re: #744 Reginald Perrin

Polly want a cracker?

That one was posted earlier today and was dead on arrival

Can you point me to the thread? I didn’t see it.

re: #747 Charles

That’s a terrible column, full of factual errors and stupid counter-intuitive nonsense. Charles Blow has previously called out the right for their rhetoric, but suddenly he sees nothing wrong with it. He’s an ass.

There is nothing contradictory about calling out the right for extreme rhetoric, while also expressing skepticism that it was a major contributing cause of the Tucson shooting. Violent rhetoric is still dangerous, even if it wasn’t a major cause of this particular incident. It’s pretty clear that Mr Blow does not “see nothing wrong” with right-wing rhetoric.

Regarding factual errors, I assume you mean his reporting of the opinion poll results that show X% of Americans believe violent rhetoric was the cause of the shooting. Those poll results are meaningless anyway, you can’t crowd-source a psychiatric diagnosis.

There is still no specific evidence that right-wing rhetoric influenced Loughner at all. All the “evidence” has been put forward so far is:

- Opinion polls about how many people think it did (meaningless).
- Mountains of examples of violent rhetoric from the Tea Party, which should certainly be condemned regardless, but it hasn’t been established that Loughner actually read or was influenced by any of it.
- The opinions of police officers and victims of the shooting, without any specific reference to anything that Loughner is known to have read or watched, or opinions he is known to have voiced.

Seriously, people should be a little more skeptical about this and go and read Loughner’s internet postings and watch his YouTube videos if they want to get an idea of what was going on in his mind, instead of just signing on to the “right-wing terrorist” narrative. There is no way anyone who is being honest with themselves can continue to believe it. He was a delusional conspiracy theorist obsessed with NASA conspiracy theories, date systems and lucid dreaming.