Jared Loughner: The Real Face of Responsibility
Yesterday’s shooting at Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ Congress on Your Corner in Arizona is a horrible and tragic event that should never have happened. However, it did and therefore we must deal with it.
The shooting is a tragedy which should be uniting us in support and defense of the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It should be bringing all of us together in support of our way of life and our representative Republic form of government. After all, Giffords’ event, an elected representative speaking with constituents, is the foundation of our Republic.
How are many on the left responding? Instead of putting politics aside and coming together, they’re using it as yet another opportunity to divide America using crass and sickening political theater. Arizona State Senator Linda Lopez only hours after the shooting, before any definite information was available, went on national television with accusations that the shooter was an “Afghan” veteran influenced by the TEA party movement. Then Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik ended his press conference with a tirade blaming conservative media for filling the American people with vitriol. It should be noted Sheriff Dupnik also believes Arizona’s recent law calling for enforcement of federal immigration law is “stupid” and “racist.”
The left-wing media and blogosphere are filled with accusations against Sarah Palin because of a marketing piece which had a target on Giffords’ congressional district (not on Giffords’ face as is being implied). These accusations are utter nonsense. First, Democrats and leftists have used similar marketing tactics in the past, not to mention even more disturbing depictions of former President Bush by the left, yet those blaming Palin for the shooting don’t bother to mention any use by the left of these types of marketing tactics. Second, either the people making these accusations are such complete idiots or they believe others are such complete idiots that they can’t distinguish between a political advertising marketing tactic and an actual death threat. If you truly believe a target on someone’s district was an actual death threat then you need to be locked up in the same sort of padded cell where the gunman belonged!
This is only one person responsible for yesterday’s shooting: Jared Loughner who pulled the trigger. Apparently another suspect, known to authorities, remains at large. Yet, Sheriff Dupnik, citing the advice of “legal counsel,” refuses to release photos or a complete description of this person so the public can be on the lookout for him. [Update: The Pima Sheriff’s Department finally released a photo of this person-of-interest. Update to the Update: Pima Sheriff has cleared the person of interest.]
So what’s the picture of Loughner that’s emerging? We now know he wasn’t an “Afghan” veteran or a veteran at all. He applied for military service and was rejected. The military won’t say why, citing privacy reasons. However, the disjoined ramblings from his YouTube videos give us a pretty good clue. We also know he’s been arrested for possession of illegal drugs. It looks more and more like he is a demented leftist radical anarchist pothead. Despite this, many on the left and the mainstream media continue to either openly or subtly blame the TEA party movement and conservative media. It’s obvious they’re taking Rahm Emanuel’s advice to not let a good crisis go to waste and seek to use the tragedy as the springboard for censorship of conservative media, silencing of anyone who disagrees with their agenda, and very likely “gun control” as well.
The TEA Party movement – a movement and a mindset, not a political party – is about government accountability. “TEA” is an acronym for Taxed Enough Already. The movement consists of people from a wide spectrum of political beliefs. They are united in a belief that government should act within its Constitutional bounds and those within government, both elected officials and bureaucrats, should be accountable to the people who pay the bill (the American taxpayers). Acts of violence against the government are completely counterproductive to the aims of this movement, which seeks to restore Constitutional order. Therefore, it’s pure absurdity to claim, as the left does, the TEA party and conservatives are agitating for violence.
Let’s look at the other side. What do they have to say? Many on the left, including some who’ve been right next to Obama, are calling for an overthrow of the system, such as self-described Marxist-socialist Van Jones’ “bottom up, top down, inside out” revolution. Frances Fox Piven, who many in the administration and many radical leftists hold up as a mentor, is calling for a violent uprising against the American system. Obama once told left-wing activists, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Another left-wing guru, political cartoonist Ted Rall, calls for the left to engage in violence against the right. The often cited “bible” of leftists and one of the books from which Loughner says he found inspiration, the Communist Manifesto, is filled with calls for violence against the bourgeoisies and government officials.
Don’t get me wrong – unlike the left, I don’t want to restrict any of their speech; I want the cockroaches exposed to the light of day so we can clearly see them for exactly what they are. My point is to expose the outright lies of the left in claiming conservatives are “inciting violence” when in fact it’s those on the radical left who are consistently and clearly calling for violent uprisings.
Is it because so many on the left are calling for open, violent uprising that they are so convinced conservatives are doing the same? As someone who pays very close attention to conservative media, I can find absolutely nothing which even comes close to the left’s repeated and unequivocal calls for violence. Conservative media talks about things like restoring honor, returning to the Constitution, taking personal responsibility, government accountability, the importance of integrity, and so forth. I must not have the “Manchurian” programming, since I’m completely missing any calls to violence, “coded” or otherwise.
It’s time for Americans of all political persuasions who might disagree on policy, but agree on the basic framework of the Constitution and the representative Republic to stand together. We simply cannot allow radicals to collapse our Republic. We must find the common ground of the Constitution on which we can unite. We can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.
We honor the memory of those killed when we stand up for the Constitution in the face of the real radicals, like Jared Loughner, who seek to destroy our Republic.
Semper Alacer 
It’s Not the Economy, Stupid; It’s Hearts and Minds
Jim Wallis (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
“You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political discussions are being made, and you will change the outcomes…You will be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to the change in the wind.” – Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 22.
One area where many conservatives continue to fall short involves focusing on simply “the next election” instead of on the larger, and much more critical, issue of fundamentally transforming “hearts and minds” of “regular” Americans. As a whole, conservatives have largely abandoned “community organizing” to progressive liberals – and with quite predictable results.
As the quote above from progressive liberal Jim Wallis reveals, leaders of the progressive movement understand the fundamental point that “winning” does not involve focusing primarily on elections themselves, but on affecting a change in the worldview of the electorate themselves.
From the moment a child enters public school today through his time in college, he is largely and systematically indoctrinated into progressivism. Hence, the absurdity of the “Occupy” movement in which young, mostly white, mostly college-educated people, gather together, wearing Levis and sipping Starbucks, to use their iPhones and iPads to complain on Facebook and Twitter about not being given “enough” due to the “unfairness” of “Wall Street” “corporatism.”
Where is the conservative counteraction to the progressive indoctrination program? Instead of serious efforts at “community organizing” in order to share the principles of conservatism itself and thereby win people over to the conservative worldview (a far more logically consistent worldview than progressivism), many conservatives become too narrowly focused only on worrying about who to support for “the next election.” Unfortunately, worrying about who to vote for doesn’t matter once you’ve allowed the opposition to gain complete control of the worldview of a majority of the electorate.
Until you cause a fundamental transformation in worldview, you may win the occasional battle, but you will lose the war. Progressives learned this fundamental truth a long time ago; which is why their efforts over the last few decades have involved bringing about a fundamental worldview transformation in American society.
Without the current postmodern and post-Christian worldview (a worldview which has systematically been introduced into our society by academia since roughly the 1960s), progressivism itself could not survive since it is such a logically inconsistent position. Progressivism, by its very nature, must “cheat” in order to exist. It can only exist in a society which rejects absolutes and rejects objective truth; for whenever progressivism is held up to the light of objective truth, it quickly evaporates into the logically inconsistent nonsense for which it actually is.
So why are so many conservatives by in large simply sitting by and allowing progressivism to dominate worldview formation? Do conservatives simply not understand the criticalness of worldview on a society? Do they truly believe simply focusing on “the next election” will truly result in the fundamental change they seek back to sound Constitutional principles?
A fundamental transformation (to paraphrase TeamObama) back to solid American principles and values as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the writings of our founders absolutely requires a fundamental transformation of the “hearts and minds” of the American people. We do need a “revolution” – but a bloodless revolution involving a reclaiming of the Judeo-Christian worldview which originally defined our nation.