Daily Kos Targeted Gabrielle Giffords in June 2008

Heated rhetoric? Reckless political language? And calls to "repudiate" incitements to violence?

Of course, it's almost always conservatives and tea partiers who get the blame. And within minutes of the news from Tuscon yesterday the progressive blogosphere and left-wing media erupted with allegations that Sarah Palin's "hit list" was responsible for the shooting of Giffords and the lives of 6 others. And right now we have Politico desperately attempting to portray shooter Jared Loughner as a right-wing anti-Semitic extremist (despite overwhelming evidence of his hardline progressive Jew-bashing tendencies). And on top of that, Jared Taylor, founder of the American Renaissance organization, reports that he'd never even heard of Loughner until yesterday: "This is complete nonsense."

We don't know what caused the gunman to mount a killing spree in yesterday's carnage. Loughner was most likely confused and mentally deranged. He was most definitely not a constitutionalist or limited government afficionado. But the point here once again is the rank hypocrisy among progressive bloggers and their enablers in the Democratic media complex. The evidence is clear that Markos Moulitsas placed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords "in the crosshairs" nearly two years ago. See Patterico, "Markos Blames Palin for Giffords Shooting — But There’s Just One Problem: Kos Put a Bulls Eye on Giffords," and especially HillBuzz, "IS DAILY KOS INVOLVED IN ARIZONA MURDERS?"

Of course the evidence of that "extremist rhetoric" has been stuffed down the memory hole at Daily Kos. But there's lots more where that came from. See Big Government, "About That Dangerous Political Rhetoric, Markos Edition."

And Markos' own infamous essay from October 2008 is still available, "Crush Their Spirits":

... we have an imperative to take advantage of a historic opportunity to break the conservative movement's backs and crush their spirits ...

Hence our need this year to take advantage of this perfect Democratic storm to not just win, but to utterly wipe the board clear of as many Republicans as we can catch in this wave.

Break their backs? Wipe the board clear? And that's after placing Congresswoman Giffords on the bullseye hit list earlier in the year.

When there's evil of this magnitude we can't trust the press to give us straight and honest reportong. Last night, WSJ's Washington Wire blog once again repeated the lie that "slurs" were hurled at Democratic lawmakers during the healthcare debate on Capitol Hill in 2010:

The shooting comes on the heels of two unusually contentious years in American politics in which lawmakers were shouted down at town hall meetings and some had their offices vandalized.

Partisan tensions during the health care debate led to angry confrontations between Democrats and constituents back home. The weekend of the vote, a small handful of protestors shouted slurs at lawmakers walking to and from the Capitol. In response, House Democrats walked arm-in-arm to the Capitol at one point, a move that struck some at the time as offensive to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators.

That claim has been repeatedly debunked, of course. But the work of citizen journalists is never done.