One can only hope...and cringe; but mark my words

MartyJayBell tweets: "Palin can't run for office now. Too easy to make tv spot with map and 'Reload.' She may be only one who doesn't realize this."

Bloomberg news reports that the Tucson shooting "is also likely to hurt the image of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, said Ross Baker, a congressional scholar at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey."

On the other hand, The Alaska Dispatch presents Rebecca Mansour's attempt to spin the story:

A Palin staffer, Rebecca Mansour told a radio talk show host Saturday that doing so is "obscene" and "appalling." In fact, she said that the "target list" was not intended to allude to guns.

"We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said.

"It's surveyor's symbols," the interviewer Tammy Bruce suggested. Bruce, a Palin supporter, describes herself as "a gay, pro-choice, gun owning, pro-death penalty, Tea Party Independent Conservative. " Her show is promoted as a "chick with a gun and a microphone."

Mansour agreed. She said that the graphic was contracted out to a professional. They approved it quickly without thinking about it. "We never imagined, it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent," she said. Rather, she said, that it was simply "crosshairs that you would see on a map."

There is "nothing irresponsible about our graphic," she said.

She did not, however, mention the "don't retreat, instead- RELOAD!" Palin tweet that went out shortly after the graphic was posted on both her Facebook page and SarahPac's website, directing them to the graphic. The tweet turned quickly into a Palin mantra. Many, even then, urged her to stop using such violent rhetoric. If she heard them, she did not retreat.

The graphic remains on Palin's Facebook page but was removed this morning on SarahPac's website. Mansour said that removing it did not constitute a "scrub" of Palin's site, as some had been alleging. She said that someone from SarahPac contacted her this morning, and was wondering if it should be taken down given the circumstances. She said that because the midterm elections had passed, it shouldn't have been there anyway.

But mark my words. It won't be long now until we hear claims that Jared Loughner was really a 1) leftist instrument and/or 2) agent for Obama,  who purposely conspired to massacre these people in order to fan public opinion against the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.