The evidence is now in, and what little seems to be known about accused Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner from people that knew him was that “he was leftwing” and “liberal in wanting to change the way the world was run, we both wanted to. He took it to an extreme I never would’ve.”
Does that mean that Arizona Democratic Congressman Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a “left wing extremist?” No. When you read his manifesto, you see that his political leanings, such as they are, were not “left” or “right” so much as “completely farking loony toons batshit insane.” His manifestos jump from subject to subject more quickly than a jittering tweaker flips channels on a TV remote. To paraphrase an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton contest, ideas seem to tumble around randomly in his head, making and breaking connections like a load of laundry in a dryer without Cling Free. They have some of the same quality of argument as Time Cube Guy: It’s less that his manifesto is wrong than that you can’t actually understand what he’s trying to say.
(Boing Boing has even more of his manifestos up, and the Time Cube Guy vibe only gets stronger. Except for the fact that Gene Ray never killed anyone…)
Loughner’s liberalism didn’t make him crazy, his crazy made him crazy.
I mean, how crazy do you have to be to expelled from a pre-algebra class? “Solve for X.” “Admit it! X is a total lie!!!! There is no X, only Zuul!”
Which makes it all the more galling how quickly The Usual Left Wing Suspects tried to pin his deeds on the Tea Party in general and Sarah Palin specifically. Never mind that military terminology has been in politics for a long time, or that liberals have done the exact thing they’re now jumping on Palin for.
Every time anyone even remotely connected to conservative causes commits a violent act, the nutroots and their media enablers are quick to label them a “right wing extremist,” but anyone with demonstrable left wing sympathies is a “lone nut.” (Indeed, they’re pretty blatant about it.) Indeed, one of the most famous assassins in American history was a known communist sympathizer who defected to the Soviet Union, but you never hear Lee Harvey Oswald described by the media as a “left-wing extremist.”
And don’t forget that the far left’s open and oft-stated desire to assassinate George W. Bush. Thus the attempt by prominent liberals to make Loughner a Tea Partier is more than a little contemptible. But such contemptible behavior is no longer surprising; it’s merely what they do.
(Hat tips to Instapundit (more than once), Powerline, and a few random Fark posters.)