Crosshairs and Consequences...

[one_voice]

The 2012 Presidential Campaign Officially Begins

No author could get away with putting that sequence of events into a novel or movie; the symbolism is too heavy-handed, the drama too hackneyed. It's too unrealistic for anything but real life. But it really happened: On Saturday, Jared Lee Loughner allegedly shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, fatally wounding six, including federal judge John McCarthy Roll and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green.


Also unrealistic: the reactions to the shooting. In an editorial published at 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, conservative magazine National Review quickly moved to apoliticize the shooter: "Jared Loughner is clearly deranged, his fevered mind drawn to irrational extremes, whether those of Adolf Hitler or Karl Marx." Not our fault, they're saying, and how dare you even try to make it political by implying it was political? By Tuesday morning, "thoughtful" right-wing hack David Brooks was saying in the New York Times that "the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it" and that charges that Loughner's actions were political "were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky."

But an attempted assassination of a member of the United States House of Representatives is by definition a political act. Though the murder of Judge Roll appears to have been a terrible misfortune—he just happened to be in the shopping center parking lot and wandered over to say hello—the assault on Giffords was premeditated.

Loughner kept a three-year-old form letter from Giffords in a locked safe in his room; he had complained to friends that she didn't live up to his expectations; he didn't find her smart or authentic enough, and she was presumably not willing to listen to his incoherent ideas about currency and mind control. In that safe, he also had documents referring to "my assassination," along with the phrase "I planned ahead" scrawled on an envelope. On some level, Loughner knew the attack was a political choice, even if his twisted ideas didn't align with any reasonable person's idea of a consistent ideology.

*snip*

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/crosshairs-and-consequences/Content?oid=6265645

[elocs]

1. My guess is that the right wing was scared to death that this could have been done by one of theirs,

one who is not mentally ill but who is a fanatical idealogue and who enthusiastically embraced the hate talk and clearly understood the gun metaphors being used.

[LostHighway]

2. The interesting thing is that we don't know the contents of those letters

We just know that the letters exist. It would be interesting to know what he actually wrote about Giffords.