Leftist Libelous Groupthink Over Loughner

If you've listened to pundits on TV or read them in mainstream newspapers, you might think that Sarah Palin and/or other right-leaning conservative figures contracted tragic Jared Lee Loughner's shooting spree last week.

A thorough initial investigation of the killer reveals absolutely no connection to mainstream conservative figures like Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly. A more honest, fact-based appraisal of Loughner leanings would show that his demons were inspired at least as much by leftist rhetoric as by right wing ideology.

Consider this. Loughner's documented complaints against Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman currently fighting for her life after being shot through the brain, were not based upon her credentials as a politically active liberal. Loughner railed against Giffords being a "fake." Gabrielle Giffords is well known as a "blue-dog" Democrat, i.e., one who demonstrates a more moderate political philosophy than the more extreme leftism that currently characterizes the Democratic Party. Loughner is also a fervent "9/11 Truther," who espouses that the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America were perpetrated with the collusion of elements in the U.S. government. Along the political spectrum, the Truther movement is far more accepted on the left than the right. It would be more reasonable to conclude that Loughner was influenced more by leftist extremism than by rightist rhetoric.

The most reasonable conclusion is that Jared Lee Loughner is a dangerously psychotic individual who realized his awful potential to inflict deadly harm. According to his best friend, he did not fall into either right or left camps, but was heavily influenced by conspiracy theories in general.

But, as Rahm Emannuel so stated so clearly in what was the Soviet propagandist style, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." What's more, if you can customize a crisis out of a tragedy, even better for engineering consensus among a political base. "Mainstream" leftist pundits have chosen to ignore the established, documented facts regarding Loughner, make politically expedient but spurious causal connections, and project a libelous connection onto their right-leaning bogeymen. At this point, the left's favorite bogeyman is Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin responded eloquently this past week to the attempts to link her to Loughner's murder spree. She called these attempts a "blood libel" and she used the label correctly and appropriately. Yes, the term "blood libel" does originate from a traumatic, tragic, and heinous act against Jews. However, that term "blood libel," has indeed become a common metaphor for the slanderous accusations of murder to unjustly blame an innocent party. It has been used numerous times, without outcry by Jewish organizations, to denounce slanderous claims against Israel, the IDF, and Jews in general.

While Abe Foxman was right to defend Palin against the leftist onslaught of slander, he was absolutely out of line to take her to task for using "blood libel" to describe the slander against her. Other Jewish groups have been even more emphatic to tow the left-wing line in vilifying Palin for her use of the term. It seems like the knee-jerk tendency of so many American Jews to identify with the left has blinded them to the unfortunate fact that they are aiding and abetting political libel themselves.