In 2008, the Secret Service revealed that, “… Sarah Palin’s attacks on Barack Obama’s patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president”. Unable to curtail her vitriol on her own, the McCain campaign finally had to muzzle her and ordered her to tone it down.

Sarah “the Barracuda” Palin has a long history of dishing out criticism. Thanks to the work of a UK blogger, we now have a snapshot of how sensitive to criticism the half term governor is while being completely insensitive to others.

Sarah Palin has a reputation for being an agressive editor of comments on her Facebook page – a reputation that has always seemed likely accurate to me, given the tedious consistency with which all comments on the page are along the lines of “I love you SARAH!”…
…But I had no idea how incredibly, almost comically, efficient her people would turn out to be in deleting comments that were even slightly critical of the former Governor. And then I came across… well, what I guess you’d have to politely call an appalling example of editorial misjudgement at best.

Here’s what I found, from a brief sample achieved by the simple expedient of hitting the refresh button repeatedly over a short period of time:

What follows is a list of negative comments like “YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, YOU EVIL WITCH” or “guns and nutters don’t mix” or “I can’t believe you don’t have the leadership of intelligence to tell your people that putting crosshairs on people incites violence.” all brought down within one or two minutes.

Even more telling about Palin’s character is a comment about the nine year old murdered in Arizona, Saturday that was allowed to stand. “It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”

Now, probably, the comment author was trying to employ some ‘hard to convey over the web’ sarcasm and didn’t really mean what was written. Nevertheless, why of all comments to edit out, why not that one?

The act of resigning her governorship after only two years shows she has no real sense of responsibility, so it isn’t surprising she accepts no blame in the attempted assassination of Rep Gabrielle Giffords. Nevertheless, after the shooting, Palin has scrubbed her websites of the violent graphical metaphor and rhetoric many believe contributed to the shooter’s state of mind.

In many respects it doesn’t matter whether Palin’s “don’t retreat, RELOAD” and “bullseye” vitriol influenced this young man or not, it is inappropriate in a civil society. As Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik states, the mentally imbalanced are susceptible and society’s inadequate mental health care system makes Pima County Jail the areas “largest mental health facility”.

In the end, a nine year old child has died and the most guilty of employing vitriolic speech steadfastly defend their ‘freedom of speech’ to continue as usual. Again, it only took one shoe bomber before millions of us were forced to line up and walk barefoot through security checkpoints in order to board a plane. Only one underwear bomber was needed to convince our legislators stricter security measures were needed. For the sake of ‘safety’ millions of us now willing allow ourselves to be humiliated and groped in public supposedly to protect us all.

How many children have to die before we as a society shun hateful rhetoric, protest vitriol on talk radio and boycott advertisers of media outlets like Fox News? How many?