A family friend says Loughner was particularly influenced by something called the “Zeitgeist” movie. News One writes the movie “claims that the Federal Reserve was behind several wars and manipulates the American public and that there was a secret conspiracy for a ‘One World Government’ or ‘New World Order,’ common themes in the Patriot Movement.” But not so fast. An elementary Internet search shows that these videos seem to be associated with something completely different. Something called the Venus Project.
What is the Venus Project? Is it associated with “Patriot” and “right wing” themes? Judge for yourself by following the link above. No one in the Venus project or Zeitgeist should be held responsible for the unhinged actions of a lunatic like Loughner, but in the interests of proper taxonomy, how should the themes articulated by Zeitgeist and the Venus Project be characterized?
The Wikipedia entry says Zeitgeist the movie was critically well received at a screening “on November 10, 2007 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as part of the 4th Annual Artivist Film Festival, where it won the Best Feature Award in the Artivist Spirit category for feature-length documentaries. In September 2008, Zeitgeist, The Movie also received a Special Acknowledgment Award at Rutger Hauer’s ICFILMS Film Festival in Milan, Italy.” Not very right wing so far.
One newspaper suggested that the movie was less than factual. “A review in The Irish Times entitled ‘Zeitgeist: the Nonsense’ wrote that “these are surreal perversions of genuine issues and debates, and they tarnish all criticism of faith, the Bush administration and globalization—there are more than enough factual injustices in this world to be going around without having to invent fictional ones.” Critical of the Bush administration, hmm.
The Venus Project describes itself in the following way:
embedded by Embedded VideoThe Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, over-population and a decline in the Earth’s ecosystems.
As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.
YouTube Direkt
Ecosystems, social engineering, redesign of culture, a “comprehensive plan for social reclamation”. These are not very well known as right wing themes.
The Zeitgeist movie and the Venus Project can at best be called “eclectic”. One hesitates to label it Left, Right, Up or Down. If one were pressed it is easy to make the case that it embodies as many ideas from the Left as from the Right, if not more. But that is a pointless debate. Loughner was beyond politics in any reasonable sense of the word. His driveway didn’t go all the way to the road. One wonders whether Sheriff Dupnik or Paul Krugman, knowing Loughner was a Zeitgeist fan, could ascribe the shooter’s madness to anything except madness. Maybe it is time to go easy on the labels and stop trying to pin it on one side of the political spectrum or the other.
Link to Wretchard’s novel “No Way In” print edition
Link to Wretchard’s novel “No Way In” Kindle Edition”
the poor bastid wanted some peace, but it was not to be.
The actual political leanings of Loughner make Palin’s accusation
that the dems have played a blood libel — that much more
riveting.
Bandwidth crisis!
I scanned quickly through “The Zeitgeist Movement”. It was striking that Loughner’s writings/statements show a pretty clear linkage to parts of this work. I did tally the political leaning of the people/organizations cited as authorities in the text (in the footnotes). By my, admittedly approximate, count there were 32 liberal, 41 neutral, and 3 conservative citations. Overall though “The Zeitgeist Movement” exists totally outside the current political spectrum.
To understand how really old and out of date the dems are–its helpful to recall the first blood libel that the post WWII democratic party used — was inveighed against Joe McCarthy.
Again I’m struck by how what some consider new is a re-hash of ideas that have been expressed before.
I suppose the rephrase is,”We may forget the past but it doesn’t forget us.”
Reminiscent of Lyndon LaRouche in his days(daze?). Correct a thought: Were Mr. LaRouche and the author (Albany cycle)
William Kennedy the same person? Perspiring minds need to know.
Patsy’s inclined to think not. Crazy!
” Who can chart the course of a twisted nerve or a ganglia gone awry?”
In “Moby Dick”, Starbuck says to Ahab; “To be enraged with a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct is blasphemous.”
To accuse people you disagree with of responsibility for a madman’s actions may not be “blasphemous”, but it certainly isn’t enlightened.
Winnie the Pookah, Captain Queequeg, and T. O’Neill hardily concur. Aargh!
Fraud is the first thing that came to mind.
“The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.”
I didn’t see any plan. Just sugary phrases and vague notions. I did wonder if it was a left-over Obominaion campaign speech. I wouldn’t call the quoted paragraph Conservative or Liberal. It is the sort of nonsense one says to a 19 year old veggie to get her knickkers down. de-construct that Paragraph. When you are done, you have nothing.
It’s easier to process the behavior of an obvious outlier nutter whose damage to society was limited to 20 gunshots than the behavior of a Krugman or a Dupnick who display a nearly equal inability to deal with truth and reality.
Krugman, Dupnick et al have a far greater ability to inflict grievous wounds on the body politic. It should not go unnoticed that Obama called Dupnick to give him an ‘attaboy.
It is far more unsettling to know that the people who control the many guns of legitimate authority have no more regard for virtue than the assassin.
As i mentioned a couple of threads back, the governmental authorities often figure in the delusions of paranoids. And there are metaphysical reasons why crazy people are never invaded by angels.
That being said, the anti-globalist and anti-fed crowd has always, in my experience been much more of the left than the right. Those have not been tea-partiers rioting at the G7 meetings for the last decade, and the common thread is paranoia about the Trilateral Commission, Skull and Bones, Bildeberger contingency — i.e. the rich, capitalist elite, the bankers, who were saddled with the blame for the Great Depression during the first great wave of progressivism.
I have watched this idea fester and maintain in my own family for decades, and it’s always associated with an assumption that the problem with the Fed is that it’s a bunch of rich bankers, and that the solution is for the government to take it over.
From where i sit, this is just warmed over Marxism, which has always masqueraded as a rebellion by the little guy against the big capitalist authorities but always shows its true essence to be even more control by even bigger authorities.
I guess what I’m saying is that this stuff is leftist to the core and any similarity to persons living or dead in the conservative movement is purely coincidental.
Well I’m sure the family friend was certainly inside the mind of the assassin but the threads coupling of his behaviors to legitimate questions about the Federal Reserve and the fifty or less movers and shakers on this planet that are it’s stockholders has validity.
The FED is not mentioned in the Constitution and was resisted by many of the founding fathers (a central bank) It has never been audited and is a PRIVATE bank born in secrecy at Jekyll Island,Ga by only a handful of bankers and government officials that wrote the legislation and then misrepresented it to Congress to get it sanitized and past..When the Rothchilds of Europe have a major say in the establishment of an institution such as the FED something is amiss. And the Rothchilds aren’t the only Europeans to have an ownership stake in the FED.
The last time Ft Knox was audited …if memory serves 1956.
Yeah the kid was a wack job but the Federal Government isn’t all that sane either as we see from the current actions of Ben Nerdneke…furthermore perhaps the poet Ezra Pound wasn’t the best American but he was jailed as a a political prisoner for thirteen and a half years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.,a Federal institution for the insane for asking the wrong questions.
It is highly doubtful he was insane he was simply speaking truth to power and they locked him away, NEVER charging him with anything.
Yes, we have freedoms here but they are at the whim of the government as Lincoln proved during the Civil war by suspending large parts of the Constitution.
This is no defense for the perp but a fact of life that the government will lie about and kill those who speak too loudly …just ask the dead children at Waco …. tanks, the ATF used tanks against Koresh and small children when they could have arrested him while he was jogging.
It’s piss poor when the truth is stifled using an incident involving an obviously deranged person and attempt to link his insanity with institutions that are thenselves suspect.
The spin this will get and is getting will be the best carosel ride ever and a diservice to the truth.
Demonizing Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, etc., for the alleged sin of demonizing leftists, saying that it incites violence is a high stakes game of liar’s poker.
The left demonized Ronald Reagan, attributing to him all the evils of the world…and he was shot.
The left demonized Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon, because they wanted Nixon with a rope around his neck, and an assassination attempt was made on Gerald Ford.
The left was engorged with hate at Bush 43, insisting that he was evil incarnate, they made snuff films about him, called him Chimpy McBushitler and openly yearned for his execution.
Alec Baldwin suggested that a group of leftists should march down to Henry Hyde’s house in a time not so long ago…and lynch him.
And not a whisper about how their actions were reprehensible, despicable, and an incitement to violence.
So, please pardon me if I don’t get misty when leftists begin a solemn whisper campaign, complete with all their sanctimonious breastbeating, suggesting that it is the fault of Sarah Palin or the Tea Party or Fox News or Rush Limbaugh for the acts of someone who listed the Communist Manifesto as one of his guiding lights, who was clearly a mental health victim in need of long term care and who was clearly less tied to a consistent political agenda than was Squeaky Fromme.
That the left immediately seized upon this tragedy and turned it into an infomercial about the depths of their depravity is all one needs to know about that side of the political spectrum. Van Jones was projecting. We now have proof positive that the leftists are the ash holes. It is apparently the only prerequisite to being a member of their disgusting lot.
Habu: Yes, we have freedoms here but they are at the whim of the government as Lincoln proved during the Civil war by suspending large parts of the Constitution.
Yeah. Silly Abe, he said the Constitution no longer applied to citizens of states that fired on Old Glory and removed themselves to the CSA.
(By the way, you got me back, Habu, the EB just went to invite-only and they won’t sign me up).
Peter Boston: Krugman, Dupnick et al have a far greater ability to inflict grievous wounds on the body politic.
Well it isn’t working.
WASHINGTON — Most Americans reject the idea that inflammatory political language by conservatives should be part of the debate about the forces behind the Arizona shooting that left six people dead and a congresswoman in critical condition, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
A 53% majority of those surveyed call that analysis mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.
What you call the “body politic” is millions of informed voters, fresh from making their voice heard in 2010, who aren’t taken in by the lib narrative
Don’t understate the problem. What you should be really worried about is that with all that clear evidence of the misbehaving media, ONLY 53% think the media is being anti-conservative?!?
Heck, it should be approaching 70%! That it is barely over 50% means a huge chunk of your population is clearly out of touch with reality. And no amount of malfeasance by their own will ever make them think otherwise.
I’m an atheist in another country, but God save you all indeed.
Ugh. Not another utopian ‘solution’. As if the last century never happened.
What a rambling, incoherent jumble of misconceptions and bogus cause and effect relationships. No wonder we’ve never heard of “Zeitgeist” till now — and probably won’t hear of it again after this news cycle tires of Jared Loughner.
cfb:
Same here.
Do they really believe we take them seriously on this subject after eight years of Hitler allusions, hangings in effigy, serial musings about assassination of political opponents by (leftwing) entertainment figures, Democrat politicians and in newspaper columns, plays, books and television shows?
Or the vicious Jim Crow-era bigotry directed at two African-American Secretaries of State and the misogynist hatred by establishment ‘feminists’ directed at Sarah Palin (including a call/threat for her to be gang raped)? Really?
And it’s especially odd to be lectured on political civility by folks with a statist festish standing beside the mountain of corpses 100 million high created during the past century by titans of Big Government. They just cannot grasp what the Founders clearly did: That the accumulation of state power, always and everywhere, leads to tyranny — the ultimate climate of hate.
And if proggies think they’re being painted with too broad a brush, well then, welcome to the club.
Wow, the Venus project is a small cement house in central Florida with a cheap-looking patio, four plastic Home Depot chairs and what looks like a Home Depot Tiki torch, and photos of their Ikea bed.
And they give tours of this extraordinary new lifestyle? I’m sorry to sound underwhelmed, but I live in central Florida in a cement house with plastic Home Depot chairs. So do all my neighbors. I had no idea we were on the cusp of futurism.
When I was a wee lad the New Yorker used to regularly have cartoons of bearded old men wearing white robes carrying signs proclaiming – “The End of the World is Near. Now we get You Tubes with all sorts of ‘production values’ that essentially say the same thing. Guess I’m going to have to rethink this techno optimist thing.
Teresita,
My goodness girl it’s good to see you in print. I had been wondering how you were.
Folks, this is one very smart lady whose use of the Socratic method is practically unrivaled in todays world. She and I have not always been on the same side of an issue but she always brings a perspective that is thought provoking and often deadly to those who mumble …welcome girl.
The encomium must end there lest your head explode.
Habu
Ms T,
I bet they didn’t sign you up because you didn’t buy their property in Costa Rica …. naw, you were just too smart for them to handle your retorts to their phalanx of yes men.
Wobbly, don’t forget, those polls have a built-in 30% who never answer, or are “undecided”. What it works out to is about two-to-one against Krugman.
ot-ish: David Frum is running around saying (a) Obama and the dems are right about “violent rhetoric” and the Republicans are realizing it, (b) Sarah Palin didn’t really know what “blood libel” means and she didn’t really mean it anyway, although maybe her speechwriters did. Frum used to be a Republican speechwriter of great skill, now he’s in a new life of being both leftish and terminally confused.
The correct place in Taxonomy for the Venus Project is that it is a utopian movement. As such, it willl have the inevitable outcome, failure. A quick review of such local tries at the brass ring like Harmony, Indiana, and it’s reboot, New Harmony Indiana, shows what happens.
“Resouced based enconomy” in other words, somebody else decides what you can get, and how much.
To second Habu, let’s not call all those who question the actions of the Fed nutters. From The Market Ticker today, the Dallas FED President Richard Fisher:
“The entire FOMC knows the history and the ruinous fate that is meted out to countries whose central banks take to regularly monetizing government debt. Barring some unexpected shock to the economy or financial system, I think we have reached our limit. I would be wary of further expanding our balance sheet.”
And he knows that the Fed and Congress will continue to expand the FED’s balance sheet by great trillion dollar chunks .
Read Market Ticker today. Richard Fisher has a lot of good things to say. It’s good to know someone close to the seat of power gets it.
If you follow me I’ll lead you to Utopia.
(Utopia for me, Dystopia for you.)
5. Charles
Spot on. The Venona papers released only a few years ago proved McCarty was right but the MSM obviously ignored the entire release of the data. They need an established whipping boy to aid their efforts in castrating the right on as many isssues as they can.
FDR’s administration was totally infiltrated with communist agents. We know this now as fact. We also know that FDR admired Stalin and insulted Churchill at the Tehran Conference solely to gain favor with Stalin. It got so contentious that Churchill left the dinner to the mutual grins and winks between FDR and Stalin.
FDR, our original socialist with real power.
Classically people use philosophies to help direct their lives. But in reality many people select from the smorgasbord of philosophies to justify what they want to do. This appears to be more true today than ever before; so many more philosophical concepts are available.
An old friend of mine became fascinated, even obsessed, with end-of-the-world scenarios. When one would be proved false he would find another to embrace. He earnestly tried to get me to adopt the same ideas. I finally had to tell him that his problem was that he was so lazy – had a master’s degree in engineering but had not worked for years – that he was looking for reasons to justify what he naturally wanted to do, i.e., NOTHING.
Loughner is what he is, and that is something very nasty. The movies and the books did not direct him but rather merely gave him comfort.
Personally I don’t believe that there was something that really triggered the actions of this loony. I think that something like this would happen to him sooner or later anyway. And now saying that some film provoked him, or others say that in was Jaques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction, doesn’t amke sense. he’s mad, that’s it and nothing else.
On Hillary and the Arizona killings;
“Hillary Clinton started her week on a shameful note, terming crazed Ari zona shooter Jared Loughner an American “extremist” of a sort with the 9/11 hijackers.
She went back for a second helping yesterday in a chat with CNN: “When you cross the line from expressing opinions . . . [to] violent action, that is a hallmark of extremism — whether it comes from the right, the left, from al Qaeda, from anarchists, whoever it is.”
I guess she would include our Revolution and things such as the Prague Spring.
Habu…
God intervened and delivered a series of micro-strokes to FDR minutes after he sent Churchill down the river.
All of this in front of three doctors! ( Every top man ALWAYS had a doctor in his presence. )
FDR’s mental powers dropped from Tehran until his death. He’d suffered an endless stream of micro-strokes.
But the first on record occurred at Tehran.
When Hoover confronted FDR about Reds all over his ‘administration’ FDR threw him out.
FDR kept Harry Hopkins as his closest buddy: now known without a doubt to be a traitor and Stalin’s man. His autobiography tells of his meeting the top Soviet agent in America time and again. That’s odd. The player was ‘deep’ under cover and operated from a shop in Manhattan!
This particular agent ended up being the back-channel that ‘negotiated’ the ‘solution’ to the Cuban Missile Crisis!
It’s enough to scramble ones brain.
30. Habu
It wasn’t just the communists in the US government. It was that Stalin was about to launch a pogrom/shoah/holocaust on Russia’s Jews in what was known as the doctor’s plot. He already had the camps set up. Russia’s media was baying for Jewish blood. They had some initial show trials.
The diabolical genius of American leftists was that they imputed to McCarthy and the American right what Stalin was about to do Russia’s Jews. This was a blood libel.
(Now the pogrom never happened because stalin died in 1953. But the work of Khrushchev and Brezhnev over the next several decades was to expel Jews from the politburo and then from the party. And finally when it became clear that communism wasn’t working in the 1970′s–they expelled the Jews from the Soviet Union. In fact, the whole story of the rise and fall of the Jews in the Soviet Union looks very much like the rise and fall of the Jews in Egypt from Joseph to Moses.)
Vinny Vidicici @ #20
Excellent point, but your figures are way on the low side.
The mountain of corpses killed, not in war, but at the hands of big government last century (by current reckonning) is around 200 Million, and just keeps on going up.
Prof Rummel at University of Hawaii has compiled the figures.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
I’m reading Raico’s “Great wars – Great leaders?”
Raico doesn’t paint Churchill in any better light than FDR, another opportunist statist and egoist.
Stalin had both of them eating out of his hand.
Raico also has a good review of John T Flynn’s “The Roosevelt Myth”
The Venus Project is just socialism in a new outfit.
“Freedom of Thought”
Loughner’s final days at the college were marked by an incident on Sept. 23, when a biology instructor called college police at 7:31 a.m. According to an incident report, the instructor told police that Loughner disrupted the class “when she told him that he would only receive half credit on an assignment because it was late.”
Loughner’s protests grew louder, one officer wrote in his report, and Loughner said his freedom of speech was being taken away, though he had trouble verbalizing his distress.
Another officer said Loughner’s head “tilted to the left with a confused look in the countenance of his face. His eyes focused down at his homework and he showed a sustained bobbing of the eyes while looking to his upper left side during questioning.”
In a low, mumbling voice, Loughner, who appeared bewildered that police were involved, said that under the Constitution, he had the right to his “‘freedom of thought,’ and whatever he thought in his head he could also put on paper.
By placing his thoughts within his homework assignment, his teacher ‘must be required to accept it’ as a passing grade,” according to campus police records.
On Sept. 29, campus police found a YouTube video in which Loughner proclaimed the college “a genocide school.”
The title of the video, which has since been deleted, is “Pima Community College School-Genocide/Scam-Free Education-Broken United States Constitution.” It was uploaded on Sept. 23 under the username “2PLOY,” the same day officers interviewed Loughner after he disrupted his biology class, according to police records.
The video showed the college campus, and the narrator said:
“We are examining the torture of students … This is my genocide school. Where I’m going to be homeless because of this school … I haven’t forgotten the teacher that gave me a B for freedom of speech … Thank you…. This is Jared … From Pima College.”
—
His behavior ranged from “subdued” — as he was described by an officer who stopped him for running a red light early Saturday — to angry and intimidating, as when he yelled at an instructor who gave him a B in Pilates at Pima Community College, according to school records.
Thanks, Keith. I was just doing my small part to dial back the rhetoric — all in the spirit of the day, you see.
Charles: The diabolical genius of American leftists was that they imputed to McCarthy and the American right what Stalin was about to do Russia’s Jews. This was a blood libel.
I find it hard to believe that leftists would do such a thing to the Jews. After all, according to the Pew Research Center, Jews went 80-20 in favor of Barack Hussein ibn Al-Obama in 2008. And that’s a bit like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.
Jared’s former teenage girlfriend -yes he had one- thinks he faking his insanity.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-jared-loughners-former-girlfriend-says-hes-faking-insanity/
41. Teresita
I find it hard to believe that leftists would do such a thing to the Jews.
……….
To American communists–In 1953 McCarthy’s hearings looked very much like the show trials that Stalin put on before he executed millions during the 30′s. As well, McCarthy’s hearings to the communists looked like the show trials that were initiated at the beginning of the doctor’s plot. The execution of the Rosenbergs that year was exhibit A–that McCarthy’s hearings were antisemetic–just like the doctor’s plot.
The blood libel against McCarthy and the American right was all the more bright and vivid for being just a few years after the holocaust. It was easy to believe the worst. The dems destroyed McCarthy and assumed the mantle of “protector or the jews.” That memory–even though a false memory based on a blood libel– is why the Jews vote 80-20 for the dems.
It doesn’t matter that the realities of the world have changed utterly. That’s why I mentioned that the inner parts of democratic thinking have grown old and detached from reality.
Dupnik vs Sheriff Joe
Detroit on the Desert
Although Pima county has had reporting problems (the Sheriff is a remarkably sloppy administrator), the FBI has enough data to allow us to come to this conclusion:
The citizens of Pima County are up to their necks in crime, especially when compared to neighboring Maricopa County.
Thirty years of hyper-partisan Democrat-led law enforcement have resulted in the highest crime rates in Arizona.
The citizen who lives in Pima County, compared to media-reviled Joe Arpaio’s territory just next door, will have almost
three times the chance of being murdered;
is more than seven times as likely to be raped;
is more than six times as likely to be assaulted;
and more than seven times as likely to have experienced a property crime such as burglary, arson or car theft.
Welll, a lot of American Jews who identify themselves as Jews seem to be JINO’s. Jews in name only. They don’t go to temple on a regular basis, don’t follow the Torah, are often self proclaimed aethiests. While there are devout Jews who vote Democrat that portion is declining. Being a devout Jew takes effort and self control and is just too much trouble. The JINO’s have a thin veener of Jewish culture on them and their self identification as Jews lets them play the victem card when it is convenient. I see similarities in many of the old line main stream protestent churches, and the caffeteria Catholics who parish hop until they find one whose attitudes they can live with. ‘Tis an old cycle for us religious types, devotion then eventually an excuse to take off work for a holiday.
“Zeitgeist” and “Venus Project” are not right wing words/phrases. That tells me volumes right there.
Unsk @42: following the immortal lead of James Carville, Czar of Civic Discoursabilitation, they have begun dragging the $50 bill thru the trailer parks, and the tenuous connection to the Tea Party is being manufactured as we sleep… prepare for the breaking news story.
I think this is a more reasonable explanation of Mr. Loughner actions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efHCdKb5UWc
Eveything else is just fluff. As Sarah so eloquently puts it: “Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them…”
45. toadold
The JINO’s have a thin veener of Jewish culture on them and their self identification as Jews lets them play the victem card when it is convenient. I see similarities in many of the old line main stream protestent churches, and the caffeteria Catholics who parish hop until they find one whose attitudes they can live with. ‘Tis an old cycle for us religious types, devotion then eventually an excuse to take off work for a holiday.
……
Yeah this is about right.
The downside for these folk is that instead of relying on their religion to give them cues as to how to live — they rely on the culture. The problem is the culture is toxic. Way too many of the people they think are steering them right are actually just preying on them.
A Day in the Life- The Beatles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWLeKNc2GZM
Glock on a red G-string
The night before the rampage, authorities say, Mr. Loughner, 22, dropped off at a drugstore a roll of 35-millimeter film containing images he had shot of himself posing with a Glock semiautomatic pistol while wearing a red G-string.
Loughner used a 35-millimeter film-based camera.
More evidence proving him to be a reactionary conservative.
Liberals Seek Ban on Metaphors
In the most bald-faced lie I have ever read in The New York Times — which is saying something — that paper implied Loughner is a pro-life zealot. This is the precise opposite of the truth.
Only because numerous other news outlets, including ABC News and The Associated Press, reported the exact same shocking incident in much greater detail — and with direct quotes — do we know that the Times’ rendition was complete bunk.
ABC News reported: “One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act ‘wildly inappropriate.’
“‘One day (Loughner) started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,’ classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. ‘The rest of us were looking at him in shock … I thought this young man was troubled.’
“Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well.
“‘A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,’ Ali said.”
Here’s the Times’ version:
“After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a ‘terrorist for killing the baby.’”
So that’s how the Times transformed Loughner from a sicko laughing about a dead fetus to a deadly earnest pro-life fanatic.