While some liberals have slyly implied that Loughner was a Tea Party supporter, former classmates remember him as being ‘Left-wing’ and ‘liberal’.
Another said he was ‘on his own planet’, which seems nearer the mark. No existing political organisation – including the Tea Party – comes close to championing Lough-ner’s deranged world view.
Paranoid and nihilistic (he kept a miniature altar with a replica human skull in his backyard), he had clearly surfed the wilder shores of political views on the internet, preaching about the evils of religion, and even picking up and espousing a theory that the government was using grammar as a form of mind control.
History shows how dangerous it is to try to second-guess the motives of political assassins.
John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan because he was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, not because he hated Right-wingers.
Likewise, Lynette Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford because she revered the cult killer Charles Manson.
But those lessons from history won’t stop some Democrats exploiting the shooting of a nine-year-old girl and five others at the weekend with precisely the sort of foam-flecked over-reaction for which they love to condemn their opponents on the Right.
The most persuasive analysis I have seen, even if it is of a necessarily cursory nature:
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/
Truth is, this does not look good for the liberals that are doing it.
It makes them look like dysfunctional mindless sheep.
BUT THEY ARE!