James Eric Fuller is an emotional victim of Jared Loughner who said something stupid within earshot of right wingers. And he apologized, although, for the life of me, an apology from this poor guy who was shot by a crazy lone wolf while attending a constituent meeting held by the congresswoman who was the target of the crazy lone wolf is a little odd.
Eric Robert Rudolph was a crazy lone wolf. James Kopp, Paul Jennings Hill, Michael Griffin, Peter James Knight, they’re all crazy lone wolves too. And the Ku Klux Klan, the Army of God, the Huttaree militia, the Kentucky State Militia, Ohio Unorganized Militia Assistance and Advisory Committee, Southeastern Ohio Defense Force, Michigan Militia (two factions using the same name), Southern Indiana Regional Militia and the Southern California High Desert Militia. Crazy lone wolves. All of ‘em.
Tim McVeigh mighta been a crazy lone wolf, but he had Terry Nichols and that guy they never identified. If he actually existed.
Remember two years ago when the Department of the Fatherland released a report saying that right-wing extremism was on the rise and the Republicans all went apoplectic? I think they were pissed because the report said that these right wing militias, made up of crazy lone wolves, often targeted crazy lone wolves in the military because they made such good crazy lone wolf militiamen. I also think the right still denies the veracity of this report.
After the Tucson shootings, a lot of folks started talking about how lousy this country is with mental illness. About how we let crazy lone wolves slip through the cracks so they end up doing things like what Jared Loughner did. You know, like when John Hinckley tried to kill Saint Ronnie because he loved Jodie Foster, who is a big ole lesbian. But John Hinckley really was a crazy lone wolf, who might not have been out on the streets to pump bullets into Reagan and Jim Brady and Tim McCarthy and Tom Delahanty if he’d gotten better mental health care. By the way, did you know that Hinckley had stalked Jimmy Carter before, but could never get close enough to shoot him, and that he didn’t actually hit Reagan? The bullet that hit Saint Ronnie hit the limo and ricocheted into his chest.
But I digress. My point is that cutting social services, ironically begun in earnest by the very same Ronald Reagan mentioned above, helps keep crazy lone wolves, and every one else, from getting the care they desperately need. The crazy lone wolves in Congress, for example, want to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, which has some pretty good provisions for mental health care. How does that mesh with what they’re saying?
Newly elected crazy lone wolf Alan West of Florida, for example, wrote on his Facebook page:
The shooter was a very disturbed individual and it appears there were so many warning signs that he was going to do something horrible. We should be focusing on the mental health crisis in our country, not politics.
And Mike Rogers of Michigan told MSNBC:
A bad guy is going to get a gun. What we have to do is intervene earlier in that cycle of violence when they have this kind of mental disability.
Right, dudes. So the best way to do that is to repeal the Act that makes some of that possible. I guess it’s easy to say that shit, and then when the time comes, conveniently forget it and vote the way you want to.
And it is the way they want to. The Teapublicans like to say that they’re doing what the American people want, but if that were the case, they’d be strengthening the Affordable Care Act instead of trying to repeal it. And they were supposed be doing this “repeal and replace” thing — only they don’t have one single idea about what the replace it with.
In Pima County, Arizona — where the shootings took place, 45 percent of the county’s mental health care recipients have been forced out of the system because of Republican budget cuts in the past year. Yeah, that’s gonna help too.
All of this underfunding and budget cuts leads to more crazy lone wolves. On the other hand, what if they’re not crazy lone wolves? David Neiwart:
For some time now, it’s been something of a reflexive response by media pundits, particularly conservatives and “moderate” liberals, to point to mental illness when some violent and unstable person commits a horrifying act in the name of extremist right-wing beliefs. If they’re just mentally ill, you can’t blame the people whose ideas they happened to pick up, can you?
Thus we have witnessed a steady stream of “isolated incidents” in which angry, mentally unstable men walk into churches and shoot their liberal targets in the head, or walk into public spaces and open fire, or crash their planes into government offices and gun down police officers. Yet when all these, and a long list of similar incidents, occur, they are dismissed as “isolated incidents.” Because, you see the perpetrators are just “nutcases.”
Likewise, when an oddball college dropout named Jared Loughner walks up to Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a Safeway parking lot and shoots her point-blank, then empties another 30 rounds into the crowd around her, killing six and wounding 14 more — well, that can’t be laid at the feet of his incoherent (but largely right-wing) belief system, can it? After all, he’s obviously got mental problems, right? Therefore, it’s just another isolated incident.
That’s a cop-out, and a dangerous one. One of its chief consequences, in fact, is that the list of “isolated incidents” — and the body count that accompanies it — will just keep mounting. At some point, people will realize that the incidents are perhaps not so isolated after all.
Mmmm. The man may have a point there …
And yet, a recent CNN poll suggested that 70 percent of the American people think Jared Loughner’s actions were the result of a failure of the mental health system — and 66 percent think nothing that can be done about it, either by society or the government. But even though Jared Loughner is a crazy lone wolf, 52 percent want him executed.
I think we just may have a nation of crazy lone wolves.
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