Guy already tore into The New York Times for their outrageous op-ed after the Scalise shooting, where they tried to once again blame Sarah Palin for the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ). House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) was shot in the hip, while practicing with the Republican baseball team in Alexandria, Virginia yesterday morning. A congressional aide and members of the Capitol Police were also wounded. Here’s the controversial portion of the op-ed [emphasis mine]:
The New York Times is well aware that any link between Palin and the Giffords shooting were long debunked, but they're going for it anyway. pic.twitter.com/BgzaQFQMz6
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) June 15, 2017
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They're right. Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right."
even way back in Jan 2011 we knew that Loughlin's obsession began 3 years before the Palin map.https://t.co/9nJccuIQnb
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 15, 2017
Let me chime here to say: yeah, that's nuts.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 15, 2017
This NYT editorial is, in fact, stupid. Palin didn't make that loon shoot Gabby Giffords. “Rhetoric” didn’t make today’s whacko shoot either https://t.co/C5X46nACEb
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) June 15, 2017
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As Guy and many others have noted, it wasn’t clear that Jared Lee Loughner, Gifford’s shooter, was motivated by “political incitement.” In fact, the whole notion that Sarah Palin had anything to do with the shooting has been widely debunked. Ben Dreyfuss of Mother Jones, a left-leaning publication, said the op-ed was “stupid.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said it was “nuts.” And CNN’s Jake Tapper said that Loughner’s fixation on Giffords began three years before the crosshairs map. Now, the Times issued a correction, but the damage is done. Mrs. Palin is considering a lawsuit against the newspaper.
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