Congresswoman ShotFollow

Every time I hear someone say this, it comes back to examples of Hamilton & Burr or other such antiquities. Is it "startlingly tame" compared to, say, 1990? Maybe but I've never seen anyone present an example from 1990 to make that case. It'd be nice though since people saying that it's gotten worse are more likely comparing it to the last couple decades than remembering the halcyon days of 1886.

Beats me. I was mainly asking because, as I said, the "It's ALWAYS been bad!" meme is generally followed by examples from 150 years ago. Personally, I didn't remember it being as vitriolic (that's everyone's word for the week, dontchaknow) back around 20 years ago even with your examples but it's not a point I think can be adequately proven or disproven either.

*smirk*

You know, out of all of this, I really haven't seen any major networks label this guy a terrorist. Is it because he wasn't religious? I feel like religion is needed in people's minds to make them think terrorism (in particular, Islam). But what this guy did is kind of the definition of terrorism, right? I mean, the Fort Hood shooter was called a terrorist, but the only difference is that his beliefs were religious, not political. Both of them were crazy, but Loughner is called insane and Hasan is called a terrorist. Neither seems to have had any outside support other than hate speeches and reading materials.

What's with that?

Damn straight.

The two are only related in that they were mentioned in this thread together. You get that these are two separate things occurring over a period of several months back during the election last year, right?

I'd also point out that "reload" is just as inconsistent when applied to a gun, right? You don't "reload" unless you've already fired. Otherwise you are "loading". So unless you can show some example of people firing guns on behalf of some political objective of Palin's during the election, your argument is meaningless.



Those are sights. WTF?


Look. At the end of the day, this is a silly argument. It's not my job to defend every statement that comes out of Palin's mouth or the mouths of anyone who works for or with her. The larger point is that there absolutely is a movement on the left to place some sort of blame for this event on conservative talk. Joph's own obsession with Palin is just one example. I could easily find a number of actions and statements taken by liberal politicians and pundits clearly pointing the finger of fault at conservative speech, and even some who are attempting to use this to try to place limits on that speech.

You guys are literally missing the forest for the trees here.

You mean like the maps that showed the targets "taken out" in red? And Palin's exact quote while teaching her daughter how to fire a rifle (linked in this thread, if you missed the video)?


ITT: Closest gbaji is willing to get to saying, yes, it was obviously a gun analogy, and the Palin camp is talking out of their asses trying to say it's not.

Well, Smash has a point that all sides tend to do this to some degree. There's value in getting people to hear your message and not the other guys. However, the left appears to be the only "side" in which the members honestly don't seem to realize that they're doing this and are incredibly selective in terms of which examples of speech they condemn.

Say what you will about Palin, or Limbaugh, or Coulter, but no matter how much you may disagree with or even find offense in what they say, they don't argue that the other side shouldn't get to say their words in response. A pattern we find repeating over and over (and this is a relatively new thing) is a movement on the left to actually prevent/curtail conservative speech. They use terms like "ratcheting down the rhetoric", but only seem to ever apply that label to the other side's speech. Joph mentioned above about how it's not a bad idea to reconsider the language we use, but I'm betting that he's *not* applying that to phrases made by members of his own party. In fact, I'd be willing to bet he completely missed that the quote about bringing a gun to a knife fight was made by Obama (or he choose to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away).

Strangely, I don't see anyone saying that quotes like that from Obama may have caused this shooter to act. Why not? Give that by all indications, this guy was either non-political or quite possibly leaned left, shouldn't we be scouring the statements by Democrats and looking for potentially violence triggering words? At the very least, if we're going to imply some sort of blame for rhetoric, shouldn't we be fair about it?

Can anyone honestly say that the NYT's was "fair" in it's front page news story. Note, that this is *not* an editorial. This is supposedly impartial journalism. Anyone want to guess where Joph got it in his head to talk about the Palin map? Yup. Words do influence people, don't they?


The "balance" in that story? One paragraph saying that Republicans have claimed that Democrats have done the same. Stacked against about 10 paragraphs detailing allegations made against Republicans, that's hardly fair, is it? And it surely leaves the reader with the impression that it's the GOP to blame if anyone is, right?


It's a stupid premise *and* it's unfairly leveled. So how about we at least acknowledge this?

There are a whole lot of phrases in US English that can be taken as gun/military metaphors. We "set our sights". We "take aim". We "zero in". We "give them both barrels". We "come out shooting". We "lob grenades". We "drop a bombshell". We "call to arms". We "rally the troops". We "take the high ground". We "regroup". We "use <something> as ammunition". We "come loaded for bear".

If we put our minds to it, we could probably come up with hundreds of common expressions we use in our society which have some sort of gun/military/violence reference. And guess what? Most of the time, when people use them, they don't actually mean for someone to literally show up somewhere with a large bore hunting rifle to take out a bear.

Isn't it ridiculous to assume so, but only in selective cases? Those phrases all have common meanings that have nothing specifically to do with weapons, despite their origins. People use them all the time. Yes, even Democrats. Even anti-gun Democrats. So let's get off this silly line of argument, ok?

And you can't retreat unless you've already been fighting. Dur!

What part of "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" is so confusing to you? The stretches and contortions of your logic to redefine this very simple, straightforward sentence is beyond pathetic.

She says it while holding a shotgun. It's obviously a web browser-based metaphor!