re: #35 Charles

Of course he was mentally ill. But that is the WHOLE POINT. The rise of this kind of dangerous rhetoric and extremism on the right wing is feeding the fantasies of people like Bedell, and inciting them to violence.

It doesn’t excuse the right wing to say the guy was crazy. Sure, he was crazy. But the craziness was fed by the extremism that is everywhere in the modern right wing.

Encouraging and allowing this craziness has consequences — one of them is named John Patrick Bedell.

I’m sorry, Charles, but I have to disagree here. We simply have no way of knowing what Bedell might have done under other circumstances, and it’s an experiment that can never be performed. People who go ape-shit crazy and embark on killing sprees always have justifications for their actions, often elaborate ones, but I don’t think anyone to this day knows what direction causality flows in such instances.

It sounds as though there is a long, sad history of mental illness here that has grown increasingly worse over the years; we’ll undoubtedly learn more in the coming days. But no one can reasonably claim that, had any of Bedell’s associations or reading materials or Internet obsessions been different, the ultimate outcome would have substantially changed.