There is still a lot of debate over Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map and if it should be relevant to the tragedy this weekend. This article tells us why it is very relative:

For Arizona Congressman Harry Mitchell, the threats were verbal, conveyed in messages left at his office. “I cannot tell you how much I wish a panty bomber would come in and just fucking blow your place up,” one hissed. Another promised to “disembowel him with a rusty pitchfork.”

For his colleague in the Arizona delegation, Ann Kirkpatrick, besides emails calling her a “whore,” the threats got physical: A sewer cap was thrown through her office window. “Everybody in the back of their minds, everybody feared this, everybody put this into their calculations,” says Kirkpatrick’s former chief of staff, Michael Frias, “but nobody thought it would happen.”

Frias was reflecting on Saturday’s assassination attempt against Gabrielle Giffords, who, like Mitchell and Kirkpatrick, was an Arizona Democrat who supported health-care reform, and felt the fury that came with that. Most notoriously, Mitchell, Kirkpatrick, and Giffords were all among the 20 Democrats nationwide whose district showed up last March on the “crosshairs” map on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. Mitchell and Kirkpatrick lost their reelection campaigns in 2010. Giffords, fatefully, won.

The bottom line is that since the publication of the map there has been an increase in violent threats against Democratic congressmen “targeted” on it. This is a fact that a lot on the right want to ignore, much like they ignored reports in 2008 that Palin’s fiery campaign rhetoric lead to an increase in the number of threats against then candidate Obama.

This isn’t going to change how Sarah Palin perceives herself though or the ramifications of her violent rhetoric. As matter of fact, she is denying the violent undertone of her map:

Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour, in an interview Saturday with conservative radio host Tammy Bruce, explained the map, “We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights,”Mansour said. “We never imagined, it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent.”

I have never heard a more blatant lie in politics. Remember the words Palin used to describe her map – locked and loaded? That right there is 100% proof that Palin meant for those to be gun sights.

Perhaps Sarah Palin should learn a lesson from her boss at FOX News, Roger Ailes, who even admitted his network was guilty of an increase in violent rhetoric and directed his employees to “tone it down”.

But this is Sarah Palin. She is one person who can never admit fault. Everything she does wrong is the fault of the media and “liberals”. Delusions of grandeur doesn’t even begin to describe her infallible view of herself. Knowing that, I don’t blame Sarah Palin for her problems, but John McCain. It was his campaign that decided Palin had the mental aptitude to be fast tracked onto the national stage without proper vetting. If they would have talked to her some and seen the kind of person she is, then maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today.