Why is Palin Always the Victim?
I suppose I should not be greatly surprised by this, but blogger Melissa Clouthier has some inaccurate reporting about me on her site today.
Within moments of the tragedy, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitas and David Frum jumped on the blame-Sarah Palin bandwagon.
Clouthier is referring to this tweet.
I retweeted a copy of SarahPac's now famous gunsight map and added these words "This is unfortunate."
That does not constitute blame, but just in case of ambiguity, I underscored that point in some rapid follow ups, staring with a direct reply to a tweet of Clouthier's:
"You think it's going to be just Matt who makes this point? I'm hoping this is a nonpolitical crime ..."
"But if it proves political, unfortunate will be a mild description of what's to come."
The Palin people recognized that obvious point too, which is why they scrubbed their sight of all reference to the map - and deleted all criticisms of Palin from their Facebook page.
You can read the whole Twitter file here, which repeatedly stresses that I don't think Palin is "to blame" - but that Palin's defensive reactions were unhelpful and ungenerous.
I then laid out what I thought Palin should have done instead, here.
You can hear the repetition of my "Palin not to blame theme but she handled this really badly" in the various radio & TV links on this site.
What does it matter that Melissa Clouthier is so slapdash? Not much in the scheme of things, except that it leads up to this comment by her: "the real crime here is that American citizens were deprived of the right to mourn the loss of lives." That's a breathtaking opinion. How could it be that anyone feels deprived of the right to mourn? And yet it goes to confirm a grim witticism I heard from an acquaintance in the hours after the killing: "You must always remember that no matter what happens, and no matter who it happens to, the real victim is always Sarah Palin."