Setting The Record Straight
by digby
There's a right wing trope out there that says Daily Kos put a "bullseye" on Giffords, just as Palin did. For the record from Media Matters:
Original Daily Kos Post Did Not Contain A Picture Of Giffords Or A Bull's Eye. In a January 10 Daily Kos post, blogger Jed Lewison wrote that the Tea Party Express fundraising letter "actually goes so far as to suggest that a 2008 post written by Markos was somehow equivalent to Sarah Palin's use of the gunsight imagery and her exhortations to 'RELOAD" in the conservative battle against Democrats. Instead of linking to the actual post, the letter links to a photoshopped version, which ads an image of Rep. Giffords and a bullseye, neither of which were in the original post." Lewison links to the original Daily Kos post which indeed does not contain an image of Rep. Giffords with a bull's eye. [Daily Kos, 1/10/11]
Here's the photoshopped page done by Gateway Pundit, which has been picked up all over the media and the blogosphere:
And then there's the other lie about DKos scrubbing the site on Saturday, which Cokie's Law has now made an article of faith along the lines of the "Move-On Hitler" trope. I know that I don't have to tell regular readers here that this is nonsense. But just for the record --- there was a diary that had been written earlier about Giffords' vote against Pelosi for speaking in which a supporter had declared "she's dead to me" the way a matriarch would disinherit a misbehaving child. The diarist removed the diary out of respect for Gabrielle Giffords but due to the obscene charge of "scrubbing the site of death threats" was later re-posted.
Keep this in mind when you hear the right repeat this nonsense over the next oh ... hundred years.
And again, I would suggest that you read this post about rhetoric from Lawyers, Guns and Money in order to understand why the Markos "target" and the Palin "target" are different. An excerpt:
Are bullseye that different from crosshairs? Of course not. However, the intended audience is: the imaginations of liberals and leftists who support a restrictive interpretation of the Second Amendment are not stoked by images of bullseyes. They generally have no pathetic investment in crossbows and so appeals of this sort are less likely to be effective than those like the one above. In terms of rhetoric, then, only the first of these two maps can be designated as “violent” because only it attempts to persuade its audience into action by stoking imaginations by referencing shooting things.
Please read the whole thing because it's important. Passionate political speech is intrinsic to our democracy and it's essential that we not get so tied up in knots that we render this conversation incomprehensible -- or inadvertently start calling for (more)restrictions on telling the truth.
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