How the Republicans' Chickens Came Home to Roost in Tucson

Something Had to Give

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch

"Six dead and Gabrielle Giffords, a 40-year old congresswoman hanging to life by a thread. In the wake of the lethal fusillade in Tucson Republicans came close to confessing to complicity by reason of incitement. Sarah Palin pulled her cross-hair go-shoot‘em target pics of Democrats from her site. Republicans in Congress suspended their opening political onslaught for a week. The right-wing commenators settled down to a steady chorus about Loughner bring a lone nut, maybe even a secret Commie. He had Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest flagged on his site, next to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. A fusion nutball maybe....

“Don’t retreat, reload” was one of Palin’s lines to her supporters when one of her Tea Party picks was whacked in the polling booth in November. Other Tea Party maenads had their own punchy lines. Michele Bachmann, a Republican rep from Minnesota, truly over the top and now locked up by nervous Republican leaders in the House Intelligence Committee, where by definition she has to keep her mouth shut, has been in the habit of saying, "I want citizens armed and dangerous.” Tea Partier Sharon Angle, who nearly defeated Senate Majority leader Harry Reid last November in Nevada, liked to invoke the possibility of "2nd Amendment remedies".Conservative Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman, designated staff director of a new elected Florida congressman, quit her job after two days in Washington when a video clip surfaced displaying her exclaiming at a political rally last July 4, "If ballots don't work, bullets will.”....."