The American Conservative

Steve Walt has a typically intelligent blog about why he’s skeptical that Tunisia is the beginning of a revolutionary wave in the Arab world, primarily in response to a blog by Juan Cole.  Walt correctly notes that 1989 was the exception, that in 1919 and, even earlier, the 1790s, the Russian and French Revolutions respectively died quick deaths.  But what he fails to acknowledge is that the reason the wave was sustainable in 1989, unlike 1919 or the Napoleonic era, was that all of the rebellious nations were united in revolt against the same overweening hegemon, which is exactly the condition that obtains the Arab world – especially Egypt, Palestine, and the Gulf – today.

Egypt is Exhibit A, with the Pharaoh already on his deathbed and the Muslim Brotherhood having already made major advances through the openings it has been able to seize.  The point being that inasmuch as Walt is right to point out that Tunisia is a warning sign to Egypt, it is too little too late, telling the regime nothing it doesn’t already know.  The conditions obtaining in Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and for that matter in Iran, hardly need be repeated here.

To complete the analogy to 1989, many readers will no doubt be incredulous to the idea that Obama will be even so noble as Gorbachev and simply not intervene militarily to stop the march of history.   Yet even if he wanted to use the military to keep the Houses of Saud and Mubarak in power, or repeat the Reagan misadventure in Lebanon, with exactly what troops and money could he do so?

Some Palestinian writers have quite convincingly compared Tunisia to Gdansk, allowing for the useful caveat that a region-wide upheaval may well still be some time off, always reassuring to us Burkeans.  On the other hand the neocons stubbornly persist in the delusion that the spread of democracy means that the Arab world will be ruled by Ahmed Chalabi and Zalmay Khalilzad, who will proceed to give Israel back the Sinai, the east bank of the Jordan, and the south bank of the Litani.

Whether the neocons are really so deluded as to believe that their vaunted “Arab democrats” are Lech Walesa rather than Gus Hall, or if their just that craven in seeking to preserve the American empire, is hard to say.  Either way the former comrades of Tom Kahn should be ashamed of themselves.

Though it may well be too soon to assume any real significance to the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the Lebanese government, it is nevertheless suggestive of what I have argued for a while – that we are on the brink of an uprising across the Arab world to cast off the yoke of the American empire akin to the wave of uprisings that finally freed Eastern Europe from the Soviets.  Helena Cobban writes:

My sense from afar is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his friends and backers in Tehran are sending a fairly blunt message to the west (whose leaders often like to describe themselves as the “international community”) that regime change is indeed a game that more than one side can play.

Where is Saudi King Abdullah? He has had several serious medical procedures recently. Who has PM Saad Hariri been listening to as he has made his decisions of recent weeks?

If Nasrallah and his friends in Tehran (especially Supreme Leader Khamenei) indeed think the time has come to give the western house of cards in the Middle East a little nudge in Beirut to see what happens, the fallout from this could well end up extending far beyond Lebanon’s tiny confines.

Cobban believes that Saudi Arabia is indeed as ripe for revolution as Egypt, with King Abdullah as near death as Mubarak.  There is apparently even some shit going down in Tunisia, of all places.  The neocons, in their moral outrage at the comparison to 1989 (or is it 1919?) will now doubt insist that this would only be the conquest of the Middle East by Iran.  But it is certainly no more so than the fall of Communism meant that Eastern Europe was absorbed by the American empire.  Indeed, who can imagine the Iranians constructing an apparatus to compare to NATO?

Speaking of Iran, in a possibly related matter we have seen the dramatic shift in the party line about the Iranian nuclear program, in what can only be interpreted as the desperation of the war party to buy time, for reasons as yet unclear.  The official consensus mouthpiece itself, the Washington Post, is typical:

The challenge for the Obama administration, Israel and other allies will be to make use of that window to force a definitive end to the Iranian bomb program. The administration still hopes negotiations, set to resume Jan. 20, will achieve that end, but most likely it will require a fundamental change in Iran’s hard-line regime. From that point of view, five years is certainly not much time.

Perhaps Barack Milhous Obama really is about to actually reach out to Iran and end the madness.  But it may also be that the neocons and Israel lobby have decided all they can do now is go for broke and do all the moral chest-beating they can muster, and perhaps try to put across the big lie that America is legally bound to use its military to prevent “crimes against the Jewish people”.  The apparent strategic retreat may also be a sign that America has already lost the war – like Russia before the revolution, like France before the Americans came in, and like Germany thereafter.

But the liberation of Lebanon, and perhaps also Tunisia, if they spread to Egypt and Saudi Arabia could create a revolutionary wave that not even the most U.S. garrisoned Gulf sheikhdoms could withstand.  Let the Arab Spring commence!!!!

Paul Gottfried has paid me the high compliment of writing an extended response to a message board comment I made of his essay on the critics of Leo Strauss.  Though I’m amused that Gottfried seems to be taken in by the argument of some Straussians, of which I was vaguely aware, that Strauss was really a Cold War liberal, I think in the end it misses the point to debate whether Strauss was a man of the right.

Gottfried is correct that Strauss’ Zionism was not a right-wing predilection in the European context.  The analogy to black nationalism is instructive with its very great likeness to Zionism.  Before World War II, to be a Zionist was a right-wing choice in the Jewish context, not only with socialism still a force to be reckoned with but with German Zionism still very much influenced by classical liberals like Hannah Arendt.  Indeed, Jabotinsky was probably responding to the likes of Arendt and Magnes far more than to Labor Zionism.

As for whether Straussianism belongs on the right today, I go back to the template that I actually picked up from a very bad leftist professor, that the right, as opposed to conservatism, is simply the enemy of the left which hates the left more than it believes in any positive program – which goes far, of course, in explaining how so much of the right through history, from fascism to neoconservatism, came out of the left.  (This professor, by the way, who was in great measure responsible for the failure of my graduate school career and I was told on good authority was only even there as a condition for hiring his wife, was furious when I invoked his template in embracing Edmund Burke).

There may well be a strong argument that in the 20th century context Strauss and his immediate disciples were closer to Cold War liberalism than even the new right, but in placing Straussianism on the right today one need only examine the fundamental Straussian influence behind Glenn Beck and the Tea Party doctrines generally.  I remember well back during the 2008 Republican primary, when I asked my friend Joe Stromberg, a Mormon apostate, what he thought of Mitt Romney’s speech on religion in America.  Blessedly cut off from the media circus, Joe wasn’t even aware of it, so we ended up having a very general conversation about Mormonism.  In explaining his quite compelling thesis that Mormonism is the ultimate religion of American predestination, at one point I was led to ask in shock “are there Mormon Straussians?”, to which Joe bemusedly replied “one or two, yes.”

Mormon Straussianism, in short, is the secret of the Glenn Beck phenomenon.  Its core doctrines about the divinely inspired Constitution (something the two groups separately believe anyway) were expounded Beck’s acknowledged forebear Cleon Skousen.  The above link by Michael Lind explains how it was the Claremontistas who first began pushing the notion that Woodrow Wilson was our worst President – not because his crusade to make the world safe for democracy directly led to all the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century by allowing the Allies a decisive victory, not because he set up the worst police state in American history (yes, Southern partisans, worse than Lincoln, we can have that out another day), but because he introduced theories of government that contradicted the Straussian belief in natural law.

It was in watching Glenn Beck’s coming out party as the white Farrakhan last August that I was finally determined to figure out how the American right came to believe such bizarre things about Martin Luther King.  I soon enough realized that it was but a classic Straussian exercise, to banish any historical and cultural context and divine the secret meaning of a great man’s words in the abstract.  In his bizarre “Rally to Restore Honor” religious revival speech that was one part Elmer Gantry and two parts Edward Bellamy, Beck made brief allusions to Mormon theology about the predestination of early America at creation.

He deftly went over this in an instant, but that he got away with it at all before his evangelical audience is shocking.  What it proves is that the American right is far more steadfast to the neocon “fourth great western religion” of Americanism than to Christianity.  What this owes to Leo Strauss hardly need be repeated here.

So if – and I realize many, not least Gottfried, will want to debate this point – the Tea Party represents the right in America today as opposed to principled conservatism, than the progeny of Strauss most assuredly belongs there.  But I should think that categories of left and right are superfluous in diagnosing the militant world-redemptive idolatry of Americanism.  And to be clear, I am the last person who would deny its debt to liberalism.

In the course of researching my preceding blog, I discover that La Rubin has actually distanced herself from the Palin “blood libel” comments.  Her line that Palin may be “more Glenn Beck then Reagan” is revealing, as it is more or less identical to the Straussian Peter Wehner’s line on Beck, that he is “more Perot then Reagan”.

What this could mean is that Jennifer Rubin really is just a hack after all.  Just in the last day or so Ali Gharib of Lobelog lamented to me in a private email that Rubin is not the moonbat she used to be now that she’s at the Post.  If she’s now in fact sitting at the grown-ups table this would be the best proof yet.  Which means we must be in awe of her heroic college try at the daunting task of out-crazying Commentary.

Yet it may not be mutually exclusive to my original diagnosis of explosive Jewish self-hate projection.  She could, after all, have actually been offended by what Palin said for some reason.

The AP has a typically insipid piece about Sarah Palin using the term “blood libel” to describe the silly idea that a political flier of hers is responsible for the Arizona tragedy.  There is apparently even a suggestion that she was issuing some kind of code-speak to her anti-Semitic supporters.  Seriously?  Are the liberals really phoning it in for someone they so clearly absolutely adore hating?  And not, of course, to a large extent without good reason.

I thought the liberal media cared enough about probing Sarah Palin, and has come far enough along from pre-9/11 political categories, to have at least some notion of the real story here.  And that, of course, is that Palin would have learned the phrase “blood libel” and its political efficacy from such tutors as Bill Kristol, to say nothing of those Orthodox Jews who have welcomed her as one of their own and presented her with an art scroll of the Book of Esther in homage to her messianic delusions.

The Little Lenin of the War Party, as Justin Raimondo aptly named him, Bill Kristol is a master with respect to the real story about the use of the phrase “blood libel” in the last generation, which is that no one uses it more often and irresponsibly than right-wing Jews.  To its credit, the AP article quoted one of the most famous such uses by Menachem Begin during the First Lebanon War.  There is also the case of the reports of underground organ trafficking by the IDF, a case in which the Israelis definitely doth protest too much.

In short, what Sarah Palin’s claim to be “blood libeled” really reflects is the underlying philo-Semitism, if it can be so called, of her well documented messianic delusions.  It may be worth noting in this context that the lunatic Stephen Schwartz posted a long and rambling response to my recent blog about him which should speak for itself.  There may or may not be cosmological cultic secrets among the neocons generally, but I have often wondered of Norman Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin, and their ilk if they are either secretly or in the process of becoming Jews for Jesus, deciding that Obama must be the anti-Christ who is out to destroy Israel, and that with most American Jews lost to liberalism, they must clearly be the 144,000.

Libertarianism is the new Trotskyism, argues Christopher Beam in a recent New York magazine essay. It is appealing even to those unfamiliar with its basic tenets because of its outsider status, but also far beyond anything that could possibly be realized.

Beam’s tendency to concentrate on extremes–rather than addressing specific policy objectives–has been rightly criticized, including by Ross Douthat:

It’s precisely because we’re so far from minarchy, with no prospects for getting even remotely close, that libertarian arguments deserve a bit more respect and consideration than Beam’s dismissive attitude affords them. If Congress was stocked with a few hundred members of the Paul family, if Penn Jillette ran the T.S.A., if the Cato Institute held veto power over every entitlement expansion and overseas military operation, it would make sense to use a long magazine article to fret, in detail, about the perils associated with the minimal state. But as it stands, Beam’s lengthy critique of minarchy seems better suited to a college bull-session argument than to an article about American political economy as it actually exists, in all its bloated and not-at-all minimalist glory.

But even if Beam goes too far in dismissing libertarians as utopian and out-of-touch, it is still difficult to imagine a robust libertarian movement in the United States (at least in a form of which the Cato or Independent Institute would fully endorse). Libertarians might have the best ideas when it comes to the legalization of marijuana, the TSA, or the Federal Reserve. A central problems for libertarians is one of outreach rather than policy. Among politicians with libertarian tendencies, there is not one who could not be described by Russell Kirk’s famous statement: “men and women who accept the label “libertarian!’ [but who] are not actually ideological libertarians at all, but simply conservatives under another name.” The Republican Liberty Caucus—the closest thing to a libertarian organization in Congress—does have a few members (such as Jeff Flake and Ron Paul) who have supported libertarian policy recommendations like opposition to the Iraq War, but the caucus does not have a single member who would endorse a libertarian perspective on abortion.

Given that the country seems more devoted to economic liberty than social conservatism, it is possible that libertarians might eventually become a sizable part of either the Democratic or Republican coalition. The larger problem for libertarians, though, is more substantive: because they are so vigilant in their opposition to expansive government, libertarians often end up overemphasizing its significance. This mistake does not show up in their specific policy proposals, however, and thus libertarian institutions that emphasize policy over political activism fare better; libertarian politics, however, often end up embodied in initiatives like the Free State Project that have difficulty germinating into a mass movement.

Movements like these aren’t “crazy,” “impossible” or “utopian.” They seek to implement policies which are not so far beyond the pale of what an average American would be willing to live with. But the lengths to which libertarian activists go seem out of proportion from the perspective of the general public; why move to New Hampshire or a seastead in the ocean when the average citizen’s most intimate, obnoxious interaction with government occurs only once a year (in mid-April) and he is still free to express his opinion at the ballot box? For this reason, some politicians and voters will always channel their inner-libertarian (when organizations like TSA exist to hate)–but being fully possessed by that inner-libertarian is as rare as channeling him is common.

I realize that this is my third blog in barely more than a month about Ron Radosh.  Yet it can not pass without comment that he has seen fit to publish a 5,000 word essay that begins right off the bat with the first of countless whoppers:

Martin Peretz has been a pillar of responsible liberalism since buying The New Republic magazine in 1974.

The occasion is a barely longer profile piece in New York magazine about the man who, along with Norman Podhoretz, can be said to have unleashed the greatest wave of anti-Semitism since Hitler.  It turns out that in contrast to the clannish Kristols and Podhoretzes, Marty Peretz has an absolute shambles of a private life, and now for all practical purposes he’s lost The New Republic as well.

A gentile friend and mentor has often insisted to me that for even many more and prominent neocons than I’ve been prepared to accept, they realize the world-historic magnitude of what they’ve done and are traumatized by the realization.  To its everlasting credit, the New York article captures the wrenching human tragedy of Marty Peretz in terms that even so committed an adversary as myself can’t help but be moved.  Like John Profumo, the Conservative MP toppled by scandal in the 60s who redeemed himself by spending the rest of his life serving the homeless, Peretz is now living part-time in Tel Aviv and teaching English to immigrant teenagers.  He has even been known to appear at protests on behalf of Palestinians facing eviction in East Jerusalem.

For Ron Radosh to therefore write a very long and spirited defense of the man’s public career is a new low for what there can no longer be any doubt whatsoever is the saddest case in the entire history of American public intellectuals.  Being somehow of the impression that in 1984 Henry Wallace was in contention for the Presidency, Radosh sings the praises of TNR thus:

For many years, especially in the 80’s, the magazine functioned as the more realistic and hard-edged liberal alternative to the stale liberalism of the wartime Popular Front, and later, the new anti-anti-Communism of the bulk of the liberal movement during the Vietnam War and after.  In the conflict at home over Reagan policy in Central America, Peretz editorially supported the Nicaraguan contras, a group for whom most liberals had nothing but hate and disdain. He did this against the wishes of his own chosen editors, who openly published a letter opposed to the magazine’s editorial policy.

He then follows this up by repeating his bizarre remonstrations for TNR to finally leave the Progressive legacy behind and embrace national greatness conservatism as called for in what has to be the weirdest essay yet by Walter Russell Mead.  But then Radosh, who never wrote a word about Israel until just three years ago, and whom it would stun me to know has ever belonged to a synagogue, mounts the tired old horse convinced it can win him the Kentucky Derby:

Most important of all, TNR was the strongest media voice in the nation that stood foursquare in defense of Israel.  And all of this was due to the influence and guidance of Marty Peretz, who always understood – and does so especially at present – that the strength of Israel was paramount to the ability of the West to defeat our latest enemy, the forces of radical Islam. Peretz realizes that Israel’s fight is not that nation’s alone; rather, it is the fight of the Western powers as a whole.

And it is this stance, we must understand, that has led to Peretz having so many enemies. His willingness to stand up and buck official liberalism in its hostility to Israel and the view of most realists and liberals that peace does not exist in the Middle East because of Israel’s so-called self-defeating policies, has meant that those who believe in this fairy tale have total hatred for Peretz, and instead of wishing him well in his endeavors, are out to destroy him.

Radosh goes on to praise Peretz for being “far ahead of himself seeing in its earliest gestations” the turn of the left against Israel.  It so happens that I remain mystified, perhaps being too provincially attached to the history of the last decade, about how the disillusionment of just a few new leftists, and later the very limited impact of the Jesse Jackson campaign on American Middle East politics, led to such hysteria as to be in large measure responsible for birthing neoconservatism itself.

I can only conclude that Zionism has always suffered from political hypochondria – that is, a complete inability to be mature and sober in assessing its challenges.  Thus what Israel suffers today is but self-fulfilling prophecy.  We can see this phenomenon in its protean form in the complete and untrammeled hysteria with which Israelis have greeted only the most modest success of the campaign for boycott and divestment from Israel.

The essay then proceeds into hysterical ad hominem:

And then there is the despicable hater of anything that is pro-Israel, Philip Weiss, a man who writes for the Buchananite paleoconservative hate magazine The American Conservative, as well as the leftist Nation - the two partner journals that blend together in defense of isolationism. In his own blog, Weiss writes that Peretz is “a racist crank…who has been ‘stripped of his magazine’ and is reduced to telling Holocaust stories in sybaritic Tel Aviv.”  If Peretz even knows who Weiss is, I’m sure he is delighted to have him as an enemy, as any sane person would. Weiss adds that Peretz “has no idea how offensive his racial statements were. I guess he has been flattered by admirers/petitioners at Harvard and the Yivo Institute and the New Republic for so long that no one dared to give Marty the news.”

Weiss obviously has no idea that few take his writing seriously, and that many find his writings more than offensive.  As for his belief that Peretz’s dismissal is “a new moment in the life of the Israel lobby,” that statement is so bizarre one must pause to even know what he is talking about.  Then he praises both Tom Friedman and David Remnick for turning against Israel. I wonder if these two, critical of Israel as they might be, really welcome an endorsement by Philip Weiss?

As my long-time readers will know, I’ve contributed a great deal to Phil’s blog in the past.  Phil definitely has a super-emotional style that has alienated me at times, though we remain friends.  Yet one can not help but notice a certain amount of projection by this feature blogger at Pajamas Media, who I’ve only started reading regularly to replace the Commentary blog for my daily dose of right wing batshit, in large measure just because his own hobby-horses happen to also be peculiar interests of mine.

What makes Ron Radosh so tragically farcical and farcically tragic is that when even National Review won’t call TNR liberal anymore, when even Marty Peretz has decided the time has come to attempt to redeem himself, Ron Radosh is hysterically running in circles trying to keep propped up a paradigm to which he was very much a late comer.

His adoption of a suicide-of-the-west narrative of devotion to Israel may as much as anything be a projection of redeeming his parents world-apocalyptic view of the similarly besieged backwater of 1930s Spain.  For all his hysterical denunciation of the “red-brown alliance” behind TAC, there is probably no historical analogy that quite fits him like the Nazi officers who were fortunate enough to end up on the right side of the iron curtain and thus prove their worth to the Stasi.  But the most revealingly dark passage of the whole essay has to be this:

So far only David Horowitz, who undoubtedly disagrees with much of what Peretz holds dear, has defended him.

Russell Kirk’s famous dictum about the neocons can be very apt in describing Peter Beinart since he so dramatically moved to the left.  As I’ve said in other blogs, I have to believe that his outspoken views on the Middle East and American Jewish politics are more-or-less sincere, and I even suspected as much for some time beforehand.  But in the main, what I must conclude about him is that he is someone who has very shrewdly taken the pulse of American liberalism and is eager to lead it into the future.

His most recent column about the tragedy in Arizona is a case in point.  His opening paragraph makes him into a paragon of reasonableness:

Liberals should stop acting like the Tea Party is guilty of inciting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting until proven innocent. That’s unfair. If someone finds evidence that violent anti-government, or anti-democratic, rhetoric helped trigger Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree, then the people making those statements should pay with their political careers. But so far, at least, there is no such evidence. Of course, Sarah Palin should stop using hunting metaphors to discuss her political opponents. She should stop doing that, and a dozen other idiotic things. But just as Tea Partiers are wrong to promiscuously throw around terms like “communist” and “death panels,” liberals should avoid promiscuously accusing people of being accessories to attempted murder. That’s too serious a charge to throw around unless you have the goods. I want Barack Obama to derail the congressional Republicans as much as anyone. But not this way.

Beinart goes on to make an argument not dissimilar to that of Phil Giraldi on @TAC that political violence is, if anything, far more often committed by our fellow Americans than by foreign “terrorists”, and that this might therefore put our Muslim scare in perspective.  Except that Beinart seems to dance around the real point in all this – that only a tiny fraction of deaths by unnatural causes are due to terrorism, so we should just move on.

Much the same conceit was in evidence with his column on the grave contradiction between the tea party austerity agenda and its militarist agenda, ably tackled by others here and here.  There was also his rather brazen case of being the pot calling the kettle black in criticizing Jon Stewart for being too centrist with his “Rally to Restore Sanity”.  On this I can attest from living in blue-state America and having developed an extremely keen sense as a young radical on the difference between a liberal and a radical, that Jon Stewart has a far better sense of the pulse of the average Obama voter – of the silent majority if you will – than any of his critics such as the execrable Bill Maher.

Finally this discussion would not be complete without noting Beinart being in the forefront pushing the extremely reckless line, to counter the pernicious plot of the Washington establishment to make Obama the scapegoat for the loss of Afghanistan, by proposing to scapegoat the military instead.  We all know how well that worked out after Vietnam.

Peter Beinart has mastered the task of appearing both eminently liberal and eminently reasonable while opportunistically bidding to be the leader of American liberalism in the generation to come.  Yet it must be said that his columns are eminently readable and enjoyable, and with a Washington press core that makes the Romanov Court look like Independence Hall, we should take sanity where we can find it.

As Europe prepares to recognize a Palestinian declaration of independence, here’s hoping that that declaration will explicitly lay claim to the whole of the viable Palestinian State created on both sides of the Jordan in 1948. Here’s hoping that, mirroring Lebanon, it will guarantee the Presidency to a Christian while guaranteeing the Premiership to a Muslim, as would in the latter case have happened electorally anyway.

And here’s hoping that it will place the new state under the protection, both of each and all of the remaining sacral monarchies, there being no other kind, in the Dar al-Islam (other than the one in Palestine east of the Jordan, perhaps), and of each and all of those in Christendom. As much as anything else, that would make the protection of Palestine a unifying force among the Christian and the Muslim traditional leaders still recognized at local level in several countries of Africa, where relations between Christians and Muslims are not currently at their best.

Lest we forget, 18 of the monarchs of Christendom – of Antigua and Barbuda, of Australia, of The Bahamas, of Barbados, of Belize, of Canada, of the Cook Islands, of Grenada, of Jamaica, of New Zealand, of Papua New Guinea, of Saint Kitts and Nevis, of Saint Lucia, of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, of the Solomon Islands, of Tuvalu, of the United Kingdom, and the Paramount Chief of the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji – are the same person.

Furthermore, any appeal to any and every country that regarded either or both of Islam and Christianity as fundamental to its identity, especially if such an appeal appeared over the names of Catholic and Orthodox hierarchs as such (from the very Holy Land, no less), as well as of their East Coast elite-friendly Anglican and their Midwestern-friendly Lutheran counterparts, would place the American Republic and its Republican Party in a very difficult position indeed: is that Republic a product of the Revolution after all, or is it, since 1776 came before 1789, an expression of the preexisting republican traditions of Catholic and Protestant Europe, as such?

Of course, as I keep being told, Jordan is Palestine: the entirely viable state created on both sides of the Jordan in 1948. “Why would anyone design Jordan as currently constituted?” No one ever did.

I am not a Sarah Palin apologist, but casting any blame on her or the Tea Party for the terrible events that happened Saturday in Arizona is foolish. Jared Lee Loughner is a troubled soul and he alone is responsible for the Tucson massacre. The insistence by left-leaning politicians and pundits that “heightened” political rhetoric caused this catastrophe is dishonest, opportunistic, and shallow.

It would be one thing if Loughner was a registered Republican, attended numerous Tea Party rallies, and often engaged in political banter with friends and acquaintances. At least then there would be a tangible link and the left would merely be embellishing and not stating blatant and utter falsehoods. But that sketch of Loughner is nonexistent. In fact the opposite is true—the extreme opposite. Loughner, according to classmates and friends, is a nihilist who posits the dream world as his reality. His philosophy professor describes his thinking process as scrambled.  Washington Post, Mother Jones, and Salon have three pieces about Loughner that are well worth reading. It is clear from these pieces alone that Loughner is not a right-wing radical, but merely a deeply disturbed and mentally unstable young man. (Though to some cynical leftists that may be the same thing.)

A portrait of Loughner is becoming clearer each day. His rants on YouTube and his statements to friends are more solipsistic than political. He riles against the government for controlling our minds through grammar. Part of his life seems plucked out of the film Inception. He contends that the dream world is his true reality and that he builds and does things in his dreams that make the other reality (our reality) pale in comparison. Loughner continually disrupted his community college Algebra class with nonsensical outburst. One of his classmates was so concerned about his behavior that she sat by the door every class. If Loughner ever did snap, she wanted a quick exit. Loughner seemingly made only one statement that can be considered even remotely policy oriented. One of his YouTube diatribes concerns the gold standard, but discerning any coherent thought from his writing is near pointless.

What is absent from the portrait of Loughner is a man swept up in vitriolic political rhetoric. Regardless of what you think of Sara Palin and the Tea Party, it is highly unlikely that the “reload” and war-laden tone of their political message penetrated the bubble of isolation Loughner created for himself.

Also coming to light is the fact that Loughner had an obsession of Rep. Giffords that predates Sarah Palin’s silly cross hairs map, Sharon Angle’s “second amendment remedies”, and the rest of the “violent” rhetoric used by the Tea Party. It cannot be clearer that rhetoric has nothing to do with this tragedy.

If the left is adamant about turning Tucson into a call to action, it would be much more honest and infinitely more productive to focus on the need to reform our mental health system. But to blame this on rhetoric, a “climate of hate”, or political propaganda is monstrously stupid and misses an opportunity to address what to do when a person you know is exhibiting mentally unstable behavior. Loughner’s professor saw it, his classmates saw it, and so did his friends. Yet, the left seems to ignore the obvious and, instead, focuses on a nonexistent narrative. Shame on them.