On the Wild Side: Palin hides behind electronic communication channels

Palin wants to run for President but cant face the public except through a conservative commentator she sends emails to. She expresses her self through a slogan of reload while posting what some consider a hit list on the internet. Her peers advise her to face the public and not hide behind electronic communications. Even if she shows enough courage to do so, I wonder if this is the type of person we really want as our next President. If the average American posted a site like this would it not be seen as a terroristic threat? Now a days if one mentions the idea of wanting to have someone harmed it is considered a threat and a form of assault. Giffords expressed the concern that someone may want to follow Palin's not so subtle suggestion. Sure, we can't say that Loughner did what he did because of the site, or even was aware of the site. Never the less, this does express negativity and juvenile tendencies that I would feel would make one question whether this is a person we would want as our next President.
Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
Politics
Palin, Amid Criticism, Stays in Electronic Comfort Zone

Under criticism that her political rhetoric had helped create a climate for political violence, Sarah Palin addressed the issue in trademark fashion: via e-mail to the conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

“Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence,” Ms. Palin wrote to Mr. Beck in an e-mail that he read Monday on his radio program.
Her brief bursts of communication on the Internet — encouraging supporters with phrases like “Don’t retreat, reload!” — have kept her band of devotees behind her.
Ms. Palin’s close circle of advisers and supporters asserted that bringing her name up in connection with the Tucson shooting was unfair, and that she should be able to ignore it as liberals try to score political points or as the news media try to provoke controversy.
But even some Republicans sympathetic to Ms. Palin suggested that she needed to find a more substantive and nuanced means of addressing the criticism to avert any risk to her political standing and to maintain control of her political narrative.
Though there is no evidence that the person charged in the shootings, Jared L. Loughner, was a fan or a follower of Ms. Palin, critics immediately noted that she had released a fund-raising appeal in March using rifle cross hairs to mark the districts where she hoped to defeat a Democrat. One of them represented the district of Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona.
Ms. Giffords’s expressions of concern at the time, in an interview on MSNBC in which she said the graphic could have dangerous “consequences,” were frequently repeated over the weekend.
In an interview Monday with reporters at The New York Times, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, considered another contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, defended Ms. Palin, if only to a point. “There’s no indication at present that those cross hairs, Fox News, any particular commentator or show or set of remarks or person was a motivating factor in his thoughts,” Mr. Pawlenty said of Mr. Loughner.
When asked if he would have produced a similar map, Mr. Pawlenty said, “I wouldn’t have done it.”
But other Republicans said that if she was serious about becoming president, the shootings in Tucson might require Ms. Palin to step out of the political comfort zone she has defined for herself, whether she viewed the current criticism of her as fair or not.
The task may be all the more pressing given that polls, too, suggest that Ms. Palin has to pass the kind of “political character” test that a moment like this can present. In a Gallup poll of Republicans this month, Ms. Palin had the highest name recognition of the party’s potential presidential contenders, but also the highest percentage of Republicans with a strongly unfavorable opinion of her.
Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman for President George W. Bush, said Ms. Palin had to address the shootings with more than a Facebook post, though he said he would advise her to wait a few days as the political dust settled.
“At a time like this,” Mr. Fleischer said, “what the nation wants more than anything else is for people to rise above the nonsense and the politics and to be gracious. There’s nothing like letting people see your heart, your emotion. Facebook and Twitter don’t convey emotion.”
Read more at www.nytimes.com