He read books by Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell, among others. He did not believe in God. By all appearances, his mind was ruined by madness and his soul by evil. In any case, he murdered a nine-year-old child, a federal judge, and four others while wounding at least twelve, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat well liked on both sides of the aisle.

I wasn’t going to write anything about the incident because—unlike, say, the frequent and ongoing atrocities inspired by the very intent of Islamism or Communism—it didn’t seem to be a murder caused by any sort of coherent idea. Bad ideas have to be answered by the best ones we’ve got, or they continue to claim the minds of believers and the lives of the just. Madness and evil, on the other hand, are simply things that happen in this broken world. The only proper response is the one in King Lear: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!”

But while little useful can be said about the murders themselves, the rush to narrative of our dishonest and increasingly desperate leftist media does have to be addressed. The Left—which has been unable to discover any common feature uniting acts of Islamist violence worldwide—nonetheless instantly noticed a bridge between the Tucson shooting and its own political opponents. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a slavering editorial blaming “the right.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson suggested that the killings were inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Politico’s Roger Simon did the same.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0109ak.html