Sarah Palin and Responsibility

Yikes I'm posting a lot today. Anyway.

Sarah Palin's violent, incendiary rhetoric had, it seems, very little or nothing to do with the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others. She is not "responsible" for that tragedy. The killer, Jared Lee Loughner, appears to have long been motivated by a simply bizarre brand of conspiracy theory/nihilism/anarchism/misogyny, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he was inspired by Palin, or Sharron Angle, or Joyce Kaufman, or any other right-wing figure who has spewed this kind of language over the past two years. She is not responsible for this event.

She got lucky.

Because let's face it, it would have been entirely possible for the shooter to have been an actual skinhead. Or a member of a minutemen organization. Or a slightly-fringe Tea Partier. Or a crazy person who was also a right-winger. It was entirely possible, during the middle of the day last Saturday, that the shooter had been someone who had been inspired by "don't retreat, reload," or by "Second Amendment remedies." And if it had been, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Joyce Kaufman, Michelle Bachmann, etc. would all be 100%, utterly, responsible for the tragedy. That they are not, that they have a distinct right to complain that many of us assumed, prematurely as it turned out, that the killer would be right-wing (and mind you, I think he's more right-wing than not, though not a doctrinaire conservative) were unfair to them, is purely a matter of luck. And what exactly do they expect to say if another assassination comes along, and that one is a straight-up right-wing terrorism event? Will they complain that we are being unfair to them then?

(Keep in mind that we have been critical of this for a long time, and that a decision can only be judged based on the reasonable expectations of the outcome at the time it was made.)