Rebecca Mansour, a media aide to Sarah Palin's SarahPAC, told a talk radio program Sunday that there was "nothing irresponsible" about a map posted by the group, reportedly since removed, targeting 20 lawmakers for defeat for their health care votes, Ben Smith reports:

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. ...



"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." ...



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 images on the map do bear a resemblance to a surveyor's symbol, but Palin herself referred to it as a 'bulls-eye' icon' immediately after the election," Ben notes.

Giffords herself told MSNBC after her office was vandalized in March that the target list was part of an inflamed political rhetoric that veteran colleagues described as unprecedented. And she said people have to realize that words and firing people up have consequences.

"This is a situation where people ... need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list," Giffords said. "But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action."