Say What? 1/14/2011 Edition [Reader Post]

Liberals:

CBS suggests that Sarah Palin is somehow responsible for the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: “…critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a “target list” of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections.”

Michael Daly of the New York Daily News: “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ blood is on Sarah Palin’s hands after putting cross hair over district.  Here is what Sarah Palin said on the Facebook page where she depicted Gabrielle Giffords in the cross hairs of a rifle scope: ‘Don’t retreat! Instead – RELOAD!’  Well, the guy who shot Giffords yesterday managed to keep firing until he killed six, including a child, and wounded 13.  Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care.  But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.”

Rep. Grijalva, when asked if the TEA party deserved any blame,  assented: “[When] you stoke these flames, and you go to public meetings and you scream at the elected officials, you threaten them-you make us expendable you make us part of the cannon fodder. For a while, you’ve been feeding this hatred, this division.you feed it, you encourage it..Something’s going to happen. People are feeding this monster..Some of the extreme right wing has made demonization of elected officials their priority.”

Markos Moulitsas tweets: Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin, http://is.gd/knNgl [the link is to Palin’s targets drawn on Democratic districts to beat]

Matt Yglesias tweets: A reminder that gun imagery and electoral politics don’t mix that well: http://yfrog.com/h4j00sj

Jane Fonda, on this Giffords’ shooting, via twitter: “Progressive Arizona Rep Gabrielle Giffords was shot.  In her ads, Sarah Palin had her targeted in a gun site.  Inciting to violence.”  Next tweet: “Glen Beck guilty too.  Shame.  It must stop!” Next tweet: “SarahPalinUSA holds responsibility.  As does the violence-provoking rhetoric of the Tea party.”

NPR ran a Sunday morning show in which a Democrat Ed Pastor is interviewed and he blames the 24/7 news cycle and the rhetoric of bloggers for this violent act.  NPR: “The motive of yesterday’s attack is really still not known, but a lot of concern has been expressed about the angry rhetoric in politics nowadays and the effects that it may have; what’s your reaction to that?”  Ed Pastor: “Well, today, I mean, you have news 24/7 and in some cases, not even news—it takes a certain ideology, certain tv channels and certain radio stations have commentators who are making a living by spewing hate on both sides of the ideology.  You have people who through the internet, through their blogs, tweeters, etc. and remaining anonymous, were able to bring up almost anything and spew hatred.”  At no time does NPR question this ridiculous theory.

Jim Scheibel, chair of the 21st Century Democrats: “Why did he shoot Rep Giffords?  We don’t know yet…We also know that Sarah Palin and Rep. Giffords’ opponent used violent imagery last year urging her opponents to ‘target’ her.” (From a Democrat fund raising letter/email just sent out).

The Communist Party of the United States issued a statement on the shooting: “While we do not yet know the motivation of the crime, many have surmised that the motivation is political because of the atmosphere of violent language and threats against Rep. Giffords and other Congressional Democrats. Political or not, the extreme right-wing tea party movement and their anti-government rantings and ravings helped create an atmosphere that allowed or even encouraged this attack. For instance, until the day of the event when it was removed, Sarah Palin featured Giffords on her webpage with the congresswoman’s district in the crosshairs of a gun, targeting her for her support of healthcare reform.  Political hate speech has consequences…Yet, the link to rhetoric and violence doesn’t end with the Palin and her tea party. It extends to the political leadership of Arizona and the Republican Party, who have fomented laws and policies that logically lead to violence. ”

I could have spent all day collecting quotations from liberals who blame conservatives for this tragic shooting in Arizona (e.g., comments by Roger Ebert, Paul Krugman, self-leaning AZ sherif Dupnik, Keith Olbermann, Ezra Klein, NOW, Michael Moore—of course; it is as if they cannot post or report their comments fast enough).

Harry Reid: “”The American people love government, but they don’t like too much politics in government.”

Pop-psychologist and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) supposes that TEA party types come out of dysfunctional families: “There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise. My presumption is they have unhappy families. All of you have been in families: single-parent, two-parents, whatever. Multiple parent and a stepfather. The fact is life is about trying to reach accommodation with one another so we can move forward. That is certainly what democracy is about. So if we are going to move forward compromise is necessary.”

Washington Post Editor Gene Robinson: “Michele Bachmann has a history of saying…crazy-ass things.”

CNN’s Eliot Spitzer: “the Tea Party [is] one of the most vapid, puerile groups out there, without meaningful ideas”

The New York Times, from an editorial entitled Pomp and Little Circumstance: “A theatrical production of unusual pomposity will open on Wednesday when Republicans assume control of the House for the 112th Congress…Those who had hoped to see a glimpse of the much-advertised Republican plan to revive the economy and put Americans back to work will have to wait at least until party leaders finish their Beltway insider ritual of self-glorification…In any case, it is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.”

Time Magazine’s Washington correspondent Alex Altman article headline: “Cult of the Constitution” and one of the lines from this article was “…the fetishizing of the Constitution is unsettling.”

gradeAmerican wrote: “The new Republicans who now control the House of Representatives pulled a pointless stunt by reading the Constitution on the floor.”

Headline for the Gun-Toting Liberal: New “Fiscally Conservative” Tea Bagger Congresscritters To Read Constitution On House Floor – “We, The People’s” Pricetag? A $1.1 Million Dollar Bargain.”

Cokie Roberts: “Republicans have a role to play here too, the real question Dan is what role will it be? Do they really want to see jobs increase or are they looking at those same figures you sited earlier and saying, well, if we keep the unemployment rate up then we won’t see the President get re-elected and that’s something, they’re eager to see him defeated.”

White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee on raising the debt ceiling: “This is not a game…If we hit the debt ceiling, that’s … essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history…The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008.”

Nancy Pelosi: “And if we hadn’t done it, if we hadn’t done healthcare, if we hadn’t done Wall Street reform and the rest of it, we still would have lost the election because we have 9½% unemployment.  Let’s take it where that came from: the policies of George W. Bush and the Republican support for his initiatives—tax cuts for the wealthy, [and] laissez laissez laissez laissez faire when it came to Wall Street…where recklessness…caused joblessness on Main Street.”

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on the record of the 111th Congress: “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us.  It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”

Harry Reid: “The tea party will disappear as soon as the economy gets better. And the economy’s getting better all the time.”

Related to Pelosi’s revival of pay-as-you-go is PolitiFact rates her statements as half true.

Colman McCarthy at the Washington Post: “To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home.”

Nicholas Benton, the owner and editor of the Falls Church News-Press, on why he decided to hire Helen Thomas as a columnist: “She’s a rock star. She should be writing again. . . . She’s the Betty White of American journalism.”

Liberals making sense:

Barack Obama in 2006: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ ”  When asked about this quotation, the White House explained that his vote really didn’t count here, as there were enough votes to pass the raising of the debt ceiling.

Kevin Yamamura of the Sacramento Bee writes this lead-in paragraph: “Gov. Jerry Brown will spare K-12 schools from further drastic cuts in his budget – so long as voters extend higher income taxes in a special election, according to sources familiar with his proposal.”   The headline: “Brown budget will spare schools if voters extend tax hikes.”  An honest reporter on the Bee staff now?  Have I accidentally crossed over into a parallel universe?

Crosstalk:

After reading his prepared remarks on the economy at a window manufacturer on Friday, President Obama sought to take some photos with workers when a pool reporter caught up with him and asked him to explain the connection between the drop in the unemployment rate and the lower-than-expected number of jobs added in December.

Obama‘s response, according to the pool: “You know, you’ve got to talk to Austan Goolsbee. That’s his job.”

Conservatives:

Michele Bachmann on the debt ceiling: “At this point, I am not in favor of raising the debt ceiling.  Congress has had a big party the last two years. They couldn’t spend enough money and now they’re standing back, folding their arms … taunting us about how are you going to go ahead and solve this big spending crisis?”

Lindsey Graham: “To not raise the debt ceiling could be a default of the United States on bond and Treasury obligations.  That would be very bad for the position of the United States in the world at large,” Graham said. “But this is an opportunity to make sure the government is changing its spending ways.”  By the way, this is known as, good cop, bad cop.

Charles Krauthammer: “Call it constitutionalism. In essence, constitutionalism is the intellectual counterpart and spiritual progeny of the “originalism” movement in jurisprudence. Judicial “originalists” (led by Antonin Scalia and other notable conservative jurists) insist that legal interpretation be bound by the text of the Constitution as understood by those who wrote it and their contemporaries. Originalism has grown to become the major challenger to the liberal “living Constitution” school, under which high courts are channelers of the spirit of the age, free to create new constitutional principles accordingly.  What originalism is to jurisprudence, constitutionalism is to governance: a call for restraint rooted in constitutional text. Constitutionalism as a political philosophy represents a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist government – for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures – in the words and meaning of the Constitution.  Hence that highly symbolic moment on Thursday when the 112th House of Representatives opened with a reading of the Constitution. Remarkably, this had never been done before – perhaps because it had never been so needed. The reading reflected the feeling, expressed powerfully in the last election, that we had moved far, especially the past two years, from a government constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers to a government constrained only by its perception of social need.”

Rush Limbaugh: “[For] the media, the Democrat adults, and the establishment, the Clinton years were their Nirvana. And, if Obama had not been African-American, he would never have been elected. It would have been Hillary and we’d still have had the love affair with the Clintons going on. This is the injection of race into the Democrat primary and overall presidential contest did what the insertion of race does to most subjects; it totally distorts it.”

Toby Smith on the economic effects of Obamacare, “You cannot repeal math.”

Breitbart editorial policy regarding the Arizona shootings: “While the internet and social media is wild with speculation on who the lone gunman is Breitbart.com’s editorial policy before and after we find out the political origins if any behind the motivation of the shooting will be to not to politicize this act. If it is a lone gunman on the left, we will be at the forefront of policing those on the right who would try to seize upon this tragedy for political purposes.  This is a sincere plea to those with whom we wage battle on a daily basis in a robust democracy with an appreciation for the First Amendment, but this is also a plea to our political way of thinking who would like to claim victory from a national tragedy. Our prayers go to Rep. Giffords, her family, and the victims who were senselessly attacked by a madman on an unspecified mission.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann [on the shooting of Rep. Giffords]: “My tears are flowing, and I am stunned and angered that Gabby Giffords was savagely gunned down while performing her congressional duties. I am praying for Gabby, and my thoughts, prayers, and deepest sympathy go out to her family, as well as the families of each of the victims.  Gabby Giffords governed with integrity and wisdom. We came to Congress together and I had the privilege of knowing her as a friend and colleague.  It is my hope and expectation that the coward who carried out this horrific act of violence will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I extend my hand of friendship to her family and staff and will keep them in my prayers.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said “We cannot accept and thereby facilitate what looks more and more like a particularly wicked programme of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing [of Christians].”   Intelligent commentary is now coming out of France?

Conservatives from the Past:

The Congressional Oath of Office: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

From:

http://kukis.org/blog/ConservativeReview160.htm

http://kukis.org/blog/ConservativeReview160.pdf