Weigel

Act I of the politicization of the Tucson shooting was pundits and liberal politicians asking if right-wing rhetoric contributed to the violence. Act II was conservatives rejecting this and pointing out, by the way , that the media did not rush to judgment when Nidal Hassan killed 12 people at Fort Hood.

Act III is the conservative fightback, as exemplified by this message from the Tea Party Express to its members.

Dear Friends: 

The attack on conservatives and the tea party movement has continued over the past 24 hours.  Media figures and liberal activists continue to falsely suggest that Rush Limbaugh, Gov. Sarah Palin and the tea party movement had anything to do with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. 

They've launched this attack even though they know it is a total and complete lie. 

During the past few days friends of the shooter, Jared Loughner, have stepped forward to say that they knew him to be a political liberal.  He admired the Communist Manifesto and burned the American flag.*

But many in the news media and the political Left are nonetheless still trying to use this awful tragedy to make people think that somehow Limbaugh, Palin and the tea party were responsible for this attack. 

They are doing it for one reason:  it is an attempt to silence us and make this patriotic, constitutionalist movement controversial - so they can try and stop the momentum this tea party movement has built.

Last night on MSNBC and liberal websites, we here at the Tea Party Express were called despicable and shameless because we won't back down.

Well guess what, friends - we're not going to back down. Not when we have nothing to apologize for, and certainly we won't just sit back while the media and liberals think they can slander us by calling us responsible for a mass murder. 

Instead, do you know what we're going to do?  We're going to fight back with even more determination and pride.  Since we have to "pay" to get our message heard (the liberal media bias is on display like never before with this tragedy), we're asking our supporters to help us fight back.

We want to have our largest fundraising day in the history of our organization and we need your help to achieve this success. Please, make a contribution online right now to the Tea Party Express - CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE.

*This is not true, by the way. Loughner's YouTube page listed The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books, alongside Alice in Wonderland and Ayn Rand's We the Living. He also included a video of a flag-burning on his "favorite" page -- he did not himself burn a flag.