An aide to Sarah Palin said images of cross-hairs were never meant to evoke violence, in the Palin camp's first extended comment on yesterday's attack.
" We have nothing whatsoever to do with this," Palin aide. Rebecca Mansour told the talk radio host Tammy Bruce in an interview. "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps," she said, suggesting that it is a "surveyor's symbol."
There is "nothing irresponsible about our graphic," she said.
She called attempts to link Palin to the violence "obscene" and "appalling," and said she was "disgusted" with the politicization.
"We can't ban the words 'targeted swing districts' from the English language," she said. "We did nothing wrong here."
"I don't understand how anybody could be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this. Where I come from the person that is actually shooting is the one that's culpable," Mansour said, speculating that the shooter is a paranoid schizophrenic. "It seems that the people that knew him said that he was left-wing and very liberal -- but that is not to say that I am blaming the left."
"I never went out and blamed Al Gore or any environmentalist for the crazy insane person who went to shoot up the Discovery Channel," she said.
Mansour recalled that her father was shot and badly wounded by drug addicts when she was a child in Detroit, and cited his model of forgiveness and avoiding politicization and blame. Her father, then the Assistant Dean of the Business School at the University of Detroit, was shot in July 1984, she said this morning.
The interview was first reported by the Alaska Dispatch.
UPDATE: The images on the map do bear a resemblance to a surveyor's symbol, but Palin herself referred to it as a "'bullseye' icon" immediately after the election.
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