WSJ article about the Tuscon murders...

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703667904576071943007100666.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

On all available evidence, Jared Lee Loughner is a mentally disturbed man who targeted Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and anyone near her in Tucson on Saturday because she was prominent and they were tragically accessible. He joins Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley Jr. and many others whose derangement led them to horrible acts of violence. Whatever confused political motives he expressed seem merely to be part of the maelstrom of his mental sickness.

In a better world, no one would attempt to exploit his madness for political gain. We would instead focus on the contributions of Ms. Giffords, by all accounts a laudable public servant. We would celebrate the lives of the other victims, and we would praise the survivors who intervened to tackle Mr. Loughner and disarm him before he could kill others—like 74-year-old retiree Bill Badger, who was grazed in the head by a bullet before helping to restrain the shooter.

But the shooting news had barely hit the wires on Saturday before the media's instant psychoanalysis put the American body politic on the couch instead of Mr. Loughner. "Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics," declared a story in the New York Times, which focused primarily on the tea party and Sarah Palin in the context of mass murder. The story even hauled in opposition to health-care reform.

Politico, the Beltway website, chimed in by quoting a "veteran Democratic operative" advising the White House "to deftly pin this on the tea partiers," just as "the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people" in 1995.

Shouldn't a publication insist that someone urging the exploitation of murder at least put his name on the record? The same goes for the anonymous Republican Senator quoted by Politico denouncing "town halls and cable TV and talk radio" in relation to Mr. Loughner.

Consider the kind of rhetoric that is being implicated as incendiary and beyond the pale. Mrs. Palin is being scored for having put contested Congressional seats such as Ms. Giffords's in cross hairs on her website before the last election. This is supposed to be an incitement to murder?

At least one left-wing site also put Ms. Giffords on such a "target" list because she is one of the Blue Dog Democrats who doesn't vote the party line. And yesterday right-wing websites were reprising this or that quote from Democrats and even President Obama invoking some martial or weapons metaphor to suggest they are as culpable. This is as offensive as the blame-Republican implications in the New York Times.

Judging from Mr. Loughner's own website, his mind was a mess of conspiracy theories, influenced by tracts like "Mein Kampf" and the "Communist Manifesto." His main complaint about government seems to be that he believes it is trying to control American "grammar." Yet this becomes an excuse for the media to throw him in with the tea partiers as "anti-government."

Perhaps we will learn more as the investigation unfolds. But so far this case couldn't be more different than that of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer who was motivated by Islamist hatred of America. Yet it is notable that the press corps was more restrained in identifying Major Hasan's Islamist role models than in immediately stretching to link Mr. Loughner with American politicians who universally denounce such violence.

Ponder the implication of this. A deranged soul shoots a public figure and we are supposed to change our political discourse and rule certain people and opinions out of bounds based on whatever incoherent ramblings Mr. Loughner published on his website?

Every two years we hold elections so that sane Americans can make a judgment on the policies of President Obama, John Boehner, tea party candidates and so on. But even though the people have recently had their say, in a typically raucous but entirely nonviolent fashion, we are supposed to put that aside and assess what a murderer with a mental illness has to tell us about the state of American politics, government and our national dialogue.

This line of argument is itself an attack on democratic discourse, and it is amazing that it even needs to be rebutted. Taking such an argument seriously will only encourage more crazy people to believe they can trigger a national soul-searching if they shoot at a political target. We should denounce the murders and the murderer, rather than doing him the honor of suggesting that his violence flows in any explainable fashion from democratic debate.

President Obama does have an opportunity here, but it is not to link—"deftly" or otherwise—his political opponents to Mr. Loughner. This would only further poison and polarize our public debate. Mr. Obama can lift the level of public discourse by explaining the reality of Mr. Loughner's illness and calling out those on the right and left who want to blame the other side for murder. That would be a genuinely Presidential act of leadership, and it would have the added advantage of being honest about the murders in Tucson.

At this point, I would argue the left wanted a situation like this to try to smear the tea parties, and attempt to silence Conservative Voices such as Glenn Beck.

Funny, the Left and the NeoCon Right have a lot in common.
According to the NeoCons and the Left scaredy cats, some stupid guy put plastic explosives in his underwear. Instead of laughing at him while jailing him. We decide that we must give up all civil rights at the airport. Let's get fondled.
According to the Left, some wacko shoots at a congresswomen and kills someone, then we must all give up free speech. Let's be silenced so that no one gets hurt.

It's almost as if Cointelpro never happened.



The militia and anti-goverment folk were responsible for Oklahoma and Mcveigh was their associate. Nothing was "pinned on" anybody.



There's an honest republican left in the senate. Who knew?

Basically this is the right trying to squirm it's way out of creating the political climate where this anti-government loon was fostered and encouraged into mounting a gun-toting physical attack on democracy itself.

This may be one of the few sane and intellectually sound articles on the tragedy that we'll ever come across. People who don't spend their whole lives focusing on the politics of every situation are the real intellectuals in this world.

There are lots of militias and only one of them was and only one was accused of being an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. No active member of any militia was ever even charged in connection to the bombing. Only 2 people were ever tried and both convicted: there was Terry Nichols, who was never a member of any militia, And Timothy Mc Veigh, who no longer associated with the Michigan militia at by the time the bombing occurred. After years and millions of dollars put into the investigation, there has been no evidence of any connection between the bombers and the militias. The militias got slandered by the president for political gain.

Likewise, the tea party never preached violence. They rallied people to go out and vote new people into congress and convince more people to go out and vote too. Inciting people to commit violence is already illegal here. All that isn't really relevant because the shooter was liberal, unlikely to have paid any attention to the tea party, Sarah Palin's website, or any right wing pundits. The shooter had a grudge against the Congresswioman for about 3 years before Sarah Palin posted the gunsight graphic on her website. Like I've been saying, this isn't a left wing-right wing political issue. That guy is insane and he was getting his ideas from delusions in his own head which do not match either left or right wing beliefs.




See my above statement. The shooter was not right wing.

So was that someone from here? Am I the only one who's just waiting for something like that to involve someone here?

Anyway, second time today this link is relevant.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011 ... ragedy.php

I beg you, please, politicize this tragedy.

You should work for Fox News, I am sure they could use a twist master like yourself.

Watch his videos. Yes , he was.

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

– John Green, father of nine-year-old Christina Green, who was killed in Saturday’s Tucson shootings.

When your avatar is Lady Liberty hoisting an assault rifle, your credibility is immediately suspect regarding the place of violent dissent within the public sphere.

You assume he views an assault rifle as a symbol of violence.

Nobody comes into this with clean hands. I think it is disingenuous for people at all points on the political spectrum to abdicate responsibility for the consequences of the demise of respectful political debate in the United States and in Canada.

We live in countries in which political debate has been reduced to sound bites, aphorisms and dire warnings. There seems to be a tacit assumption from all sides that the general public is neither interested in substantive discussion and, more insultingly, is incapable of understanding and participating in such a discussion.

When a person of fragile mental health hears messages that one side or the other is embarking on policies that are going to endanger us, it is not unreasonable to expect that such a person might perceive violence as a way of preventing that endangerment.

No, neither side pulled the trigger. Neither side encouraged him to pull the trigger. But both sides have contributed to a poisonous political atmosphere in which government and politicians are demonized, and ordinary citizens are left with a perception of powerlessness and disconnection.

Well you sure as hell don't make cupcakes with an assault rifle

+10

Food for thought...having met the man who was appointed to represent McVeigh....

1. There was really no evidence proving McVeigh did the crime. The case was based 100% on emotion on the jury. The testimony of his "accomplice" was inconsistent and not credible since it was obtained on the deal by the prosecutor to not seek the death penalty in his separate prosecution.

2. NEVER in the history of such events had two people managed to pull off such an attack by themselves. The is from the foremost experts on the topic of terrorism. In spite of the fact that the federal government spent 10 times as much as the defense to prosecute McVeigh and Nicoles and had the resources of every law enforcement agency at its disposal, the word of the accomplice cutting a deal with the prosecutor was their best evidence against McVeigh. No expert believes that OKC was the result of two people working alone, but the government failed to find any evidence of how these two did all of this without needing the testimony of Nicoles to make their case.

3. McVeigh was convicted largely due to jury tampering. An assistant working on the defense case acted WITHOUT permission and released some document to the press that allegedly claimed that McVeigh confessed to the crime (which he did not). This was exposed to the jury because the judge did not sequester them to prevent contamination. Because this taint originated from the defense side, it hurt any motion for a mistrial by the head of the defense team. To the time I met this man, he could not understand why this assistant did what he did.

4. The above action destroyed any hope of appeal. The strategy was that they would lose at trial but appeal on the sufficiency of the evidence, which he felt was not only the best chance at justice for McVeigh, but it was the only option because of how emotionally charged the trial was. Nothing was being decided on the evidence...just the emotion. Even the lead prosecutor being a man in a wheelchair was a move to play with the jury's sympathies. The appeal would focus on how the evidence COULD NOT support the conclusion the jury came to. Since there was a taint deliberately introduced, it created a Catch-22 in the appeal. The first angle would say, BUT FOR the taint, the jury COULD NOT have found a reason to convict. To uphold that would prove the jury could have convicted, which then leads to the original planned angle, BUT FOR the emotionally-charged atmosphere, the evidence DOES NOT uphold the finding of the jury.

5. Before McVeigh's execution, it was found that THOUSANDS of documents about the case were never disclosed to the defense in violation of discovery rules for criminal procedure. The judge ruled to let the execution go forward because McVeigh was obviously guilty and to do otherwise would be a miscarriage of justice. For those of you who don't understand....the only sanction that the state understands (or feels pain over) is to forfeit a prosecution when they don't play by the rules. Money is not a sanction to someone who can pay any amount of money demanded. The prosecution cheated. The courts WOULD NOT allow time to review all the withheld evidence to see if any of it could exonerate, or create reasonable doubt, as to McVeigh's guilt. This was a dangerous precedent set in the court system. The prosecution cheated at every level and put a man to death who clearly could not have done the act without help from others and the system rewarded this cheating rather than hold the state accountable to the very rules it created.

6. As a side note on politics. Bill Clinton reportedly credited Timothy McVeigh for helping him get re-elected. The OKC tragedy took national attention off of his scandals and put them elsewhere.

The above only addresses the trail of McVeigh. There are also relevant factual issues about the day itself that proves that something else was going on....with the bulk focusing on the fact that McVeigh's "bomb" COULD NOT do the damage necessary to produce the result we saw and that officials were on the scene almost immediately in full gear when they admitted to the press that they were at home and first learned of the incident after it happened is a major time discrepancy.

You also have the mass exodus of suspected terrorists from the USA after this incident (with Clinton giving to order to let them leave the USA...when most of them were stopped with bomb-making supplies in their possession).

A lot of stinky stuff going on.