Jared Lee Loughner’s picture from his MySpace profile (since removed)
Jane Fonda, lots of my liberal classmates on the class listserv, and the New York Times were busy, chinstroking, and fingerpointing at the Tea Party Movement and Sarah Palin for “targeting” Rep. Giffords’ district.
“It is fair to say — in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric — that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired,†said a statement issued by the leaders of the National Jewish Democratic Council. Ms. Giffords is the first Jewish woman elected to the House from her state.
During last spring’s health care votes, the language used against some lawmakers was ratcheted up again, with protesters outside the House hurling insults and slurs. The offices of some Democrats, including Ms. Giffords’s in Tucson, were vandalized.
Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,†Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.â€
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James Delingpole spoke for all of us on the right.
How sick do you have to be to start making political capital out of the killing of six people including a nine-year old girl, long before anyone has the remotest clue what the murderer’s motives were, or his political affiliations, or his state of mind?
Not sick at all, to judge by the response of so many US Tweeters in the immediate aftermath of the Arizona shootings. When you’re a liberal, it seems, cloying sanctimoniousness, grotesque moral posturing, double standards, hypocrisy and cynical, malevolent smearing all come as naturally and healthily as breathing.
As Toby Harnden reports, barely were the bodies cold when the liberal fascists started pointing the finger of blame: it was Sarah Palin’s fault, of course; Sarah Palin’s and Glenn Beck’s and, of course, the Tea Party’s. Definitely not a crazed killing spree by a deeply confused young man, no, sirree. After all, as Rahm Emmanuel would say, you must “never let a crisis go to waste.â€
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So what were the shooter’s, Jared Lee Loughner, politics actually like? This description, reported elsewhere by the New York Times itself, does not make Loughner sound exactly like a Movement Conservative.
Another former high school classmate said that Mr. Loughner may have met Representative Giffords, who was shot in the head outside the Safeway supermarket, several years ago.
“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,†the former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote in a series of Twitter feeds Saturday. “I haven’t seen him since ’07 though. He became very reclusive.â€
“He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was ‘stupid & unintelligent,’ †she wrote.
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On MySpace, Loughner describes his reading tastes and, on YouTube, he seems to have shared some of his political opinions. Arizona Daily Star:
In a MySpace profile, Loughner said “My favorite interest was reading, and I studied grammar. Conscience dreams were a great study in college.”
He lists among his favorite books “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto”. But he also includes a broad variety of other titles, including: “Animal Farm,” “Brave New World,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
In another YouTube message, Loughner said: “I know who’s listening: Government Officials, and the People. Nearly all the people, who don’t know this accurate information of a new currency, aren’t aware of mind control and brainwash methods. If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn’t have happen.”
“In conclusion, my ambition – is for informing literate dreamers about a new currency; in a few days, you know I’m conscience dreaming! Thank you!”
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HillBuzz points out that you could just as easily blame Kos for publishing the vitriolic speech that inspired the shooter.
Glock 9mm, used in the shootings, pictured on Loughner’s MySpace page atop a US History book
SDD
The response on this from liberals is utterly predictable. We have lots of psychotics in this country. Every twenty years or so one of them directs his actions toward a politician instead of a neighbor or co-worker. Suddenly the cause becomes not the psychosis, but the assumption that he was driven to his action by something the rest of of us did. He was “inflamed” or “inspired” by angry words or some web site or (most laughably) the rhetoric of a political movement. We are supposed to believe that the actions of some loony are much the product of his environmental influences, and it is those influencers who must be silenced in order to “prevent” another killing twenty years from now. Yet somehow that same logic doesn’t apply to the daily bombardment of media exhortation to all sorts of twisted activity. Want to promote pedophilia? No problem. Anything goes. Glorify teenage sex? Just hand them a condom. Sadistically violent movies and video games? Ah, just harmless creative expression. Why is it more logical to assume that Jared Laughner was driven to shooting people by political rhetoric than by a media bombardment of violence and perversion? Or by anything but his own deranged mind? The man had in his backyard an altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges. Most assuredly the devilish work of the Tea Party.
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