If The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf were indeed Jared Lee Loughner’s preferred pamphlets—then we also know this about the young man responsible for shooting six people to death and wounding 12 “outside of a Tucson, Arizona, grocery store”: He is consistent on matters ideological.
Left-liberals like the former White House communications director Anita Dunn (of the Mao Moment) will tell you that their communist heroes share nothing with fascism’s icons. Not true.
“For many decades,” wrote Ayn Rand, “The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property.”
On the other hand, Loughner, who shot US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, through the head, also liked some good stuff: Animal Farm and We The Living.
And Loughner’s penchant for this YouTube Disturbia portends anger, alienation, even pain.
UPDATE I: SHAPING THE NARRATIVE. Intoning on CNN, Donna Lemon was keen to shape this crime as a function of the hot-bed of political hatred that Arizona has allegedly become. Pima County AZ Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has furnished the necessary hyperbole:
“But again I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I believe has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
Expect this impetus to gather momentum. “Our Overlords Who Art in DC” are worried sick about their own asses. To wit, Speaker John Boehner has suspended the people’s business: a vote to repeal the hulking healthcare bill. Instead, our sovereigns are likely to follow this crime with a rash of laws guaranteeing their safety against The Great Unwashed—at a great cost to said Unwashed.
The Great Unwashed will go along. Fishermen brave treacherous seas to do a job that is the most dangerous on earth, bar that of farmer (Boer) in South Africa. But, no, our elected representatives must be shielded from the vagaries of their relatively easy jobs. Sacred Cows.
Murder is the ultimate evil. Using the political process to steal from some subjects and give to others is also evil. Let us not discount that moral imperative.
What else to expect:
• Draconian security around The Sacred Cows. If one of them deigns to grace the local store again, it will be with a security detail that’ll shut down the store and the suburbs around it.
• Some kind of harm to law-abiding gun owners. No crime against an official can go without doing damage to citizens’ right of self-defense.
• A renewed war on all things Arizona, including on the eminently reasonable immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070.
UPDATE II (Jan. 9): “THE LEFT CRANKS OUT THE BIG LIE.” Via Larry Auster:
Remember when President Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Remember when conservatives were blamed for the supposed rash of black church burnings in the late 1990s? Now conservatives and supporters of enforcing U.S. immigration laws are being blamed for the mass murder in Tucson yesterday.
This is the Big Lie, which Hitler, one of its top practitioners, defined as a lie so colossal that “no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” And here is the particular form that the Big Lie takes in the current instance: falsely blaming one’s target for the very thing that you are doing to him.
The left, through its wild charge that “conservative hatred” is responsible for the Tucson mass murder, is spreading hatred of conservatives. The left is actually doing to conservatives what it falsely accuses conservatives of doing to liberals. That is the Big Lie.
AND:
“The media have not bothered to mention some of the more ‘rude and crude’ comments our esteemed ‘Genius in Chief’ Barry has made over the past couple of years. Lines such as, ‘If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun,’ or, ‘We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back,’ [‘Rosa Parks could not be reached for comment’], or his remark that middle-class white Americans ‘cling to guns and religion and dislike of people who are different,’ or, most recently, his shocking comment to Hispanics that they should look at Republicans who oppose amnesty as their ‘enemies’ whom they should ‘punish.’ Naturally, the media do not suggest that Obama has been planting hatred of white conservatives in the hearts of liberals and minorities.”