On Congresswoman Giffords, Mother Jones reports:
Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: “It wasn’t a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did something stupid, he related that to people. But the thing I remember most is just that question. I don’t remember him stalking her or anything.” Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: “It wasn’t like he was in a certain party or went to rallies…It’s not like he’d go on political rants.” But Loughner did, according to Tierney, believe that government is “fucking us over.” He never heard Loughner vent about about the perils of “currency,” as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created.
Of all the “friend/classmate says” reports we’re seeing, this is perhaps the most illuminating to date. Tierney seems to have known Loughner long enough and intimately enough to offer genuine insights.
And yet those insights still don’t offer anything close to a clear picture of who Loughner is or what he believes politically. If anything, the piece adds to the confusion and seems to confirm, at least for now, that his beliefs were far outside the mainstream and near impossible to place on any simplistic political spectrum. Which may well be the case when all is settled. What is clear in this piece is that, as many earlier reports have noted, Loughner is probably deeply mentally disturbed.
It’s important to note too that while Tierney seems a trustworthy source and his views as a close friend are valuable, he can only represent part of the story. There may be aspects to Loughner politically which he never revealed to Tierney—he may have been a Tea Party member, he may have bee a communist—and Tierney’s claims are difficult to verify. The bottom line: we’re still waiting for more. All for now seems a kind of speculation.
*Correction: Post initially incorrectly identified Balz a working for The Washington Times.
Just out of curiosity, has it occurred to anyone that Loughner's ideas about the government "brainwashing" people through grammar may derive more from Goerge Orwell's book "1984", which Loughner listed on Youtube as one of his favorite books, and which develops in detail the theory of "Newspeak"? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
#1 Posted by LoopGaroo, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 11:14 AM
First of all, Shafer's piece is the most asinine, dumbass piece he's written yet, and that's saying something. Violent imagery is a "good thing" and "better that angry people unload their fury in public"? Like Scott Roeder and Randall Terry? Let's ask Dr. Tiller's family about that. Let's ask the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims what they think of Timothy McVeigh "unloading his fury in public." Let's ask Rep. Gifford's husband what he thought of the "Fire an M-16 at Gabrielle Gifford" event that her recent opponent staged in Arizona. That was "a good thing"? Shafer is a sick, sick puppy.
What normal citizens are saying, Joel -- not "the left" but normal people -- is that Republican leaders need to back off and moderate the dog-whistle rhetoric. Michele Bachmann needs to stop calling for "armed revolution" and "being armed and dangerous" on the steps of the US Congress. They need to start denouncing their people that come armed with semi-automatic weapons to political rallies, to stop invoking gun and violent racist imagery in their political discourse, to stop demonizing their political opponents as somehow less than human and not "real Americans." They need to take responsibility for allowing the political climate to get so vicious. We shouldn't let the Republican leadership off the hook in abdicating their leadership to the purveyors of hate-speech radio and rightwing extremists like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
Your pious pronouncements and your pernicious false equivalence is letting these Republican leaders off the hook. They are already spinning their way out of the responsibility to tone down the rhetoric, and you are enabling that.
#2 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 11:57 AM
It amuses me to hear that "we don't know enough" from people who don't seem to have any problem with "Shape of the Earth Still In Doubt" style journalism.
#3 Posted by Elmo, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 12:19 PM
http://dartcenter.org/content/shooting-in-arizona
#4 Posted by Steve Gorelick, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 02:04 PM
Dan Balz works for the Washington Post, not the Washington Times :-)
My way of addressing the points you made in this article was to pass along to my Twitter subscribers a famous quote: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
#5 Posted by Jay Rosen, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 04:16 PM
Given Jack Shafer's position, is he also calling for the elimination of the FCC, warning labels on records, and the movie rating system, since I haven't even picked up a weapon after watching Saw V, and I haven't started treating women like hoes after listening to Dr. Dre.
#6 Posted by GBBound, CJR on Mon 10 Jan 2011 at 05:24 PM
a chilling nyt note for Bernie Sanders - Americans will certainly take up arms against tyrants and socialists - good heavens, is it possible we are all so stupid as Bai presumes, incapable of telling the difference between Mao and Shaw?
#7 Posted by larry darnell, CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 01:08 AM
CJR,
Please also note these intellectually honest (politically incorrect, non-partisan, root-striking, pro-peace, etc.) perspectives:
-- From "On the Weekend's Shooting," by Simon Black:
"Speaker of the House John Boehner summarized many politicians’ reactions to Saturday’s shooting when he said, 'an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society.'
"I’m inclined to believe that acts and threats of violence against all people have no place in any free society. The life of a politician is not worth more than the life of the nine year old girl who was shot and later died at the hospital, or the 76-year-old man who died on the scene as he was protecting his wife, or of any of the other victims.
"I’ve seen mainstream media reports that portray the apparent shooter as an anti-government subversive whose favorite books include Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. This makes absolutely no sense — what kind of anti-government proponent counts Hitler, Marx, and Engels as his favorite authors?
"Rather, it’s more likely that the shooter was just another loony who owned a firearm and decided to use it. If the victim had been Gabrielle the bus driver instead of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, it would have barely registered a few words at the bottom of the CNN news ticker."
-- From "When Will They Figure It Out?" by Butler Shaffer:
"Whenever I hear politicians bemoan such violence, I am reminded of a scene from one of the Godfather films. As Michael Corleone is in church participating in his grandson’s christening, the priest asks him if he rejects violence, to which Corleone answers 'yes,' even as his henchmen are going about murdering his adversaries. How politicians can, on any moral or intellectually honest grounds, condemn the violence that they daily legislate and fund, is beyond me. When John McCain angrily weighed in on the Tuscon shootings, I was reminded of his 2008 presidential campaign song-and-dance that went 'bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.'"
#8 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 01:31 AM
Do you want to know why http://journalismisback.com ?
#9 Posted by Jakub, CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 08:02 AM
Journalists gotta write. Can't just report actual 'facts' over and over. So we get these large statements about 'society' now whenever something like this happens - but only if it fits a pre-existing urban bourgeois narrative and prejudices. (There was little hand-wringing about 'the climate' and 'left-wing hatred' contributing to the shootings of or at Wallace, Ford, and Reagan.) A lot of such journalists seem to get their framing devices from the political/journalistic equivalent of what used to be called 'Eurotrash'.
When the hysteria is subsided, perhaps CJR will do a compare-and-contrast treatment of this event and the massacre at Fort Hood. After the latter, you will recall, consumers were urged not to jump to conclusions and generalizations about huge categories of people and their beliefs.
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 12:35 PM
There are always freakouts over 'left wing hatred' and false equivalences between isolated left wing violations of decor and right wing systematic campaigns of terror.
Christ, even Anderson Cooper, who has appeared to have lost his brain in this incident, made an equivalence between Bachmann's "I want Minnesotans armed and dangerous" and Obama's "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight." statements.
Sorry, but have we allowed ourselves to become so willfully stupid that we would tae a phrase like "A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush" as an advocation of violence against actual birds?
But for the purpose of saying the left is just as bad, if not worse than the right, yes - we pretend to be that stupid. Everybody is the same, our coverage is balanced, so what are you complaining about Mark? The media equates code pink with the people who murder abortion doctors. What more do you want?
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 01:46 PM
I don't think it's accurate to say Loughner's political philosophy is "incoherent;" his YouTube rants read like a course in Ron Paul 101: Introduction to Loony Economics.
The problem is that when times are uncertain (the wars, the economy etc.), the conventional wisdom no longer makes sense to people, so they resort to conspiracy theories. That wouldn't be a problem if Beck, Palin, Angle, Bachmann et al would be content to simply say "My opponents' ideas are bad for the country."
Instead, they're saying "My opponents are Marxist infiltrators who are destabilizing the country intentionally in order to establish a Marxist dictatorship and throw all of you in FEMA concentration camps!!!" And if you aren't very smart but you love your country, and these people convince you that certain politicians are conspiring to destroy this country and everything it stands for, you're going to feel compelled to resort to drastic measures.
And some might say "well if this rhetoric is so compelling, why haven't there been more asssassination attempts?" That's because most conservatives know Palin, Bachmann, Beck, Angle and the rest are completely full of shit, but refuse to admit as much lest they lose one iota of credibility. They know all this shit about the Democrats turning this country into 1930s Germany is an appalling bunch of lies, but there's always a risk that some idiot like Jared Lee Loughner might take them seriously.
#12 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 03:45 PM
"I don't think it's accurate to say Loughner's political philosophy is 'incoherent;' his YouTube rants read like a course in Ron Paul 101: Introduction to Loony Economics."
That statement is so detached from reality; it's no wonder that you immediately moved on to the usual, easy targets w/o even pretending to qualify the Ron Paul assertion. (Talk about incoherent.)
1. Loughner's ramblings do not claim any particular belief system, and — like your opening statement — are not rationalized through coherent theses or argumentation.
2. Ron Paul and his fellow classical liberals (libertarians, Austrians, et al.) — unlike the everyday "lefty" or "righty" — are consistently opposed, in word and deed, to the use of violence or coercion to affect change.
3. Ron Paul's desire to "legalize the Constitution" by "repealing legal-tender laws" in order to "allow for competing currencies" and to "let the free market decide" the best currencies is far removed from Loughner's truly "loony" desire to use violent revolution, or the power of the state, to force everyone to use his preferred currency.
#13 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 11 Jan 2011 at 10:42 PM