By: Mike Thurau

If you’re still looking for a way to rationally understand why Jared Laughner shot 20 people at a Gabriel Gifford rally, you won’t find it here.  And as long as I’m giving away free advice, I may as well tell you that you won’t find it anywhere else either.  There will never be a rational explanation as to why Jared Laughner shot 20 people because Jared Laughner is not rational.  He is demented.  I’ll leave it to a professional psychologist to pin an actual diagnosis on him, but Laughner seems to be flying all the red flags of schizophrenia.  

As I read the analysis’s of Laughner’s patchwork manifestos and cobbled-together, text based video blogs on the various news and opinion sites I frequent, I am struck both by how desperately the reasonable among us are trying to make sense of this rampage and how futile their efforts are.  The only place the actions of Jared Laughner made sense was in his own deformed mind, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that they no longer make sense there either.

However, I do not want to dismiss this shooting as the spontaneous outburst of a lone lunatic.  Indeed, to simply sweep Jared under the rug as a boy-born-bad would be to throw away the silver lining of incite this tragedy can offer us.  Jared is not alone in America’s gallery of political assassins.  I don’t need to go back more than a few decades to conjure up examples of lone lunatics trying to (and often succeeding) to take the lives of men and women who are only marginally connected to the decisions being made in the halls of power.

●        Joe Stack: Who flew his private airplane into an IRS building to protest how poor the government was making him with all of its taxation. While it may not have been the most successful terrorist act in human history, a man flying his personal aircraft into a Federal building to protest his destitution is probably the most ironic.

●        Timothy McVeigh: Who detonated a truck filled with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City as an act of vengeance for Federal persecution of his radical right comrades in Wacco Texas, and Ruby Ridge.  It is speculated that the lawyer who defended McVeigh will also defend Laughner.

●        Ted Kaczynsk: Who mailed explosive packages to numerous government bureaucrats and academics in an effort to halt the advance of human technological progress. While he is an Anarchist by his own definition, his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future contains an entire chapter about the dangers of fraternizing with Leftists.

●        Scott Roeder: Who shot a doctor that performed abortions while he was attending church for being insufficiently Christian.  Like so many of his counterparts, Roeder chooses the most ironic way possible to commit his crimes.  It’s men like this that blur the line between stupid and crazy. Then again, who says you have to pick just one?

●        Byron Williams: Less famous than other American Fascists because he was successfully apprehended by police while he was on his way to a shooting spree of civil liberties lawyers and environmentalists, he remains notable due to admitting in an interview, “I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.”

The list goes on much longer than this, especially if you include people like John Hinckley or Arthur Bremer who’s attacks are political only due to the stature of their target, their motives being little other than personal madness. For the time being, I would toss Loughner into the Hinkley/Bremer category, although he doesn’t fit there as neatly as they do.

While Loughner’s conspiracy theories were little more than paranoid daydreams, they bear an uncanny albeit coincidental similarity to many similar delusions adhered to by a much larger audience within the political Right. While the political Right seems to be more than comfortable accepting Loughner’s insanity, the self aware amongst them must be more than a little bit uncomfortable with the similarity of his rants and rants of their own lunatic fringe. When A is arguing with B on some particular point (be it the gold standard, existence of shadow governments, etc) the inclusion of a third party, party C, changes the equation if they both agree that C is insane. If C ends up sounding a lot like B, even though C is seldom fully coherent enough to complete a cohesive thought, the credibility and mental aptitude of B should be called into question by both A and B alike.

Don’t count on this happening though. Already the Right wing myth machine has scooped this story up and is chiseling it into another part in their “think with your gut” narrative. A Twitter post describing Loughner as “quite liberal” appears on almost every site with enough disregard for intelligent journalism to include Twitter posts as insight into the mind of Jared Loughner. Furthermore, Beck, Limbaugh and all the usual suspects have seized the opportunity to accuse the Left of exploiting this tragedy by politicizing it. Expecting them to realize the hypocrisy of calling attention to the fact that Loughner read the Communist Manifesto when calling him a left wing loony while saying this shooting ought not be politicized would be to expect too much. A more likely scenario is they are perfectly aware of their hypocrisy and they simply don’t care.

An e-mail blast sent out shortly after the shooting occurred across the Tea Party Nation mailing list stated that “The left is coming and will hit us hard on this, we need to push back harder with the simple truth.” To begin with, “is coming and will” implies that they have not yet been “hit hard” but they expect to be, therefore justifying their efforts to “push back harder”. Granted, Sarah Palin’s map of political enemies, using cross-hairs to mark their electoral districts, got more eyeball time than when it first debuted. Furthermore, articles linking Loughner’s actions to Beck and Palin’s rhetoric have become almost common place. Its not whether or not Loughner is a member of the radical right that worries me (ideologues require a certain degree of mental stability after all) it’s that he fits right in without even trying that I find so troubling.

It is enough to ridicule Glen Beck for having beliefs that are not accurate without having to further accusing him of inciting shooting sprees amongst the mentally ill. Jared Loughner is responsible for Jared Loughner and he shot 20 people because he is crazy. However, the fact that an event such as this one fits so neatly into the rhetoric and expectations of what has become mainstream conservatism should be a source of discomfort for the entire political spectrum.

The Bush=Hitler rhetoric was present from 2000 to 2008, but not in Congress or amongst anyone running for office of national visibility. The Left’s fringe stayed on the fringes (despite our best efforts) and a clear distinction between the mainstream and radical elements of the national debate was maintained. Protests against the war were massive, but they were not armed. Rhetoric was heated, but violent revolution was never seriously put on the table. Arrests were made, but only for civil disobedience and non-violent resistance to a system that has gone terribly, horribly awry. This has been the chief difference between the Right and the Left to the apolitical observer as far as I can tell.

The Right champions force, coercion and fear while the Left still tries to win hearts and minds with reason and empathy. This difference has been maintained through years of ever greater violence and vitriol emanating from the Right, and the Left has more frequently blamed itsself, rather than its enemies, for its shortcomings. When Tim Proffit stomped on Lauren Valles head at a Rand Paul rally, and then mustered up the audacity to demand a public apology for being videotaped, many of us (not me) blamed Moveon.org for her concussion, because they were the organization that put her in that situation in the first place. This is the difference between us and them. And it is a difference I no longer see the utility of maintaining. In my experience, those who oppose violence at all costs are those who have never experienced violence – real violence – first hand. It is time the Left learned the political limits of appealing to sympathy.