The attack here was done by a nutjob. As a Canadian I look at it without political Bias on either side. I see it as a crazy who may or may not have taken it a step to far. Palin can't really be blamed, in the same way J. D. Salinger can't be blamed for John Lennon's murder. Both provided something some whack job took to heart.
Quote:
At some point, Chapman became obsessed with Catcher in the Rye after rereading it for the first time since high school. He was particularly influenced by protagonist Holden Caulfield's polemics against "phoniness" in society, and the need to protect people, especially children. He was holding a copy of the book when he murdered Lennon, in which he had written "This is my statement." After his arrest, he wrote a letter to the media urging everyone to read the "extraordinary book" that may "help many to understand what has happened."[44] When asked if he wanted to address the court at his sentencing, Chapman read a passage from Catcher in the Rye that describes Holden Caulfield's fantasy of being on the edge of a cliff and having to catch all children from falling. A psychiatrist at the sentencing, Daniel W. Schwartz, said that Chapman wanted to kill Lennon because he viewed him as a "phony." Chapman later said that he thought the murder would turn him into a Holden Caulfield, a "quasi-savior" and "guardian angel."
Chapman recalls having listened to Lennon's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album in the weeks before the murder and stated: "I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying that he didn't believe in God... and that he didn't believe in the Beatles. This was another thing that angered me, even though this record had been done at least 10 years previously. I just wanted to scream out loud, 'Who does he think he is, saying these things about God and heaven and the Beatles?' Saying that he doesn't believe in Jesus and things like that. At that point, my mind was going through a total blackness of anger and rage. So I brought the Lennon book home, into this Catcher in the Rye milieu where my mindset is Holden Caulfield and anti-phoniness."[43] Chapman later stated that, while Holden was not violent, he did "have a violent thought of shooting someone, of emptying a revolver into this fellow's stomach, someone that had done him wrong" despite being "a very sensitive person and he probably would not have killed anybody as I did. But that's fiction and reality was standing in front [of] the Dakota."[45] He further said, "So the child and the adult conspired together to kill the phony. Then the child and the adult went to the Dakota on the morning of December 8. The adult, very charming, knows his way around-even invited one of the fans to lunch across the street-the child, frightened, alternately praying to God and the devil to get him out of this. The adult was praying to God. He was a fake adult, but he was scared and he knew that the child was about to do something very evil and wrong. The child was praying to the devil and the adult was praying to the Lord. The spiritual dichotomy: Devil-God. And the inner dichotomy: the child-the man. They're out there in front of the Dakota late one night'"
It is of similarity. Palin did not say we should kill these people, or we should murder these people. Unlike Gbaji I take "not retreat, reload instead" to mean that the conservative party should not give up on those particular areas, but to rework their game plans and come back at it next time with a better strategy.
It most certainly does not mean reload the web page, and I guess because I am not mentally challenged I see that, and I also see those targets on the map as political targets, areas of the country that the conservatives should focus on wining the next time around.
As to the quotes you listed, if people start dieing those who said those things should be held responsible, they used words like Kill, assassinate. Those aren't buzz words, those are actual words that can only be associated with one thing in the context they are written in. Palin simply chose wrong words, but that being said, anyone with a functioning brain knows what she meant.
