Context for Tucson

"Gabrielle Giffords was targeted by the Tea Party Right on the basis that she supported the Obama health care plan – a plan that Beck and others like him have regularly explained to millions of Americans as representing totalitarian communism. Indeed, Sarah Palin’s notorious gun site map was only part of the eliminationist rhetoric unleashed against Giffords. For instance, her local Republican opponents held a fundraising event for his campaign that included the following message: ‘Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’"

Follow the below links to two articles, one post-Tucson recent, and one from August 2009, by Jeff Sparrow, an Australian Left-wing writer:

Have We Got A Show For You!
The Social Significance of the Arizona massacre.

There's a lot to read.
If you believe gun culture is healthy and the Tea Party are just nice people... you will blow a gasket.

"The toxic milieu of the Patriots spawned Timothy McVeigh — and a wave of other domestic terrorists responsible for over 40 violent incidents between 1995 and 2000.
The militias faded after the Clinton years, partly because of the economic recovery, partly because the far right felt less visceral antipathy to George W Bush and partly, perhaps, because the "war on terror" provided an external focus for internal rage. Yet, all through the Bush administration, the conservative infrastructure pushed the same populist message: the president was a swaggering Texan man of the people; his enemies, effete and treacherous intellectuals.
That strategy reached its nadir at the last election with the McCain/Palin ticket. Sarah Palin campaigned on almost nothing other than her anti-elitism: for her supporters, Palin was an ordinary hockey mom coming to clean up Washington, her very inexperience proof of virtue. In that respect, Obama’s victory — the defeat of the oxymoronic "Team Maverick" by a black liberal — was seen as the end of the so-called "Southern strategy", with the Republicans’ preferred talking points decisively rejected by an increasingly young and increasingly multicultural electorate.
In the wake of the Obama landslide, many Republican strategists recognised a need to change course but the populist forces they unleashed now possess their own momentum..."