Wednesday, January 12, 2011

On "Target"

The day after the mass-shooting in Tucson, a friend posted a link to a 9 month old story on Sarah Palin's facebook map of "targeted" congressional districts for this last year's congressional campaign.  His comment was "Palin removed the image from her website. Wonder why?"

Later in the discussion he claimed "I've never said Palin was responsible for the Arizona shooting. She's not.   But ...."  Which begs the question, why did you post a 9 month old story about it the day after the Arizona shooting?

This after I showed him similar Democratic images which produced no flap at all.  And as usual, once confronted with actual facts that contradict the narative, he had to backpedal to the standard "well, it's bad on both sides".   With which I had to disagree.  I didn't flinch at Obama's "If they bring a knife to the fight, we'll bring a gun."   Well, except to note that if Sarah Palin had said that instead of Barack Obama, we would never have heard the end of it.

I then made the prediction that when the next attempted or successful murder, bombing, or threatening act of vandalism takes place, we will see the exact same thing.

The left will grab their megaphone and try to pin it on the right, and when the evidence once again does not support their claim, they will backpedal to "well, I decry it on both sides".

It's both sides, until you go away this time -- and the next time it comes up, it will most assuredly be the right exlusively again out of the gate.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've pointed to articles in a previous post on the hypocrisy of these accusations.  And of course Michelle Malkin's roundup and the irrefutable zombietime post. But the absolute idiocy of where this whole "argument" begins still bugs me.  "Target".  And "crosshairs".  It came up again the other morning while watching our local forecast on TV ... when the map zooms in from the satellite view to the local view.  Crosshairs illustrating the zoom.

And I thought about golf range-finders.  And camera viewfinders.  Illustrations of telephoto zooms from space ships in sci-fi movies.  Steve Austin's bionic eye.  And the "target" and "battle metaphors ... business, sports, marketing ...

Charles Krauthammer adroitly pointed out that the word "campaign" itself is military in origin.  Good article, by the way.

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