Even as the liberals’ Big Lie about conservatives’ responsibility for the massacre is being rapidly discredited by the facts, the liberals can’t let go of it

As reported in this morning’s New York Times, the FBI has found written statements in Jared Loughner’s home showing that he planned to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, but has found no indications as to why he targeted her. The article goes on to mention Loughner’s repeated disruptive behavior, in five classroom incidents involving campus police, which led to his being suspended from Pima Community College.

Notwithstanding the complete absence of any knowledge of Loughner’s motives for seeking to kill Giffords, the Times ends the story with this:

Nobody knew for sure what compelled the gunman. Ms. Giffords, who represents the Eighth District, in the southeastern corner of Arizona, has been an outspoken critic of the state’s tough immigration law, which is focused on identifying, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants, and she had come under criticism for her vote in favor of the health care law.

To repeat, there is no evidence that Loughner had any interest in the illegal alien issue or in Gifford’s stand on it. Indeed, there is no more evidence that Gifford’s position on the illegal alien law motivated Loughner’s attack on her, than there is evidence that Giffords’s position on Afghanistan or taxes or the funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting motivated his attack on her. Yet the Times couldn’t refrain from tossing off the hint that Loughner shot Giffords because of her opposition to Arizona’s controversial law on illegal aliens.

But here, I think, is the silver lining. That final, cheap-shot paragraph in the Times article may be the fading echo of the leftist media’s attempt to blame the Tucson massacre on the right. The facts showing that Loughner was a mentally ill person who had nothing to do with conservatism have been widely disseminated. The left realizes that they can no longer sustain their Big Lie that Loughner was a conservative motivated by “conservative anger.” But the skunks at the Times couldn’t completely abandon their pet notion that the massacre was caused by right-wing hatred, since that charge, as Robert C. insightfully shows in the previous entry, is central to their own ideological identity. “To the believer,” Robert writes, “the unfounded accusation itself is offered as a testimonial of belief to other fellow believers.”

Liberalism, as I have said many times, is not about reality; it is about the perpetual reenactment of the sacred liberal “script” in which virtuous, inclusive liberals demonstrate their virtue by suppressing bigoted conservatives.

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Paul K. writes:

Very insightful post.

The various “ideas” Loughner has babbled about have no particular coherence; Karl Marx, gold-backed currency, and government mind control are all merely buzzwords with which he expresses his paranoia. Whether he picks up one of these terms from the right or left wing is irrelevant. Is the lunatic who thinks he’s Napoleon more right-wing than the lunatic who thinks he’s Jesus Christ?

Jim C. writes:

Good post. This incident begs 1 substantive question: What is society supposed to do with its violent paranoid schizophrenics? We need to bring back institutionalization for the Loughners of the world.

LA replies:

Of course. Let us remember that de-institutionalization was not done primarily for money-saving reasons, but for cultural and political reasons. It is one of the works of liberalism which must be reversed.

“This incident begs 1 substantive question.”

The word is “one,” not “1”. It’s time to stop the spreading use of numbers in place of words.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 10, 2011 05:47 AM | Send