The blame game gets even more crazy

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That does not mean there is no threat from the right. The militia movement would be classified as right-wing. Roeder (the killer of Tiller) was undoubtedly a right-winger, and there have been a number of politically-motivated right-wing murderers in the past few years. Political violence comes overwhelmingly from the right (note that Obama receives more than 4 times as many death threats as Bush ever did, so trying to say the left does it too is BS).

These clarifications should not be necessary, but conservatives are probably stupid enough to need this spelled out for them:
1) No, I am not saying all conservatives, or even any mainstream conservatives, are violent killers.
2) No, I am not saying anything in particular about the recent shooting in Arizona. I've seen leftists try to pin that on the right; I have also seen right-wingers try to pin it on the left in exactly the same manner. I can dig out video clips if you don't believe me. I'm not pinning it on anyone except the guy who did the shooting.

So you dismiss the leftist books he loved but oh the right wing books are signs that he is a deranged right wing nut.

Are you too partisan to recognize that you're not being objective and looking at the facts or are you just dishonest?

1. I agree they both have crazy eyes.

Eh, when a large amount of peoples politically suddenly seem to differ from what their government is implementing a relatively violent reaction should be expected. The extremism will calm down if the new house makes a show of moderating Obama.(prediction) The left is not an exception from this behavior, political violence is coming more from the right because of the government is currently moving towards the left from the right, the same behavior would come from the left if the situation where reversed.

I didn't think you where the type to call a political movement(or the majority of the members of a political movement, the difference is negligible in this context) stupid.

You are wrong, for two reasons:
1) The Obama administration isn't even implementing these alleged "far-left" policies that have right-wing nuts freaked out.

2) Obama has received more than 400% as many death threats as Bush did, so no, the left would not behave the same way if the situation were reversed. And note that Bush was a much more controversial figure than Obama, and did not have nearly the kind of mandate going into his first term that Obama had. Imagine for one moment what the right-wing/Tea Party reaction would have been if Obama lost the popular vote and only narrowly won the electoral vote when the Supreme Court voted along purely partisan lines to support him, and tell me you aren't full of crap.

Imagine for one moment what the right-wing/Tea Party reaction would have been if Obama lost the popular vote and only narrowly won the electoral vote when the Supreme Court voted along purely partisan lines to support him, and tell me you aren't full of crap.

(I was explaining from the view point of the people we are talking about), even though thats usually what the behavior is labeled as, even if the facts say otherwise.

if any tea party at all where to develop in that environment it would likely have huge differences than the current, likely being both weaker and less driven.

David Frum thinks marijuana is to blame





New York Daily News apparently thinks he's a satanist



Apparently the guy was an atheist, Tea Party supporting, communist, hard money advocating, liberal, flag burning, satanist, far left, far right, pot smoking, constitutionalist, nihilist, independent, military reject, antisemite, racist.

I seriously hate everyone that is trying to further their agenda with this tragedy. You people make me sick.

The questions that I want answered is why did this guy fall thru the cracks? All the signs were there. Apparently he has given death threats before and if he had been prosecuted for even one of those he would not of been able to buy his weapon. What medications was this kid on? Why the hell wasn't there any police at this event? Why did it take 15 minutes for them to show up to the scene? I just see complete incompetence on so many parts.

ABC has interviewed Zach Osler, a friend of the Tucson shooter Jared Lee Loughner. If you're trying to decipher Loughner's worldview, Osler's comments offer two important clues.

First: Osler flatly rejects the theory that the killer was driven by the political rhetoric found on cable news and AM radio. Loughner, he says,

did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn't listen to political radio. He didn't take sides. He wasn't on the left. He wasn't on the right.

Second: Loughner turns out to be a fan of Zeitgeist, a feature-length online documentary that is one-third arguments that Jesus never existed and religion is an evil fraud, one-third 9/11 trutherism, and one-third conspiracy theories about bankers. There's been a lot of speculation out there about one of Loughner's comments on YouTube, "I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver!" -- a sentence that may sound like something a gold bug would say, except that Loughner was also prone to describing strange schemes for an "infinite source of currency," which is precisely the sort of suggestion gold standard advocates would reject. His interest in Zeitgeist clears things up a bit. The movie belongs to the old money-crank tradition, which stretches from the Greenback Party to the Social Credit movement and from Ezra Pound to Alan Watts. The film's chief argument against the Fed is that it is a private institution that profits by lending money at interest; the filmmaker prefers an "interest-free independent currency" that isn't created by private banks.

Is this left-wing or right-wing? Money cranks come in both flavors, but in the case of Zeitgeist the labels "left" and "right" are pretty useless descriptors. The best label would probably be "New Age paranoia." If you've ever gone browsing in an occult bookstore (and you really should; it's like browsing in a science fiction bookstore, only the authors really believe the stories they're writing, or pretend to), you may have seen a shelf labeled "conspiracies" right alongside the sections marked "astrology" or "Tarot." People who write about fringe politics often miss the extent to which New Agers serve as a transmission belt, allowing ideas from the left, the right, and the counterculture -- not to mention more outré folks like the UFO buffs -- to slide from one subculture to another.

Zeitgeist obviously isn't the end of this story. Loughner may have been influenced by the picture, but he incorporated its ideas into his own crazycakes combination (which also seems to include an obsession with lucid dreaming and an interest in Philip K. Dick-style reality-bending movies such Donnie Darko and A Scanner Darkly). The most important point here is that it's a mug's game to try to fit this guy into a neat little category like "right" or "left." Like many killers and would-be killers before him, Loughner belongs to the very far end of the political long tail.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/12/the-new-age-assassin

L.A. Times: "Loughner's ramblings appear rooted in far right"

Posted on January 12, 2011, 12:23PM | Matt Welch

That would be the news pages, not the Opinion section. How, at this late date in combing through the wreckage of the Tucson shooter's brain and paper trail, do you arrive at that conclusion? The same way newspapers did just after the massacre: by using as your primary factual source not anybody who actually interacted with the guy, but instead the factually fallible partisans at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Most wind up concluding that Loughner suffered from mental problems. But experts said that several oft-repeated phrases and concepts — his fixation on grammar conspiracies, currency and the "second United States Constitution" — seem derived from concepts explored with regularity among elements of the far right.

"What you can see across the board in his writings is the idea that you can't trust the government — that the government engages in mind control against its citizens," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long monitored the radical right.

Loughner's assertion that he would not "pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver" is a running theme among right-wing opponents of the Federal Reserve system.

"The people who talk about the manipulation of currency follow it backward from the IRS to the Federal Reserve...that it's run by either secret, powerful elites or secret, powerful Jewish elites," said Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a nonprofit group that also monitors right-wing extremism.

First, note the code words "experts" and "seem," crucial to so much truly awful speculative journalism from time immemorial. Second, this formulation would lead the unsuspecting reader to conclude that Loughner's currency-talk was limited to or generally characterized by complaints of the greenback not being backed by precious metals, which is indeed a longstanding source of concern among a measurable minority on the right, far right, and Planet Libertarian.

But Loughner, as even the most cursory glance at his non-L.A. Times-quoted ramblings will show, used "currency" as a bizarre, all-encompassing metaphor, overlapping with grammar, mind-control, conscious dreaming, and God knows what else. As Jesse Walker observed yesterday, the shooter participated in online fora with actual gold bugs, and they thought his "infinite source of currency" talk was plum loco. In fact, you have to exert some editing effort to produce a Loughner quote on the gold standard that sounds anything like your modal Ron Paul fan. As Patrick "Patterico" Frey points out in a rebuttal to the L.A. Times piece, the one quote the paper used was surrounded by this unincluded context:

In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, I can't trust the current government because of the ratifactions: The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.

No! I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver!

No! I won't trust in God!

If that "seems" like a routine emission from the far right, you're either not actually familiar with the far right, or your hatred of it is activated by the mere presence of keywords like "Constitution" and "currency," which overwhelm whatever sense of logic and fairness you might have brought to the issue.

Chip Berlet, on the other hand, is quite perky about your white supremacy. We know about the SPLC, but what about this Chip Berlet fellow, and his assertion that "the people who talk about" currency manipulation–which, by the way, every government engages in, by the act of having a quasi-governmental body set interest rates–are either A) anti-Star Chamber, B) anti-Semites, or C) both? Here's who Chip Berlet is: Someone who thinks that both the Tea Party and libertarianism can be explained by white racism:

It's an AstroTurf campaign to fill people with scare stories and misinformation. Even if these people say, 'No one told me to come,' they are getting direct mailings telling them to go to meetings and ask questions. They are angry because they feel displaced. They feel pushed out of the way by liberals, people of color and immigrants. It's the story they have told themselves to explain why they haven't made it in America. It's racial anxiety fueled by a bad economy, a black president and disparities at a time when white people's supremacy is being challenged.

Now we have a black president, and for the most part whites didn't riot in the street. But it doesn't mean that most of us who are white men in America don't wonder what that means. They see the president as the head of a bureaucracy, and they are unsettled by the idea of having a black boss: How am I supposed to act? What am I supposed to do? Does that mean white people are losing power? The short answer is: Yeah, deal with it. [...]

It is a backlash against social liberalism and it's rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back.

Would you quote this man as an "expert" on right-wing rhetoric?

Look, while I'm glad that Andrew "Fifth Column" Sullivan, David "Unpatriotic Conservatives" Frum, and Matt "They're full of s**t. All of them" Taibbi are all so suddenly concerned about the level of divisive vitriol in our national discourse, the persistent attempts on the news pages (let alone in the Twitter feeds of debased partisans) to link this atrocity to beliefs held by millions of Americans, despite an utter lack of evidence so far (as I'm aware) about what political messages this crazy person was consuming and reacting to, reveals much, much more about those connecting the dots than it does the ideologies they are attempting to discredit. This goes for Rush Limbaugh, too.

This guy? He was just crazy. And he was!Question: Where were the major-media thumbsuckers about the dangerous rhetoric of radical environmentalism after James Jay Lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel and issued a list of specific (and insane!) environmental policy demands? Answer: Outside of a few sprinkled non-liberals, they largely did not exist. Even though Lee was far more explicitly and identifiably ideological, even though his views did have some overlap with the outer fringes of environmental Malthusianism, most MSM types, if they discussed extreme green rhetoric at all in the wake of the incident, concluded that Lee's manifest weirdness and grievance-fueled fixation on the Discovery Channel trumped all similarities and chains of causation. This was, I think, a defensible response.

Why so different now? The answer is obvious: We are nearly two years into a media panic about grassroots right-of-center/limited-government activity and rhetoric. They have been predicting imminent race-fueled mayhem for so long that there is no way a lack of connective evidentiary tissue was going to stand in the way of pinning this murder spree on The Climate of Hate. In the immortal words of Paul Krugman, which stand as the best definition of "confirmation bias" I've seen yet,

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

You think you would have seen this photo before if she was a Democrat who had been shit-stomped by Tea Party protesters?The media wasn't expecting a Malthusian crime spree, just as it wasn't suspecting scruffy anarchist protesters to stomp on and break the leg of a Republican woman outside of a New Orleans fundraiser (note: I don't know if they ever nabbed anyone in that almost totally ignored case; the point is that if there was an existing anarchists-attack-Republicans storyline and fear, it would have made national headlines long before any arrests). Much of the world's most damaging journalism–initial reports on Hurricane Katrina, for one of a thousand examples–are a direct result of confirmation bias overwhelming the industry's traditional standards of verification. Embattled Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik may well turn out to be the analogue to former New Orleans Police Superintendent Edwin Compass in this case: official permission to run with a story that just seems like it must be true.

Only this this time the L.A. Times cannot claim the excuse of not having access to a catastrophic reporting zone. And in making tenuous claims between rhetoric and action, the newspaper has succeeding in poisoning the very well it is trying to clean. Even if evidence surfaces to support the hunch, it will not excuse the speculative pre-writes.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/12/la-ti ... amblings-a

That makes somewhat more sense, but you have to recognize that the labeling is the issue here, not what the government is actually doing. So your point is completely moot, as the issue is deluded crazies on the right, not extremism or radicalism from the government.

That's the point. The left-wing opposition to Bush was not, and never would have been, nearly as violent as the right-wing opposition to Obama. Therefore your claim that "the same behavior would come from the left if the situation were reversed" is a load of crap.

As to relative political power, Bush had majorities in both houses of Congress, and strongarmed and threatened the Democrats until they agreed to unilateral disarmament on the issue of the filibuster.