Although it's long been proved that Sarah Palin and so-called violent political rhetoric had absolutely nothing to do with January's tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona, CNN's Piers Morgan felt it was necessary to bring her up during Wednesday's interview with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' (D-Ariz.) husband.
For his part, astronaut Mark Kelly was only too happy to take the bait and run with it (video follows with transcript and commentary):
PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Some interesting insights in the book into who, you know, walked to the plate and who didn't, really, in terms of political colleagues and people that she had worked for and against. Sarah Palin doesn't come out of this very well, I don't think, because there was a woman who at the time had been putting these cross hair things on her website and stuff, including Gabby.
And in her haste to take responsibility didn't even bother to pick the phone up, to write, do anything.
MARK KELLY: Yeah, we were never contacted by her.
KELLY: Yeah, I was surprised too. You know, certainly the targets that she put over Gabby's and other people's districts, in our opinion, was not the right thing to do. She is not the first person to do that. And it hasn't always been Republicans that have done that.
MORGAN: I liked your line about it, which is if you had had the chance to talk to her, and you were expecting to, you weren't going to say that you were responsible. But you were going to say, you've been irresponsible.
KELLY: Yeah, that's my plan. You know, this was no surprise to us. Gabby even spoke about it before January 8th, during the election cycle, leading up to the election, in an interview. I think it might have been on MSNBC or some other -- another cable news network. She made is very clear that, hey, this is what's going on, and this could ultimately incite people to do violent things. So it wasn't a big surprise on January 8th that -- you know, that we -- you know, where we knew this map existed with the cross-hairs on it. Now, having said that, you know, Sarah Palin certainly is not responsible for what happened. But I think the angry rhetoric in an election year is not -- it's not helpful.
MORGAN: Because there are people out there who are clearly mentally unstable. And Jared Lee Loughner is a classic example of this, where he clearly was not normal when he did this.
Yes, and it was determined there was absolutely no connection to Palin or anyone on the right, and there was absolutely no political motivation discovered in this incident by a crazy man who if anything had a leftward ideological leaning.
But such facts don't matter to people like Morgan when they have an opportunity to bash conservatives.
How sad that ten months after this horrible incident, with Giffords healing miraculously, America's media still feel they need to whenever possible bring someone up that had absolutely nothing to do with shootings that occurred thousands of miles away from where she was at the time.
