Palin finished?

Post Tucson crystal ball gazing from Bob Ellis at The Drum:

Palin, who may be guilty of ‘encouraging a terrorist act’ is politically finished I would think now, and Donald Trump the automatic Republican front-runner, closely followed by his hair. And Fox News, which has done its fair share of enflaming domestic terrorists with its Tea Party war cries and yodellings, may lose some sponsorship and a lot of audience, fast.

Predicting the future is risky business and Ellis is almost certainly wrong: if anything the seemingly endless stream of anti-right rants – many, like Ellis's, Loughner-like – will eventually produce a backlash that will increase support for the right. Good work Bob, keep it coming – read the whole thing, it's nutty as.

Update

Biologist PZ Myers' immediate reaction to news of the shooting, and I do mean immediate – it wasn't yet known that Congresswoman Giffords had survived being shot:

I'll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I'll bet he'll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.

The Tea Party connection didn't pan out so Myers changed tack:

What we have here is an attempted assassination of a politician by an insane crank at a political event, in a state where the political discourse has been an unrelenting howl of eliminationist rhetoric and characterization of anyone to the left of Genghis Khan as a traitor and enemy of the state…and now, when six (including a nine year old girl) lie dead and another fourteen are wounded, now suddenly we're concerned that it is rude and politicizing a tragedy to point out that the right wing has produced a toxic atmosphere that pollutes our politics with hatred and the rhetoric of violence?

Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation. The people who are complaining are a mix of lefty marshmallows whose first reaction to the fulfillment of right-wing fantasies by a lunatic is to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness for thinking ill of people who paint bullseyes on their political opponents, and right wing cowards who are racing to their usual tactic of attacking their critics to shame them into silence. This is NOT the time to back down and suddenly find it embarrassing to point out that right-wing pundits make a living as professional goads to insanity.

Myers' attempt to score points off a tragedy is truly grotesque. As Tim Blair says, Myers is an idiot, the ever-so-smart scientist still trying to link Loughner to the right. It would be a good idea to wait until there's some evidence, any evidence.


Spelling error: it's Loughner, not Laughner. Corrected.