Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

The image is no longer on the Web site, and Ms. Palin posted a statement saying “my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.” (Late Saturday, the map was still on Ms. Palin’s Facebook page.)

He developed an illogical fascination with logic. Math, grammar, logic - the systems civilization has developed to make sense of the world became the means through which he expressed the confusion and pain in his increasingly lost mind.

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Roll, Christina Taylor Green and the other victims in that Tucson parking lot was not a means to anything. It was an end in itself. The gunman's goal was undoubtedly existential - an individual committing a horrific act for its own sake.



I doubt that Loughner, sitting in a Tucson jail, gives these matters much thought. I doubt that he cares much about who won the 2010 midterms or who will win the presidency in 2012. I doubt that a man who seems so confused and desperate cares much about ideology. Sarah Palin and her cross-hairs map deserve nothing but ignominy, but the suspect probably didn't worry that liberals would blame conservatives for the shooting or that conservatives would take umbrage at every media accusation. If he's a political actor, he probably doesn't know it.

Deliberative Dialogue

...
Flash Forum in Response to the Arizona Shootings held by the Center for Democratic Deliberation on January 21 at Penn State. The panelists are listening to a student accuse them of being irrational left wing ideologues who are attempting to blame right wing rhetoric for the shootings


..., the most interesting and important dimension of the exchange was this: whatever validity this student had in accusing the panel of a left leaning bias was lost by the agonistic manner in which he presented his position. His rhetoric was designed to shame and dominate rather than to question and deliberate. The panel did a nice job of undermining this rhetorical strategy. But the performance of a kind of political speech that erodes the possibility of common understanding served as a very powerful object lesson about how we talk to one another politically.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/ ... Road/blog/

thumos
Sometimes deliberation depends less on what we say than it does on how we say it