Loughner introduces himself above and something he calls "conscience dreaming," which is "the greatest inspiration for my political business information."
Loughner may have been politically motivated, yes, but he was also just plain crazy, based on a look at his videos. This is a still from the video above that should handily illustrate that:
(Loughner's name was given out as "Laughner" by some members of the press.)
EDIT:
This is a screencap from Loughner's Youtube page, which lists among other things his favorite books: "Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno."
Loughner's perfectly normal book selections will doubtless be ignored due to his also listing Hitler's Mein Kampf.
It's inevitable that Loughner's act will be politicized--has already been politicized. I assumed he might be an especially insane right-winger. It's just as likely, the more I think about it, that he was more crazy than anything, and his politics could be defined as "fringe" for the left or the right. Swing far enough around the political spectrum on either side, you eventually collide in crazy land.
As an (attempted) assassin and mass murderer, this may put Loughner more in league with past killers like John Hinckley, who shot Reagan, and Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who killed a number of victims from a campus bell tower at a Texas university in the late 1960s. Whitman's behavior may have been influenced by a brain tumor that caused him to behave erratically.
I hope - HOPE - that Sarah Palin is still called out, no matter how late, for targeting public officials. Maybe the only bright side is that her Reign of Lunacy has ended.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Once I saw how nutty the dude is I felt compelled to point it out... but that doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric has to undergo a sea change. I don't think this will be the first time someone tries/does something like this this year and I think this sort of thing will happen more often--and the motivations will be clearly political. This guy's motivations probably were, in a way, but they were so nutty that in the end you really have to acknowledge it was the crazy that brought him to this pass. All his videos read like schizophrenic rambling, which is pretty hard to ignore.
ReplyDeleteI find it strange that his biography on his youtube page was written in the past tense. I attended-I was-I had favorite books, etc.
ReplyDeleteSo did I, Annie. I wondered if it just showed an overall tendency towards verbal weirdness (look at his videos) or if he was saying something more pointed, writing for "posterity."
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