting" Giffords district. Then, based on absolutely nothing, they concluded Loughner saw the map, took it as a direct order from Palin to kill Giffords, and went on a rampage. The irony here is that by falsely accusing Palin of being directly responsible for the Giffords shooting, her critics did a thousand times more to incite a violent attack on Sarah Palin than Palin had ever done by putting crosshairs on Gifford's district. Plus, as an extra added bonus, we got to hear some of the least civil people in all of politics sanctimoniously lecturing everyone else about the need for civility before they went on over-the-top rants against everyone who disagreed with them.
8) The birther silliness reaches its apex. The evidence that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii is overwhelming, which is why the birther silliness has long since been the domain of crackpots and cranks.
They had a rallying cry that we heard over and over again, "Show us the long form birth certificate! C'mon, Obama! Show it to us....if you weren't born in KENYA!"
After Donald Trump eventually picked up the issue, Obama rolled his eyes, contacted Hawaii, and produced the piece of definitive documentation the birthers had been calling for all along. As expected, it showed he was born in Hawaii.
