What a shock—she goes on the attack.

In a post on her Facebook page, “Palin” (which is to say, a ghostwriter) responds to criticism that her targeting of Gabrielle Giffords may have contributed to Jared Loughner’s assassination attempt.

Like many, I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on what happened and praying for guidance….

Is there a single person who believes that Sarah Palin was asking God—as opposed to her political advisers—for guidance?

I’m imagining the prayer here:

Dear God, could you help me out? See, I put a bullseye on this woman, and then—fuck!—some crazy guy shot her, and now everyone’s saying it’s my fault, and, well, shucks! I didn’t really want someone to shoot her. I mean, maybe a little. But not in the head! Now how am I going to run for president? Thank you o God for your guidance, and if you could renew my reality show too, that’d be awesome!

In typical narcissistic Palin fashion, she says nothing about praying for the people who were shot. She wants “guidance.”

The non-praying Palin continues:

President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle….

Only Palin would be cynical enough to resort to Reagan—an attempt to place her in the Reagan lineage, which is to say, an attempt to position herself for the 2012 election—while commenting on an assassination attempt. (‘Cuz, you know, someone tried to kill Reagan too, so if you quote him then it’s all good!)

In any case, it’s a red herring: No one is blaming “society.” Instead, people are discussing whether inflammatory rhetoric such as that used by Palin inspired a murderer’s act of violence.

Quite different.

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?

I must have missed all the commentators talking about how many more “calm days” there were during Revolutionary times. Why are those words in quotation marks? Did someone actually say them? Or are they just-you know—made up? And then given the quotation marks to make it sound like lots of people have been using 1804 as a point of comparison. It’s fascinating to see how conservatives have inserted this straw man into the debate, attributed it to liberals, and then turn around and call liberals crazy for asserting something they never asserted in the first place.

But it is worth pointing out that dueling is now, well, illegal, and has been since the Civil War. (Shocker, the South was the last holdout.) And also that, in a duel, both parties are…what’s the word I’m trying to think of?… Oh. Armed.

In any case, most of the Founding Fathers to whom Palin turns for cover decried the practice of dueling.

Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were among the most prominent Americans to condemn dueling. Franklin called duels a “murderous practice…they decide nothing.” And Washington, who undoubtedly needed all the good soldiers he could get, congratulated one of his officers for refusing a challenge, noting that “there are few military decisions that are not offensive to one party or another.”

History! It’s all complicated and stuff.

Palin goes on to remind people that she’s already denied that she’s inciting people to violence. So it’s unfair that she has to do it again.

As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, “We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote.

Here’s the actual clip of that. Do you find it reassuring? Like when she talks about “this B.S. coming from the mainstream media”?

I could go on, lamenting Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” to describe the criticism she’s enduring, for example. (History!)

As the Times points out,

Blood libel is typically used to describe the false accusation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, in particular the baking of matzos for passover. The term, which is centuries old, referred to anti-Semitism and violent pogroms against Jews, and her use of the phrase itself has caused the video to go viral, attracting criticism of her description of the controversy. Ms. Giffords, who remains in critical condition in a Tucson hospital, is Jewish.

Which is more offensive, I wonder—if Palin didn’t know what the term refers to, or if she did?

But you know what’s the really scary part? The massive string of adoring, reverential comments. Somewhere in that crowd of unthinking, unblinking admirers, there’s another Jared Lee Loughner in the works. Could it be the middle-aged white man who writes (exactly) this:

They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.

Why does that feel more like hate than love?