While the BBC look for the Palin connection, at left American magazine Mother Jones, reporter Nick Baumann interviews an old friend of Jared Loughner, Bryce Tierney :
On Sunday, federal prosecutors charged 22-year-old Loughner with one count of attempting to assassinate a member of Congress, two counts of unlawfully killing a federal employee, and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. Giffords was the target of Loughner’s rampage, prosecutors say, and the sworn affidavit accompanying the charges mentions that Loughner attended a Giffords “Congress in Your Corner” event in 2007. The affidavit also mentions that police searching a safe in Loughner’s home found a letter from Giffords’ office thanking the alleged shooter for attending an August 25, 2007 event.
Tierney, who’s also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period. He’s unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges—Loughner “might have gone to some other rallies,” he says—but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: “He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?'”
“He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question.’ Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”Giffords’ answer, whatever it was, didn’t satisfy Loughner. “He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question,’ and I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that,'” Tierney recalls. “Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”
One gets a distinctly Mark Chapman vibe from that. From his Youtube videos we can deduce that Loughner, to put it charitably, is running on a different mental track from most of us. His ramblings about grammar seem like a bastardized version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
– that language and grammar can determine, or at least influence, thought. It was unfortunate for Ms Gifford – and even more so for the six people murdered, including a nine year old girl – that he chose to ask her his unanswerable question – and resented her inability to answer.
Here is the real reason for his actions. It has nothing to do with Palin, but of course the BBC will never report it as it does not fit in with their anti Palin views. How are they allowed to get away with it. ?
They break their charter all the time.
I think it shows what they have already decided the narraive to be. Normally in shootings like this (especially given the evidence pointing to a profound psychological issue) the press will trot out a psychologist to give insight.
But not this time. Given the new element in this post we’re starting to see some kind of fixation with Giffords. That would clearly run counter to the narrative needed.
I saw the Sherrif interviewed on yesterday evening’s ITN news. I wondered if the Beeb carried out. In it the Sherrif suggested that given the charged political atmosphere, that politicians carry a gun when they’re meeting representatives.
What beautiful irony. The sherrif advising politicians to carry out the constitutional right to bear arms. This right is one the things the Beeb is using in its efforts to create the impression that the tea party are gun toting crackpots directly responsible for this shooting.
The sheriff is a vehement Democrat – odd the BBC did not mention that.
What was his question, if words have no meaning?
p.s. When faced with a disagreement on any topic, I, after the initial skirmish, usually bring out the big guns and try to outflank my enemy with all the firepower available. If possible I will target my enemy’s weak points, subjecting him to repid fire assaults, taking any strategic high points available. After softening him up with the old 1-2, I bring out all my weapons and bombard him from all sides – and if he does not retreat in total surrender after all this, I may bring out the nuclear option (calling him a nasty Leftie). [Oh, and if he tries to knife me in the back with fallacious counter-arguments, I will gun him down with cold logic.]
Frankly, I resent the BBC’s inability to answer this question: how do you monitor your output for bias? All we get is Helen Boaden et al telling us the BBC isn’t biased because she says so.
Doesn’t make me want to shoot them though. A Chinese burn will do for now.
Loughner was also apparently obsessed with 2012 end times prophecies. Could he have been pushed over the edge by recent inflammatory rhetoric in the media?
Is this the end of days?
In Arkansas and Louisiana, birds have been falling dead or dying out of the sky in their thousands. Dead fish have littered the Arkansas River. Australia is drowning in biblical floods. And the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, only teared up twice today as he prepared to take the oath of the speaker’s office. Something isn’t quite right. Some websites have predicted that the End of Days will happen before the end of January.
Is Matt Frei to blame for the Tuscon massacre? It’s the question that everyone in America is asking, our correspondent says.
I would bet any Beeboid or defender of the indefensible that the murderer had no idea about anything Sarah Palin said or did, and that he clearly lived in his own mental world.
The new year is barely one week old and already we have something for the end-of-year list of favorite moments of BBC bias.
I just sent in the following complaint to the BBC:
All of Mark Mardell’s blogposts between 8 Jan. and 11 Jan., as well as all of his reports made for broadcast on the BBC (audio and video, which are broadcast on multiple BBC outlets) falsely blame Sarah Palin for the attempted murder of Rep. Giffords and the murder of six innocent people. According to his own personal records, as well as that of every single acquaintance who has come forth, he was angry at and obsessed with Rep. Giffords as early as 2007, long before anyone ever heard of Sarah Palin.
Police reports have mentioned a letter from 2007 which clearly proves that the murderer was already targeting Rep. Giffords. This happened many months before Sarah Palin was chosen as Sen. McCain’s running mate in 2008. Furthermore, the murderer’s clearly deranged mental state existed long before that as well. These facts have been censored by all BBC reports on this story, and instead attempt to unfairly and dishonestly blame someone who has done nothing. The fact that so many in the mainstream media are doing the same thing is no excuse for the BBC. Reporting falsehoods and censoring information is wrong, even if everyone else does it. The problem is that every single BBC presenter is taking the same line of attack when reporting or commenting on this incident. This is libel now. The BBC is blaming someone for an act of mass murder without cause, and in direct contradiction of the facts. Please correct your reporting on this incident. Mark Mardell, at the very least, owes the viewers and Sarah Palin an apology. NB: If this complaint is going to be turned away simply because Mardell is, on paper, and employee of BBC Worldwide, please substitute either Richard Bacon, Victoria Derbyshire, or Stephen Nolan for Mardell in my complaint, as they have done the same thing.
I included a link to the interview in Mother Jones.
I asked for a reply, and, if not all-purpose boilerplate, I expect an excuse-filled dodge saying that the real issue is political discourse and not the act of murder itself.
Good luck; Mardell has it in for Palin politically, whenever possible; his interest in her is obsessively negative: a million miles from ‘political impartiality’, in any meaningful sense.
In the meantime, Bacon was on Radsio 5 a few minutes ago gratuitously vilifying Glenn Beck of FOX NEWS. Bacon simply tried to write off Beck with a one-minute clip from Beck’s programme last night which Bacon pronounced, from his full intellectual height, as ‘meaningless’.
Here is 17 minutes of that Beck show on Fox News last night; as Beck keep saying – ‘make up your own minds’:
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/glenn-beck/index.html#/v/4491512/beck-facts-vs-garbage/?playlist_id=86917
The right have been very restrained about the left using the attempted murder of Congresswoman Giffords as a pretext for an anti-right and anti-Palin hatefest, and rightly so in the wake of such a tragedy, who would want to seek to the barrel scraping depths of our opponents? However, as the shock and horror of the attempted murder of the Congresswoman and murder of bystanders begins to recede to that of painful memory, it is down for each and every conservative and decent leftist to demand apologies from demagogues who have despicably used this tragedy to whip up hatred, and demand that leftist leaders disown the words of their hate-filled colleagues.