Democrats in the Teapublicans' Gunsights

In playing skittles chess when I was young, we had a taunt that we loved to use whenever we got our opponents up against the ropes..  It went, "You can wriggle and you can twist, but you will never get out of this."

Now we can see the Teapublicans struggling for all they're worth to wrench themselves as far  as they can from a like situation, now that they have inspired one of their own to go out and fire a bullet straight through the brain of Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona, while killing six others at the outset, including a third grade little girl, a federal judge, and several women up in their 70's.    That "collateral damage" resulted when these people were unlucky enough to be present while Giffords was making a public appearance at a Safeway in Tucson.   At this writing she is somehow still alive and responding, despite her severe cranial penetration by that assassin's bullet.

The Teapublicans' main defence is that the shooting is entirely the responsibility of the 22-year-old shooter and not anyone else, period, end of story, which they hope and pray will end quickly, after the failure of their side to end the Congresswoman's life at once.  But where Giffords and the Teapubs are concerned, this will not be a short story at all,  though with the mainstream media being as tightly blinkered as it is these days, I can see how the Teapubs can hope to be completely absolved.of all responsibility in obscenely short order..

After all, we have the recent case of the Israeli commandos who boarded an aid ship that didn't belong to Israel and that was bringing assistance to the Palestinians on Gaza, which also does not belong to Israel, except through armed force.   And when the people on the aid ship resisted the commandos with non-lethal tools like boathooks, these brave Israeli boys used their high tech firepower not merely to injure but also to shoot dead no less than ten of the aid-bringers, while suffering no deaths themselves.   Yet instead of being instantly brought up on charges of blatant murder, these mass murderers were  hailed as heroes in Israel and most likely in parts of the U.S., too, and to date have gotten away with this unforgivable act completely, just as former President GWBush is getting away with a huge number of similar war crimes that he inflicted on Iraq. 

With the state's governor, Jan Brewer, running a close second (and appearing to be keeping a very low profile through all this), aside from the shooter, so far the main person on whose feet these Arizona killings can be laid, because she owns the ear of a large number of perpetually angry Americans of the paler countenances, is Sarah Palin, that refugee from the frigid wastes of otherwise beautiful Alaska.   It seems that during the run-up to the just concluded midterm elections, among many other railings against the Democrats and especially against President Obama, she published a graphic on her website, in which Democratic opponents of Tea Party candidates in a number of states were shown as targets in the crosshairs of gunsights, and one was Gabrielle Giffords.

The Palinites probably saw Giffords as being an especially important and vulnerable target, because she was running in Arizona, the newest No. 1, hate state, a dishonor previously monopolized for decades and even centuries by the various members of the Cotton States..   And she had made herself especially despised by the Teapubs because, among things, she had been strongly opposed to the draconian anti-immigrant measures that Governor Brewer and her people had made the law in Arizona.   But despite the many victories that the Teapubs got in the elections and that enabled the Repubs to regain control in the U.S. House and to sharply narrow the Democrats' lead in the Senate to nearly nothing, Giffords had still won in Arizona, which must have really made her Target No. 1 for the Arizona Teapubs and had earned her the assassin's bullet, since the elections had failed to take her out.

But the gods -- and a young intern named Hernandez -- were again on Gifford's side, and she has a chance of surviving all this, while for a long time the Teapubs will be beating themselves ragged, blaming everything in sight for the shooting except the real offenders -- themselves, and the climate of violence and hatred that they have been stirring up so relentlessly in the country that Palin and her ilk constantly speak of taking back -- to somewhere -- and with the chief part of their symbology being the very non-feminine implement of the gun.