Thanks to CBS News, MSNBC, the Associated Press, Mark Potok, Paul Krugman, Markos Moulitsas and Jane Fonda — yes, that Jane Fonda — we now know who is responsible for the tragic shooting outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, Saturday. It’s Sarah Palin!  With some help from Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. I haven’t heard Bill O’Reilly’s name mentioned yet, but I’m sure we will soon enough.

Keith Olbermann anchored MSNBC’s evening coverage of the shooting, and he spent practically the entire evening trying to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin. You see, early last year Palin posted a map of the United States with little targets identifying the Congressional districts where the seats were held by politically vulnerable Democrats. One of the target districts was that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot Saturday. (Giffords survived the shooting, but six people, including a Federal judge who was apparently there just to do some grocery shopping, were killed and a dozen others were wounded.)

For good measure, he had Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center on to verify that talk of “death panels” and such inspires unstable people to go out and commit violence. The SPLC, by the way, considers people like Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ron Paul supporters and pro-lifers to be dangerous potential terrorists. In fact, it even considers Judge Andrew Napolitano, the most consistent supporter of civil liberties on television, to be a dangerous enabler of terrorists.

Also chiming in was Markos Moulitsas, operator of the left-wing website, Daily Kos (I won’t provide a link; if you’re curious, you can Google it yourself), who, in obvious reference to Palin’s “target” posting, tweeted, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.” I don’t know whether that was before or after he pulled a Daily Kos post from one of Giffords’s disgruntled constituents that was headlined, “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!” And who can forget Mouitsas’s own target on Giffords in 2008?

Jane Fonda also likes to tweet:

Progressive Arizona Rep Gabrielle Giffords is shot. In her ads, Sarah Palin had her targeted in a gun site. Inciting to violence.

Which reveals Fonda’s ignorance of, not just politics, but spelling as well. It’s gun sight, not gun site. A gun site is a gun emplacement, like the one in North Vietnam in which Fonda was photographed pretending to shoot down American planes. And Palin did not have “her” targeted. “Her” district was targeted. And Giffords is no “progressive”; she’s a “blue dog” Democrat, one of 19 who voted against keeping Nancy Pelosi as minority leader last week, an action which, as we saw in the post that was yanked from Daily Kos, angered a lot of “progressives”. (Gee, it looks like people on the Left have an even more pressing motive for violence against Rep. Giffords!)

Paul Krugman, who is always introduced by the liberal news media as “Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman”, especially when he is uttering a pronouncement on a subject about which he knows nothing, was a little — just a little — more restrained. “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was,” Krugman posted on his New York Times blog. “And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list”. In an update, he noted that Palin had called the shooting “tragic” and had expressed condolences to the victims and their families, but he dismissed this: “…right-wingers went wild over anyone who called 9/11 a tragedy, insisting that it wasn’t a tragedy, it was an atrocity.” He fails to mention that the reason “right-wingers” called 9/11 an atrocity is that it was a well-orchestrated attack, planned and financed by enemies of the United States, not the act of a single deranged individual.

Olbermann, Potok, Moulitsas, Krugman, Fonda — we know they all hate Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Hating is what they do for a living. Much less excusable were the so-called “news stories” from CBS News and the Associated Press. They are supposed to be in the business of reporting the news, not inventing it.

“Giffords has drawn the ire of the right in the last year, especially from politicians like Sarah Palin over her support of the health care bill,” said the AP in its initial report of the shooting. “It’s still not clear if the gunman had the health care debate in mind or was focused on his own unique set of political beliefs as witnessed in the Internet videos.”

Note that, at the time this was written, nothing — absolutely nothing — was known about the gunman or his possible motives. The reporters who wrote this piece of drivel are indulging in pure, politically motivated speculation. Sarah Palin is about as relevant to this story as Martha Washington.

Not to be outdone, CBS News, in a story headlined, “Sarah Palin Criticized Over Gabrielle Giffords Presence on ‘Target List'”, reported that “critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a ‘target list’ of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections.” The “critics” turn out to be people posting hostile comments on Palin’s Facebook page. Farther down in the story CBS tells us that “around the time of the Palin post, Giffords’s district office was vandalized with a window being shot out.” Yes, and around that time I finally got around to buying that digital camera I had had my eyes on for so long. Obviously, all these events are related.

While the attempts of the mainstream media and professional Palin-haters to drag the former Alaska governor’s name into this tragedy are nothing short of disgraceful, even worse is the performance of Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. After the shooting, Dupnik told reporters,

But again I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I believe has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

At the time he made this statement, Dupnik knew nothing about the suspect except his name. He was speculating about motive on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. In law enforcement — or in any other profession, for that matter — this is considered very unprofessional. Yet, this statement was the one the media ran with in their attempt to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. One fact the media did not report along with Dupnik’s statement is that last year, after Arizona enacted its immigration enforcement law, Dupnik described the law as “racist” and said he would refuse to enforce it. I guess we don’t have to speculate about his motive, do we?

It is pretty obvious what is going on here. As Rahm Emanuel said when the Obama Administration took office, “never let a crisis go to waste.” In other words, use the fear and confusion of a crisis to ram through a program the people otherwise would never accept. The Left is using the Tucson shooting in an attempt to silence the Right, to shut down debate. And they seem especially intent on using it to discredit Sarah Palin.

Which tells us two things. One, it is the Left, not the Right, that rejects calm, reasoned debate. The only “dialog” the Left wants to have is one in which they talk, and everyone else listens — and obeys.

The other thing this tells us is that the Left genuinely fears Sarah Palin. One would have to be utterly paranoid to believe that the “targets” on Sarah Palin’s map were anything other than symbolic. Certainly, there is no evidence — none whatsoever — that the suspected shooter, Jared Loughner, ever saw that map. But the Olbermanns, Moulitsases, Potoks, Krugmans and Fondas hope that if they tell this and other vicious lies about Palin often enough, they can eventually silence her.

And this makes me like Sarah Palin all the more.