Jared Loughner Shooting Spree: ‘Left-Wing Pothead’ or Sarah Palin’s Fault!

Posted By Beth Shaw

We experienced a horrific tragedy last week when Jared Loughner, an obviously seriously disturbed 22-year-old man, walked into a crowd and began firing at people who had gathered to meet-and-greet U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Predictably, people began politicizing the incident right out of the gate.
Most of the vitriolic rhetoric came from groups like DailyKos, just as soon and they scrubbed their own web site of left-wing threats to Congresswoman Giffords, they began accusing the right-wing of threatening her. The accusations were and are unfounded.

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of an opportunity to politically divide people and lets certainly not let a good tragedy go to waste.

It turns out Loughner had it out for Giffords since he met with her at one of her Congress on Your Corner meetings in 2007 and thought she had responded to his questions in a disrespectful manner.

Naturally, all of the finger-pointing and calls for the heads of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party started before any real facts were in. Loughner’s ideologies apparently leaned to the left. Not that where his ideologies leaned mattered. His problems appear to have more to do with psychosis than with politics. As a former therapist I would hazard a guess that his psychiatric evaluations are likely to come up with a diagnosis that might read something like paranoid schizophrenia. But that’s jut a guess, made from a distant and from just reading some of his writings. I’m not the only one who sees schizophrenia in his behaviors and words.

But as the Obama Administration said, never let a tragedy go to waste. Jump right in and start using it to divide and hopefully conquer your political enemies. That’s been tried, and has worked in the past. The Reichstag fire comes to mind.

In the midst of the politicizing of this tragedy we forget the victims of it. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those who are injured and their families as well as the families of those who were killed.

You can watch Jared Loughner burning an American flag in the video he made below. Some more of his seriously disturbed videos can be seen here.