Surprise: Loughner Opposed Iraq, Afghanistan Wars, Detests Christianity

Guy Benson | January 11, 2011 12:02 PM

As we all know, the Tea Party movement is teeming with Bush-hating, 9/11 truther, antiwar, Christian-hating, "Left-wing pothead" zealots:

On July 7, 2010, Loughner posted his assertion that the war(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan “is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949”:
There was help with cleaning the uranium from the Iran and Iraq war in the 1980’s?
Article 33 of the Geneva Convention is the prohibit of pillage.
All military invasions with armed forces into a foreign country are war crimes in the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.
The Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a military invasion with armed forces into a foreign country.
Therefore, Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.
Ouch! For the thoughts of war.
In a thread on unemployment, Loughner quotes with seeming approval, portions of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserting “the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity” and “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”
And then there are his frequent attacks on religion and Christianity, e.g.:
    Crap on God!
    Crap on God!
    Crap on God!

Indeed, Loughner was so inspired by the ("overwhelmingly" right-wing) "climate of hate" that he didn't vote in 2010, and is a registered independent.

The purpose of this post, of course, is not to suggest that Loughner is a man of Left. He's not. He's an unstable, psychotic person with terrifying and violent impulses; his indecipherable "politics" are immaterial to his hideous crimes. Even if his views were more easily identified with one end of the spectrum than the other, public figures' political speech should not be blamed for his deranged actions. In that hypothetical case, correlation would not equal causation. In the actual case before us, there's absolutely no evidence of correlation or causation, which makes the ongoing effort to tar the Tea Party/Sarah Palin/Talk Radio/Sharron Angle/Fox News (take your pick) as complicit in Saturday's atrocity all the more cynical and intolerable.