Mark Potok’s Loony Logical Leap

by Roger Koppl

The tragic shooting in Arizona has sparked a fight about whether today’s right-wing political rhetoric is somehow responsible for egging on Jared Loughner.  The evidence so far is against the claim.

Mother Jones, hardly a right-wing rag, interviewed a friend of Loughner.  It seems that Loughner had a grudge against Giffords after she failed to give him a satisfactory answer to a question he put to her at an earlier event.  Loughner told his friend that he had asked Giffords,  “What is government if words have no meaning?”