Paranoia From The Left

Jared Loughner, the alleged murderer of several people in Arizona is being marketed by the disinformation organizations as the latest example of the menace posed by "right-wing" people and organizations. The large "news" organizations always seem to see bogeymen on the right, but never on the left.
 
A study of assassins would probably conclude that most were not right-wing, but just plain nuts.
Richard Lawrence, the failed assassin of Andrew Jackson was found not guilty by reason of insanity and died in the nut house in 1861. John Wilkes Booth is called a "Confederate sympathizer", but from his shouting sic semper tyrannis as he jumped from the box at Ford's Theater, it would seem that Lincoln's tyrannical measures were his motivation. Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield for personal reasons, not politics. Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated William McKinley is usually classified as a Socialist or Anarchist, but in either case is almost universally admitted to being insane. Lee Harvey Oswald was a left-winger and member of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee. Whether Oswald was the actual assassin of Kennedy, he is the "officially
recognized" one and was not a right-winger. John Hinckley Jr. was another nut, who was trying to impress Jodie Foster and did not shoot Ronald Reagan for political reasons. Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace for the purpose of gaining fame, not for ideological reasons. Lynette Fromm tried to shoot Gerald Ford, thinking that it was somehow going to benefit Charles Manson. Sara Jane Moore was if anything other than crazy, a left-winger. Giuseppe Zangara, the assassin of Anton Cermak and the attempted assassin of Franklin Roosevelt said in the Dade County Courthouse jail, "I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists." Oscar Collazo and Griselio Terresola, who attempted to kill Harry Truman were Puerto Rican independence activists, not right-wing activists. Leo Ryan, the only congressman to ever be killed in the line of duty, was murdered by communist/left-wing lunatic members of Jim Jones' People's Temple.

It seems that the purpose of always seeing right-wingers under every bed is to suppress criticism of government. To those on the left, most of what government is doing is A-OK; the only objection being that it is never doing enough. This is a criticism that the mainstream can tolerate.

Free speech was fine when it was possible to maintain control of who could be heard, but with the rapid dissemination of ideas by electronic means, the left has lost its near-monopoly over speech control. This has made it possible for "sinister forces" - a Nixonian term - to propagate ideas out of the "mainstream".
The first rule in the left-wing playbook seems to be to impute evil, insanity or bad will of some kind - usually hate - to your critic. If your opponent is a stark raving lunatic or has evil intent there is no need to refute his position; his lack of coherence refutes itself. It's what might be called a modified argumentum ad hitlerum; if Hitler said it, it must be wrong.

The second rule seems to be that whatever oppressions the government authorizes are legitimate. The fault is always with the Minutemen, never with the British government. If you don't want your powder seized, you're a radical. If you object to the Stamp Act, you're unpatriotic. If you object to the Quartering Act, you've got something to hide. Many examples from the present could be offered, but you get the idea.

The Arizona massacre not only does not demonstrate the principle that the left wants it to, it positively refutes it. If the NRA ran a dramatization of a left-wing malcontent attacking a relatively conservative woman congressman, but being foiled by an armed citizen, it would be dismissed as "right-wing propaganda."