Take your blood libel and shove it...

Blood libel. Glenn Reynolds couldn't have picked a better term (incidentally, the day after someone else did). Conservative bloggers quickly latched on to the war cry while liberals, either oblivious or uninterested in the challenge, petulantly carried on about gun control and the Fairness Doctrine.  That is until a certain someone got in front of a camera and drove the dumb bastards into an all too predictable frenzy.

But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

"That...that bitch! How dare she!"  And within hours, we were inundated by:

1. endless unsolicited history lessons on the origins of the term (seriously, in the age of Wikipedia we're still doing this?),


2. the ridiculous theory that her speech, which mentions not one attack hurled her way, was nevertheless all about her,


3. the insistence that Palin somehow doesn't get something, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Palin wasn't the target.

Now that Palin's called a spade a spade (she's reloaded, as they're putting it), we're to pretend that this is nothing more than a little bit inside baseball between a "polarizing" politician and the media that makes bank on her ups and downs.  But that's a lie.  Before Palin spoke, she wasn't the target.  The bastards whining in the aftermath of Palin's speech spent a weekend smearing those "who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars."

The coastal pansies are afraid of Palin.   She and a new crop of national conservatives have no interest in instructing the  unwashed middle to forgive and forget.  And that's why Palin calling their "blood libel" for what it is has them running scared.  Palin's constituency is the one that drives the economy, that feeds the cities, and most importantly holds the lion share of of both privately owned and government issued firearms.  Defiance and anger may not be enough to get to the White House, but it's damned useful at drawing a line the Left dare not cross.