Jan 10 2011
Terrorist Attack in Arizona Linked to Hateful Rightwing Media Rhetoric
A twenty two year old white man in Tuscon, Arizona on Saturday shot and killed 6 people including a federal judge and a nine year old girl, and wounded 14 people. Among those injured was the target of the attack, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords is critically injured after being shot in the head from 4 feet, and remains in a medically induced coma in the hospital. Giffords has also been listed on a US map of Democrats to target by Sarah Palin for their support of President Obama’s healthcare reform bill. Palin has come under fire in connection with the shooting because the map uses images of crosshairs in gunsights to identify the Democrats. Palin has now taken down the map from her website, as well as deleted her famous tweet “Don’t Retreat, Reload.” Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter, who is now in custody, has been linked to a right wing Anti-Semetic group called American Renaissance. Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish. Much of the media coverage of the massacre has focused on the apparent mental instability of Loughner and whether the vitriolic rhetoric against President Obama and the Democrats coming from the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and other prominent right wing commentators inspired Loughner to attack. In the hours after the massacre, Pima County Sheriff Dupnik said “We have become a very angry country, part of it very ugly. And that even though we have free speech in this country, constantly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, making the people angry at government . . . may benefit some party, but I think those people have to consider that they may have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future.” President Obama just called for a moment of silence at 8 am PST in Washington DC to commemorate the tragedy.
GUESTS: Roberto Lovato, writer with New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation Magazine, Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America
Read Roberto’s writings here: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/search.html?author_search=roberto+lovato&submit=Search+NAM+DB
Find out more at www.mediamatters.org.
3 Responses to “Terrorist Attack in Arizona Linked to Hateful Rightwing Media Rhetoric”
Jared Loughner is crazy. On YouTube he listed the communist manifesto as one of his favorite writings, and made many other statements that show that he’s not a right-winger. To imply that he committed this act because of the right is a dangerous statement to make, given his left leaning ideology.
Loughner also listed the ring-wing darling, Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” as one of his favorite books.
That is absurd, the man is a committed COMMUNIST that is also a homosexual that wanted to get a sex change operation. To even attempt to state that this man is linked to the right in the U.S. is outright distortion of the facts. The left in our country is simply utilizing a tragedy to attempt to silence dialogue, nothing more. These are the very same folks that claimed that “dissent was the most patriotic of actions” not more than 3 years ago, but yet they of course meant as long as dissent was not against them, or their warped policies. This grandstanding will get them nowhere, and it will not change anything, we do not like their policies, and we will NEVER accept being governed by these socialist idiots again.