The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How @JAMyerson Blamed @SarahPalinUSA for Tucson

Posted on | February 9, 2014 | 24 Comments

While the beatdown on Jesse Myerson’s communist advocacy will continue — compelled by the impersonal forces of history — we can take a brief detour to examine what he wrote after Jared Loughner’s deadly January 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona.

Beyond Blood Libel: A Refudiation of
Sarah Palin’s Lone Gunman Theory

You can read the whole thing, if you have a masochistic appetite for bad writing, but here’s a sample paragraph:

But even if it cannot be demonstrated that Loughner’s act grew out of the right-wing violence-glorifying culture, there remain critical pieces of context for understanding how culpability for violence is not the sole possession of the man who pulls the trigger. Arizona made the deepest cuts in the country to their mental health budget; Loughner was an obvious victim of this policy, standing as he did to benefit from such funding. Having been removed from school and rejected from the military on the grounds of his mental instability did not, owing to Arizona’s lax standards regarding firearms, prevent him from buying a gun, another important point.

Oh, so “culpability for violence is not the sole possession of the man who pulls the trigger,” which might come as a surprise to Jared Loughner, who pleaded guilty and was sentence to life in prison, but this is how Marxists think, see? Your belief in individual responsibility is “false consciousness,” and in fact you are rendered helpless by the oppressive power of the capitalist bourgeosie, as represented in the person of a certain Republican politician:

Obviously, Sarah Palin finds a link between Islamic extremism and terrorism against America, and she is right to, even though it contradicts her “lone gunman” point. I wonder, though, whether she would have made the same point about crimes beginning and ending with those who commit them if Jared Lee Loughner had been named Abdul Aziz. Wouldn’t she be right to suspect that a widespread inchoate movement which rallies around weapon-related symbols and idioms and has been known on a considerable number of occasions to resort to violence might have produced this result?

Readers will recall that, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some idiot leftists claimed that a “target” map — showing Democrats that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had hoped to defeat in 2010 — was to blame for Loughner’s rampage at a public meeting for “targeted” Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. Myerson admits he initially believed Loughner was a right-winger:

I myself thought, at the first reports of the shooting, that, on the balance, he probably was quite likely to be a Beck-head, and I think I was right to suspect that and to remain wary of such people.
Thing is, though, I’m a sucker for empirical evidence, and mostly it does not point to Jared Lee Loughner as a foil-hat right-wing lunatic (after the mold of, say, Timothy McVeigh), gold obsession notwithstanding. In fact, a friend of his told Good Morning America, “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio.”

Coincidentally, Myerson seems to have lost interest in “empirical evidence” regarding the Tucson shooter just about the time Loughner’s friends and acquaintances started explaining that the gunman’s political beliefs were “liberal” or “radical.”

Of course, schizophrenia has no ideology, but Jared Loughner‘s descent into madness — after breaking up with a girlfriend, he started using marijuana, LSD and salvia divonorum, and dropped out of high school — was certainly not a right-wing phenomenon. And there was an unusual influence on Jared Loughner’s worldview:

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. . . .

You can read the rest of my Jan. 17, 2011, American Spectator column. Myerson obviously never read it, because he seems never to read anything that doesn’t confirm his own paranoid beliefs. Despite his self-declared devotion to “empirical evidence,” Myerson is in fact fanatically devoted to the conspiratorial worldview of Marxism. This ideological devotion more or less requires Myerson to ignore the significance of Zeitgeist as a factor in Loughner’s madness.

Myerson didn’t really want to understand why Loughner did what he did. The deaths of six people in Tucson were of interest to Myerson only insofar as they could advance the Left’s agenda.

 

Category: Intellectuals, Sarah Palin

Comments

24 Responses to “How @JAMyerson Blamed @SarahPalinUSA for Tucson”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    February 9th, 2014 @ 11:57 am

    Remind me never to piss you off Stacy…

  2. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 9th, 2014 @ 11:58 am

    In the very large grand scheme of things, it seems like a positive development to finally have a democrat admit that he is a marxist and proud to be a marxist.

  3. Mm
    February 9th, 2014 @ 12:30 pm

    “Beck-head.” What other slurs does he use when he feels safe?

  4. richard mcenroe
    February 9th, 2014 @ 12:47 pm

    Amazing how the Junior Sooper-Genius missed that the cops turned Loughner loose after repeated violent encounters because his mama worked for the Democrat county…

    Myerson can put on all the airs he wishes, but his mindset is no different from that of any Truther or Alex Jones zombie.

    It is more important to him to “know” he has the “secret revealed truth”, no matter what the facts. In his case, the “secret revealed truth” has been discredited everywhere it has ever been tried, but that will not stop him.

  5. DaveO
    February 9th, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

    “But even if…”

    It’s always ‘but even if’ when one is a Prognazi. It’s the old “Truth to Power” construct: ‘but even if [whatever a conservative is alleged to have done] was not done, then conservatives are still responsible because [insert lie, or a fallacy so broken only the indoctrinated can get past the fail].
    When the Challenger blew up: but even if the O-rings were faulty and every one who knew said nothing, then it is still President Reagan’s fault because he wanted a press conference with Christa McAuliffe.
    When 19 Muslims slammed into the WTC: but even if the 19 men were Muslim fanatics, then it is still President George Bush’s fault because he ran an oil company in Texas that created too much competition with the Saudis and forced these poor innocent Muslim men to get on a plane controlled remotely by Israelis, so Islam could be blamed.
    When Obama was revealed to have known the effects of the Affordable Care Act on workers: but even if hundreds of thousands of Americans lose medical care that is keeping them alive from cancer or lupus or whatever, then it is Ted Cruz’s fault because instead of working with HHS to make the program work, he got press attention.
    It’s always the same. “But even if” followed shortly by a lie of such proportion that any sane man or woman shakes their head, but the Prognazis put their hands in the air and sing atheist hymns of hallelujahs.

  6. Christopher Blake Carlton
    February 9th, 2014 @ 1:12 pm

    No one destroys Commie’s like RSM. It’s a thing of beauty.

  7. Rather be anon
    February 9th, 2014 @ 2:04 pm

    “Refudiation”?! Everyone makes mistakes, but come on, this guy writes for a living.

    It’s almost enough to make one doubt that he is really smart enough to have discovered why communism is actually OK in spite of the death toll and misery.

  8. DaveO
    February 9th, 2014 @ 2:09 pm

    “Refudiation” and “Truth to Power” are words from the Bush Derangement Syndrome crowd. Myerson is both self-identifying and writing to his audience.

  9. Rather be anon
    February 9th, 2014 @ 2:14 pm

    OK, I googled “refudiation,” and it’s a Palin gaffe. But since Myerson is a communist, he ought to dislike both major non-communist parties. Therefore Palin’s political views should be about as different from Myerson as anyone else’s right? It doesn’t make sense for a communist to have special interest in Palin.

    I would be really interested in hearing Myerson’s criticisms of Democrats.

  10. richard mcenroe
    February 9th, 2014 @ 2:18 pm

    Commies will always support Dems in office because the Dems are betting at prepping the proletariat for communism.

  11. Becca Lower
    February 9th, 2014 @ 3:26 pm

    Good stuff. There’s a similarity I noticed between Myerson and the Team Kimberlin and/or #FreeKate minions: in one of his tweets, Myerson accuses you of being “obsessed” with him. In his world, there can’t be another reason you keep writing about him.

  12. concern00
    February 9th, 2014 @ 4:33 pm

    Conservative ? tangible reality

    Liberal ? intangible fantasy

  13. Bob Belvedere
    February 9th, 2014 @ 5:32 pm

    THIS.

  14. Adobe_Walls
    February 9th, 2014 @ 7:36 pm

    When the Soviet Union fell we thought the world had been saved from Communism. Perhaps, time will tell but what is not in doubt is that the “fall of Communism” made the world safe for Communists.

  15. K-Bob
    February 9th, 2014 @ 9:36 pm

    I thought he meant this:
    http://biermagazine.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DF_becks_366.jpg

  16. Adjoran
    February 10th, 2014 @ 2:30 am

    Myerson is just another privileged little liar, then. His “communism” comes from his pampered existence where his only contact with “the oppressed masses” is when one of them fills his water glass or fixes his air conditioning.

    What a punk.

  17. section9
    February 10th, 2014 @ 7:57 am

    Question, Stacy: is this clown Harold Myerson’s son? You know, the socialist front man for the SEIU over at the WaPo?
    The thing that pissed me off about Tucson was that the GOP Establishment refused to stand up for Palin, Rush and any of the other conservatives attacked by the Left in the aftermath of that mass murder. Once the GOP ran for the Tall Grass, I decided I wouldn’t pi$$ on them to save their lives if they were on fire.

  18. hrh40
    February 10th, 2014 @ 9:58 am

    Actually, refudiate became the Oxford American Word of the Year in 2010:

    http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2010/11/noad-2010-word-of-the-year/

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  21. Quartermaster
    February 10th, 2014 @ 6:25 pm

    “…there remain critical pieces of context for understanding how culpability for violence is not the sole possession of the man who pulls the trigger.”

    For once I agree with a marxist. Since Loughner plead guilty, we should execute all AZ Dimocrats for their role in the killings. /sarc

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  23. DeadMessenger
    February 11th, 2014 @ 2:46 am

    Stacy, your Spectator column is completely unfair to Myerson. You are clearly engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

  24. ChubbyBubba
    February 11th, 2014 @ 7:33 am

    Soi dissant writer Jesse Meyers doesn’t know that “refudiate” isn’t a word? What a maroon!! (oops, wrong cartoon character) (alright, I guess I’m late to the show, see below)