Palin aide: She’s getting death threats at unprecedented levels

I almost wish that this wasn’t being reported as it’ll only inflame things further among fringe types, but after four days of screeching about Palin the murderer, who can blame her staff for wanting to show the world the ironic outcome? I trust and hope that she’ll be fine: She’s got the financial means to hire the best security that money can buy, and remember, as noted earlier, the truly dangerous nuts typically don’t make threats. The vast majority of these people, I’m sure, are liberals popping off at her in a rash moment and then cooling down later.

An aide close to Sarah Palin says death threats and security threats have increased to an unprecedented level since the shooting in Arizona, and the former Alaska governor’s team has been talking to security professionals.

Since the shooting in Tucson, Palin has taken much heat for her “crosshairs” map that targeted 20 congressional Democrats in the 2010 mid-term election, including that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was the main target of Saturday’s attack.

Friends say Palin, a possible 2012 contender, was galled as suggestions of her role in the tragedy have swirled.

Given the amount of hate routinely directed at her, she’s appeared at times to take an oddly too-casual approach to personal security. Remember how there seemed to be no bodyguards around when that weird guy followed her around the airport with a handheld camera? No disrespect to Todd, but if he’s all that’s standing between her and a Jared Loughner, that’s not good enough. This week will, I assume, change that situation forever.

Now, let’s see tomorrow how the media and the left react to this story. There’ll be three responses, I assume. One: “Hey, maybe we should tone down the rhetoric on Palin before she gets shot.” If so much as one person offers that, consider it a victory. Two: “I condemn the threats, but we can’t be held responsible for the actions of crazies.” That’s actually the right answer, I think, or at least it would be if they’d been criticizing her for something she’d actually done. Having invented the Loughner connection out of thin air, though? Nope. Three: “She’s lying, either to turn down the heat on herself and earn sympathy or because she enjoys the media spotlight.” Mind you, there’s actual documentary evidence of some of the threats, but this will be the default explanation anyway thanks to the magical civility gene that makes liberals who are mentally ill somehow utterly immune to the worst rhetorical excesses. Demonize Palin all you want — have Paul Krugman and Frank Rich scream in the face of an untreated schizophrenic that she’s the prophesied antichrist — and it won’t motivate him a bit, because even deranged liberals are ultimately too smart and civilized to do anything wingnutty like take a shot at someone. That, as best as I understand it, is the going theory for why the left’s endless casual assertions about the basic malevolence of the right — racist, sexist, fascist, plutocratic, 50 times a day in assertions great and small — can be shrugged off as harmless to even the most diseased sympathetic mind. “Only fruitcakes” would act on stuff like that. Right, Jared?

To cleanse the palate, here’s our old friend Chris preparing for tonight’s post-Obama full-body tingle by insisting that we can’t “exonerate” Palin in the shootings because we don’t have all the facts yet about what motivated Loughner. She is, in other words, still a suspect in mass murder. Click the image to watch.

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