The rap on Sarah Palin as governor in Alaska was always that in Sarah's world, everything was about Sarah. When the then-governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate fumbled her way through an interview with CBS's Katie Couric seemingly unable to answer the question of "what newspapers and magazines (do) you regularly read," some old friends and ex-employees of Palin joked that the problem was that Palin had the political sense to avoid the honest answer.

The honest answer for Palin, they said, was this: "I only read newspaper and magazine stories with my name in them."

Somehow, this was always a little hard to believe. There had to be more to Palin than that. After all, she had, much to her credit, kick-started her career as an Alaska politician with an effort to create transparency in state government. She couldn't possibly be as self-centered and self-involved as was claimed by some of those who knew her, or had known her, best.

But then came "Sarah Palin's Alaska," a show billed as being about Alaska but really about Sarah Palin, wherein she seemed to take every opportunity to snipe at those who have criticized her or those she simply doesn't like, including First Lady Michelle Obama.

And now, Palin is out with a video about the tragic shooting that left six dead in Tucson, Ariz., including a 9-year-old-girl and a federal judge, and the video is mainly about Sarah Palin. It opens, admittedly, with the obligatory nod to the dead and wounded -- one of whom, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the apparent target of a deranged shooter, remains in critical condition after being shot in the head.

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

"My heart broke for the innocent victims," Palin says. And everyone's heart should be broken. The shooting in Arizona was a senseless, incomprehensible act by a madman. Palin gets past that in about 30 seconds. The rest of her 7-minute, 43-second video is largely about how Sarah Palin shouldn't be held responsible for heating up the political rhetoric in America today.

Did that rhetoric have anything to do with the shooting in Tucson? Nobody knows. Quite possibly not.

But we do know this. We are all influenced by the environments in which we live, and the political environment in Arizona in recent years has been especially contentious and bitter. Arizona passed an anti-immigration law aimed directly at trying to stop the flow into America of Mexicans trying to find a better life. That law has become a subject of national and international debate. Palin herself got involved both in Arizona and in Alaska, where she attacked Sen. Republican candidate Lisa Murkowski for her decision to vote against funding for some sort of reverse "Berlin Wall" along the Arizona-Mexico border to keep the Mexicans out.

Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter in Arizona, posted online comments complaining about people who can't speak English. From his online posting, it is pretty clear Loughner was mentally unstable. Insanity, however, does not make one immune to the surrounding environment. It might, in fact, in some cases, make people more susceptible to it.

I have known crazy people. Some of them you could talk down during their paranoid moments, and some of them could be easily and sometimes accidentally talked up. The crazy people are really different from you and I only in that they have an even more tenuous hold on reality.

Now, all of you who have never, ever had a violent thought can stop reading. Everyone else should continue, because the rhetoric of politics in this country is a legitimate topic for discussion.