The Giffords shooting was not about rhetoric

Though the Left and their allies in the media are desperately trying to make it about that. But the facts to support that narrative are not there:

The one thing the media can’t stand to tell you about Gabrielle Giffords

[...] Watching the coverage of the story this weekend was truly perplexing. The left immediately jumped to blame the right before we even knew he name of the shooter. The right correctly defended itself pointing out that most of his rhetoric was from the left. At moments of attempted fairness, both sides say that they have some responsibility for angry rhetoric. The media, which is forever trying to elevate itself above that which it covers, claims that one thing we can all agree on is that there is a problem with the discourse in this country.

However, the one thing that no one seems to want to talk about is that after looking at the gunman and his ramblings, I don’t see how a discussion about rhetoric applies at all.

The truth is, unless there are a lot of new facts to come that we don’t know about yet, this shooting says absolutely nothing about our political discourse. Nothing. In fact, it says absolutely nothing about society as a whole. Zero.

I know this is disappointing to politicians and the media, but sometimes the story just isn’t about you. It’s about the people who were shot, and the person who shot them.

Think about this. Jared Lee Loughner was fixated on Gabrielle Giffords since at least August 2007. You might recognize that date as occurring approximately two years before the Tea Party existed. When he had a chance to finally interact with her, he asked her a question about grammar. Grammar.

He’s just crazy. There’s no larger story here. There’s no there there.

The media and political hacks have used this tragedy as an excuse to talk about something they want to talk about—supposed right wing violence. There is absolutely no evidence at this time that supports that the right wing had anything to do with the killers actions. It’s the ultimate “when did you stop beating your wife” storyline. Conservatives are forced to defend themselves against a charge that no one with any evidence is presenting. [...]

This is what the Left always tries to do. When the facts aren't on their side, they can't win an argument, so they have to resort to silencing the messenger by any means possible, even completely dishonest means:

A Horrid Crime, a Dishonest Debate

[...] The atrocity has called on us to indulge a double fantasy. First, that it is worth the time and effort to engage Obama’s base in a debate about the root cause of the shootings, and specifically about whether what the Left frames as an atmosphere of toxic rhetoric (translation: the Tea Party, talk radio, and Fox News) is to blame. Second, that without such a debate, we wouldn’t and couldn’t know why this atrocity happened.

To grasp the absurdity of the first point, one need only remember the reaction to terrorist attacks by two jihadists: Maj. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people and wounded numerous others in the Fort Hood massacre, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to explode a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. There could not have been a more committed effort to deny that Islamist ideology and its hateful rhetoric had anything whatsoever to do with these events.

Very simply: The Left likes Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist critique of America, while it seethes with contempt for the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and any person or institution that can serve as a symbol of conservatism or bourgeois American life. Consequently, any heinous act that can be contorted, however counterfactually, into a condemnation of the Right will be exploited for that purpose. Conversely, there is to be quick rationalization for, and then studious suppression of, any shameful episode that is too clearly traceable to a leftist cause célèbre — Islam, a movie pining for George W. Bush’s assassination, ghoulish wishes that Clarence Thomas or Dick Cheney will meet swift and painful deaths, or Senate Democrats’ comparing U.S. troops to Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot, or terrorists.

There is no point debating any of this. Two years ago, we were still being told dissent was the highest form of patriotism; now it’s the root cause of murderous rampage. Modern leftists are tacticians. They’ve convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause, obviating the need to be consistent or faithful to facts in any single episode. For them, it’s all about how the episode can be spun to help the cause. That’s worth understanding, but not debating.

Second, can we forget that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s atrocities transformed them into icons of the modern Left — respected “educators” still passionate about “social justice”? Barack Obama didn’t say, “I’ll have nothing to do with unrepentant terrorists who dedicate books to deranged assassins.” He chose to hold his political coming-out party in their living room and cultivated relationships with them, just as he cultivated a relationship with other hate-mongering radicals.

It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism. What vitriolic thing would someone need to say to you, whether the vitriol could be cast as right-wing or left-wing, that would get you to pick up a gun and start spraying bullets at people with whom you disagreed, however vigorously, about some political or social issue? It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.

If wanton violence has a cause other than mental illness, it is a culture that lionizes the savages. That culture is not the culture of the Tea Partiers so despised by the Left. [...]

The Left is always accusing other people of doing what they themselves are doing. Earlier in the article, it's mentioned that Ayer's and Dohrn had dedicated a book to Bobby Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. It's clear who their hero's are, and the tactics they approve of.

And these folks, and their supporters, accuse the Tea Partiers of complicity in the Gifford shooting, without any evidence? They tell us not to rush to judgment in about the Fort Hood shootings, but they themselves rush to judgment about the Giffords shooting before we even know any of the facts, before we even know what the shooters name is?

The shooting was not about rhetoric. Don't play the game. Call them on it.