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<\/p>\nI\u2019ve been accused of having wished for Sarah Palin\u2019s death and\/or threatening her life because of this tweet:<\/p>\n
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Now. Anybody who knows me, has read my books, has read my blog, has read my Tweets, has breathed the same internet air I breathe knows I\u2019m a Reagan-conservative-moving-swiftly-to-libertarian Mormon with a side of objectivism to spice things up.<\/p>\n
Thus, it didn\u2019t occur to me that my tweet, made in conversation with someone else, in response to my utter disgust<\/em><\/strong> with the immediate blaming of Sarah Palin for Saturday\u2019s shooting of a Congresswoman would be taken as a threat against Palin and\/or a wish for her death.<\/p>\n It smacked me in the head last night when I was tweeted that I was \u201cscum\u201d who had threatened her, with a link to a YouTube slideshow of a collection of tweets that actually DID wish her dead. Mine and one other tweet were vague enough that they didn\u2019t belong in the collection in the first place. I\u2019ll not defend the others except to say that my first reaction on seeing them was, \u201cThey\u2019re blowing off steam like everybody else.\u201d Which is, I think, a reasonable thing to conclude.<\/p>\n Let me tell you what I was doing Saturday when I was watching all the Palin-blaming go down on Twitter: I was at a packed roller rink with my kids, in the middle of loud music and people-chaos, barely listening to their whining, looking at my Twitterstream for news on the Congresswoman\u2019s status \u2026 and crying.<\/p>\n For the country. For what it means for political discourse when some nutjob pops his cork for no reason other than he\u2019s a nutjob. For \u201cmy\u201d side, which is being blamed for everything from eating their boogers to nuclear winter.<\/p>\n But mostly I was crying for Congresswoman Giffords, who was out doing her job and a guy with a mental illness decided to kill her, for the six innocent people including a 9-year-old girl who died, and the other 18 wounded.<\/p>\n If you are coming here because you saw that video or saw whatever random tweet in which some nutjob on \u201cmy\u201d side put me in that list, and you actually are taking the time to find out who I really am<\/em><\/strong>, know this: The people who made that video and who are blindly tweeting make \u201cus\u201d look bad.<\/p>\n There is nothing that will kill an ideology or a movement faster than the nutjobs co-opting it: Because the reasonable people who can disagree without being disagreeable, who can let the slings and arrows go by like mature people, who can get \u201cour\u201d things accomplished, who can discern the nutjobs on the \u201cother\u201d side\u2014people like me\u2014will simply walk away quietly because they don\u2019t want to deal with the nutjobs.<\/p>\n And in reference to my tweet in particular, even taken on its face<\/em><\/strong>: If you don\u2019t get it, you need to learn nuance, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole. Buy a clue, rent one, steal one, I don\u2019t care. GET ONE.<\/p>\n This is not conservatism. This is its formerly disenfranchised nutjobs peeing and shitting in its swimming pool.<\/p>\n God help us all.<\/p>\n