Tucson shows the failures of America's purported ruling class

By Tim Dunkin

As the old saw goes, character is only revealed when it is put to the test. Slightly more than three weeks ago, the character and mettle of those in our society who believe themselves to be the cream of America's crop were tried, and found wanting. Taking a terrible tragedy, those in the progressive Left — as well as a few on the "Ruling Class Right" — tried to twist and abuse the situation to their advantage. Thinking that they were being too clever by half and that they could easily use the shock and disgust over the shooting to channel easily-swayed public opinion into their corner, they succeeded only in openly displaying to the American people just how dull, predictable, and nasty they really are.

Who are these self-described elites? They are the progressives who dominate in the news media. The opinion-makers. The journalists and talking heads who like to think of themselves as the gatekeepers of information in American society. They are also the left-wing, usually Democrat politicians. They are the eager young technoliberals like Markos Moulitsas, who runs the Daily Kos, and the dull young things who blog at places like the Huffington Post. In short, they are the people in our society who think that they're just smarter, more enlightened, and nobler than you or I. They are not constrained by silly notions of "morality" and "honesty." They are the people

who believe that we the people need them to hold our hands, tell us what how think about the events of the day, and provide for our needs via the power of unlimited government (which they, of course, seek to control and use to their ends). Whatever it takes to advance the progressive agenda and to demonize its enemies, that's what they'll stoop to.

By now, surely everybody (except for those who have been off in a cave in Antarctica for the last month) knows about the tragic shooting that took place in Tucson, Arizona on January 8th of this year. A terribly disturbed young man named Jared Loughner, mentally imbalanced, socially isolated, susceptible to the vain and empty promises of nihilism and conspiracy theory, shot and killed six people at a political gathering. Included among the dead were a nine-year old girl and a federal judge. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (DAZ), the intended target, was shot but survived her wounds.

Now normal people, upon hearing about this sort of thing, do not immediately think about how they can try to spin it to their political advantage. Normal people instead react with horror and compassion, seeking to see what can be done to salvage the situation, care for the survivors, comfort the loved ones of those lost, and to grieve the dead. Normal people don't try to capitalize on tragedies to advance their own political causes.

But we have to remember that when we're dealing with the Left, we're not dealing with normal people. We are dealing with sociopaths.

This is something which was fully on display in the aftermath. The smoke had barely had time to clear before Olbermann, Matthews, and the rest of the MSM's ghoul crews were trumpeting the "fact" that Loughner surely was a "right wing extremist." Probably a Tea Partier. We can almost guarantee that he listens to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The left-wing blogs abounded with innuendos about Loughner's supposed conservatism.

Problem was, not a single shred of it was even remotely true. As details about Loughner started to come to light, they showed (as almost invariably happens) that he was certainly no creature of the Right. Indeed, it was revealed that he was an atheist who hated and criticized religion. Former classmates described him as "liberal" and left-wing. His beef with Rep. Giffords, known for being a blue-dog Democrat who had just voted against Nancy Pelosi for the leadership of the Democratic rump presence in the House of Representatives, was that she was "fake" — that she wasn't sufficiently leftist to be truly "authentic." One of Loughner's former friends even stated that Loughner would "well up with anger" upon seeing pictures of President George W. Bush.

Despite all this, we cannot say that it was his leftist politics that drove him to shoot up a Tucson street corner. Loughner was also mentally ill, extremely unbalanced, isolated and alienated. His presence and actions at Pima Community College, where he was taking classes, severely disturbed his classmates, and led to five separate contacts with campus police and an eventual expulsion from the school. There was apparently also quite a lot of drug use, especially hallucinogens. He was a dupe who fell for pretty much every conspiracy theory to which he was exposed.

So no, we should not say that he committed this crime because he was a leftist. But it must also be admitted that he definitely did not do it because he was a "right-winger," either.

But the professional Left has never let little things like "facts" get in the way of a good meme. For weeks, the same storyline — Loughner was influenced by "hate speech" from "radicals in talk radio" and the like were played out across the nightly airwaves. Even after those who knew him came forward — repeatedly — and told interviewers that Loughner never even listened to talk radio, that he didn't even watch the TV news.

At one point, some anonymous left-winger even got the brilliant idea to grab a screen shot of a Pima County online voter registration and photoshop Loughner's name in, along with a "Republican" party affiliation. This was then published all over the left-wing blogosphere as "proof positive" that Loughner was a right-wing Repugnican. Of course, whoever photoshopped it misspelled the name of the city as "Tuscon," and then had to release a later iteration in which it was spelled right, which should have been a hint to the lefties that maybe the screenshot wasn't legitimate. Certainly, the fact that a top official with the Pima County Board of elections had already stated on air that Loughner was in fact a registered independent, and hadn't even voted in 2010, should have suggested that this easily falsifiable lie wouldn't work.

But the sad fact is, among left-wingers, it did work. They fell for it, completely and unhesitatingly, and they continued to hang onto the screenshot as evidence, even when it was positively disproven. Again, we see the whole "meme over facts" mentality in action.

Nevertheless, the general population was not convinced, despite the constant repetition of the lies about Loughner's political persuasions. We stupid non-elites just weren't getting the point, despite their constantly repeating it to us, slowly and in monosyllables. So, the media then decided to take a slightly different tack, which was to somehow, through some nebulous penumbra of a shadow of a doubtful connection of tenuous consistency, try to connect Jared Loughner to Sarah Palin.

Hunh?

Oh but see, Sarah Palin's PAC, back at some point during the 2010 campaign season, had mailed out some campaign literature that included little crosshaired targets over the congressional districts of 20 vulnerable Democrat candidates, one of which was Giffords' Arizona district. From this, it was inferred, Jared Loughner took the hint that Sarah Palin wanted him to put a cap in Gabrielle Giffords.

Nevermind that they never explained how a guy who didn't even watch the TV news, and who had no ideological affinity for Sarah Palin whatsoever, would have gotten her PAC's campaign literature, and been so motivated by it as to go shoot someone who was a lot closer to himself in political philosophy than Palin is. Nevermind that the Democrats had, in fact, employed almost exactly the same type of crosshairs imagery on some of their campaign literature back in 2008. See, only Republican use of such images can create violence and political terrorism.

But what we have to understand is that the elitists — in the media, the leftwing blogosphere, the left-wing politicians — all assume that the average American has the same visceral loathing for Palin that they do. Therefore, they assume that because they will readily believe even the most outlandish and flimsy lies about her, that you and I will too. But, as with their earlier tactic, we dumb bumpkins in flyover country were just too dumb to catch on and start blaming Palin for this tragedy.

After a while, the meme eventually morphed from one in which guilt for Loughner's rampage was attached to one or another specific figure in conservatism to one in which the "climate of hate" caused by the "radical" nature of our political discourse was to blame. Of course, by this, what they really meant was the "climate" set by "right wing talk radio" and the criticisms of Democrat policy by Tea Partiers and the like. In other words, just another unsubtle attempt to steer the discussion away from the tragedy itself, and onto a supposedly conservative cause for the tragedy.

Since Rush Limbaugh and his ilk were responsible for setting up the climate of hate, the natural response — at least in the mind of the lefties — is to regulate talk radio. Control what goes onto the airwaves. Accelerate the rollback of the first amendment. All of which is believed to be a reasonable response by those on the Left who have willingly believed their own false meme. In other words, it became a crass, cynical attempt to purvey the tragedy into a contrived reason for knocking one or more of the thorns in their side off the air.

Which is ironic, when we consider the sort of rhetoric that routinely spews out of the filthy sewers that the lefties call mouths. Sarah Palin has been threatened with rape, they've fantasized about murdering her, and drawn pictures in which she is being punched in the face with teeth being knocked out. Just this past Monday, a children's theater in liberal Missoula, Montana alluded to her beheading! George W. Bush was the subject of numerous assassination fantasies from disgruntled lefties while he was President. About a week ago, one of the people who were actually shot by Loughner, himself a leftwing lunatic, threatened to kill a local Tea Party member.

Perhaps the crowning gem in their diadem of hypocrisy was the (now former) Pennsylvania congressman, Paul Kanjorski, who said that "right-wing hate speech" needed to be reined in — this same "gentleman" had not two months before said on air that the then Governor-elect of Florida, a very conservative Republican, should be "put up against a wall and shot."

Doubly ironic is that in places where the Left has actually had total control — places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, places where people like Paul Kanjorski actually ruled — people like Governor Scott were lined up and shot.

Nevertheless, we stupid sots known as "the American people" once again failed to take the hint from our elite superiors. Even after this airwave offensive, polls still showed that large majorities of Americans made no connection between Jared Loughner's crime and the state of political discourse in this country. Average Americans continued to place the blame for Loughner's rampage on Loughner himself. Sheesh, why can't we get it? No wonder the talking heads in the news media are smarter and more enlightened than us.

These failures did not, however, prevent further non-sequitur responses to the shootings. The new meme is that the Tucson shootings have "reopened the debate over gun control." Republican (?) Congressman Peter King (RINO-NY) made rumblings about introducing a bill that would make it a federal crime to carry a weapon within 1000 feet of an elected official. Since we all know that a wacko who is intent on shooting a congresswoman is going to reconsider his efforts upon contemplating that bringing a gun near her is now illegal. Sure.

Other knee-jerk responses in Congress have included proposals to ban "high-capacity magazines" (again, a proposal that fails to make sense for pretty much the same reason that any other gun regulation fail to do so) and to ban speech that is "hateful" or could potentially "incite" someone to violence (conveniently nebulous in its application, we can be sure). Will any of this work to prevent future tragedies? Of course not. Would they infringe massively on our already tattered Constitution. Quite obviously. But, to the ruling elite in Congress, none of that matters.

What all of this shows is that those who presume to think they are our nation's elite are seriously out of touch. Their thinking, their perceptions, their understanding of the events of the day are completely different from that of the average American who just wants to be left alone to live their lives in peace. These people — the leftwing bloggers, media mouthpieces, politicians, academics, and the like — literally cannot understand why you and I do not see things like the Tucson shooting, and blame Palin or Limbaugh or the Tea Parties or the Republicans in Congress. They can't comprehend why we don't follow them in their leaps of logic which use the power of political hatred to make these totally unreasonable connections. Because we can't see them, it must be because we're dumb, we're unenlightened, we haven't been conditioned properly to think the right way about things, so they have to lay it on even thicker and heavier. Maybe that's why a dunderhead like Danny Glover, weeks after the rest gave up on the effort, was still trying to claim that conservatives "enabled" Jared Loughner?

He just doesn't get it.

The problem is not with us. The problem is with them. The problem is that this pretended "elite" is not. These people on the Left are, in fact, generally not that smart, and are definitely not capable of reasoned, critical thinking. The problem is that the lefties, having ditched the notions of right and wrong, and of absolute moral standards, see no reason to think that reality and truth are anything besides completely malleable, and can be "re-formed" in peoples' minds into anything they want.

Yet, refusing to play along doesn't make us dumb or defective. It makes us normal. And it shows just how defective those on the other side really are.

© Tim Dunkin