On Monday, Jane said that Sarah Palin’s career may be over now because of her inflammatory rhetoric’s being linked to Jared Loughner’s assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords — an attempt that severely injured her and left six others dead. A recent German radio interview with Stefan Prystawik, the German press liaison for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, would likely be yet another nail in Palin’s political coffin, should it be translated into English for mass-media consumption.

That’s what I’m about to attempt, with my high-school German and a few online translation aids. (If any readers speak or understand German, feel free to pick over this in the comments.)

Right from the get-go, the interview’s title lets you know the score: “Es ist also sicherlich so, dass Frau Palin da Geister gerufen hat”. I interpret that to mean: “It’s also certain that Mrs. Palin has summoned the demons”, or evil spirits. The subhead translates as: “While publicist Stefan M. Prystawik believes the assassination attempt on Jewish US Politician Gabrielle Giffords was an isolated event, he sees its root cause in the nation’s right-wing political trends – and American political icon Sarah Palin.”

Prystawik’s interviewer, Friedbert Meurer, starts by asking him: “Can one dismiss this act that happened in Tucson as that of a deranged man, or was it a political assassination attempt?” Prystawik’s response: “Well no, not totally. It’s already apparent that the main cause lies with the extremism and psychic (he probably meant “psychological”) instability of the perpetrator, but on the other hand it is certainly already known that the environment for such actions was first — I will not say that the environment made it possible, but at minimum it certainly diverts the thought currents of extremists towards such deeds.” Upon prodding by Meurer, Prystawik mentions “der rechte Rand” — the right edge, fringe, or wing — as being behind this environment, or “Umfeld”. . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo.

(Crossposted from Renaissance Post.)

Yesterday afternoon, at a press conference to discuss the Tucson, Arizona shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and over a dozen others — a political hit that has so far resulted in six deaths, a nine-year-old girl’s among them — Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was quite clear on who he thought was to blame in egging on a mentally imbalanced suspect with ties to the right-wing racist hate group American Renaissance. From FDL’s Jane Hamsher’s liveblogging of Sheriff Dupnik’s news conference:

Says Giffords was the target, and that there were 2 incidents occurred in a “very vitriolic” campaign. Someone in an “angry audience” dropped a weapon out of their pants. Another incident where windows were broken out of her office. At her office at Swan and Pima right now, suspicious package being investigated.

The 22 year old suspect does have a criminal past. Says this is how “unbalanced people respond to vitriol coming out about ripping down the government. Arizona has become the capital. We have become the mecca of prejudice and bigotry.” Believes people who are unbalanced especially, like the suspect, are extremely susceptible to vitriol.

Interestingly enough, there has been an effort by the media organs that have served as enablers of the peddlers of vitriol to minimize, if not outright conceal, their roles in spreading it. One method is to simply pretend that Sheriff Dupnik — a man who, as an Arizona law enforcement officer, has been a first-hand witness to the effects of this media-promoted vitriol — didn’t say what he said. This method is the one used by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike of the New York Times, who in this story on the shootings scrubs out Sheriff Dupnik’s comments on media-enabled vitriol helping to make Arizona the capital and Mecca of prejudice and bigotry as assiduously as various right-wingers such as Sarah Palin and Giffords’ Republican opponent Jesse Kelly have been scrubbing their websites of crosshairs and other implied threats directed at Representative Giffords. Meanwhile, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander is ordering the press to stop talking about Palin and the Stalinesque “Commissar Vanishes” removal of this inflammatory material from right-wing websites; knowing how the corporate media usually leaps to fulfill the requests of their GOP allies, I suspect this will happen very shortly.

. . . Read the rest of this entry →