Mister Pobor is right, Jared Loughner is a nutcase (“The media used the shooting for their agenda,” Jan. 13). But then so was the man who flew his airplane into IRS headquarters in Texas, as were the men who stomped a grandmother protesting a Tea Party rally in Kentucky, as were the people who made thousands of death threats to Democratic congressman during the health care debate, as were the people who committed hundreds of acts of vandalism against Democratic offices during the recent election.
And while all these thousands of separate acts were the actions of nutcases, their targets and paranoid rationalizations were supplied by cynical right-wing politicians and their allies on hate radio and Fox News. If placed next to each other on a page and without attribution, I challenge anyone to show me the difference between the website rants of Jared Lee Loughner and Glenn Beck.
This article appears in Jan 20-27, 2011.