What the left says, and the truth.

Jared Loughner was a White Supremacist who supported many of the Tea Party's objectives, though not formally a member of the Tea Party. He didn't get his orders directly from Sarah Palin though there's no doubt that the violent rhetoric from Palin, Sharon "Second Amendment Solutions" Angle and other Tea Party "leaders" contributed to the climate of violence in which Loughner functioned.

No one said that George Zimmerman was a racist white guy who hates blacks. He does appear to have been motivated by racism, given that he referred to Martin as a "F*cking Coon" while he was chasing him down and said "they always get away with it" before he shot the innocent teenager.

Joe Stack was not in any way a Liberal. He an anti-Government nutjob who believed that the government was stealing his hard earned tax dollars - precisely the message of the Tea Party.

Floyd Corkins' motives have not yet been determined. The FRC is in fact a hate group, not that that justifies what happened.

And let's not forget that the simple fact that these people have access to assault weapons is largely because the Tea Party has taken such an extremist view of the Second Amendment that they've even got Antonin Scalia saying that the Second Amendment carres shoulder mounted rocket launches and suitcase nuclear weapons.

And before you go, don't forget about Scott Roeder, the Right Wing Anti-Abortion Nutjob who assassinated Doctor George Tiller because Bill O'Reilly called for his assassination. Or James Van Brunn, a White Supremacist anti-semitic Right Wing Holocaust Denier who shot up the Holocaust Museum. And of course the star of the show, Timothy McVeigh, who could be the poster child for the Tea Party.

You can sit around all day and debate the political motivations of nutjobs, but you cannot ignore the fact that the Tea Party has for over three years consistently put forth the message that any regulation of any kind regarding guns is unconstitutional and part of Obama's secret plan to take everyone's guns away, that the government of the United States is the enemy of the American people, and that the Second Amendment was created to empower the people to respond with violence if they don't like the decisions the government makes. Meanwhile, "liberals" have consistently tried to impose common sense regulations and limitations that do not infringe on the right of a law abiding citizen to defend himself with a gun if he chooses. No one would argue that a Liberal shooting someone is an impossibility, but it would be equally ludicrous to assert that liberals encourage violence, or that the Tea Party doesn't.

LOL "Just because Jared is a white supremacist doesn't mean he wasn't a progressive."

Um, Doc, yeah it does. White Supremacists reject the notion of equal rights regardless of race or ethnicity. That's by definition Right Wing. I hate to bring them up, but this was the view of the Nazis - the Aryan Race was superior and had the right to dominate or even exterminate anyone they viewed as "inferior". That could be a Tea Party Keynote Address.

And of course neither Wilson nor FDR were white supremacists, but you already know that. Wilson was, admittedly a segregationist, but "separate but equal", although it is repugnant to the Constitution, is not a question of supremacy but of separation. Even Lincoln believed (and hoped) that after the slaves were freed they would want to all return to Africa. That's why Liberia exists, as a haven for freed slaves. It was founded in 1820 by Americans and it was expected that most freed slaves would go there.

I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence. IF a "Far Left Extremist" were to shoot up a movie theatre that doesn't mean that "Far Left" politics are to blame. Similarly, the fact that Jared Loughner was a white supremacist doesn't mean that was his motivation for shooting Congresswoman Giffords and the others.

However - and this is a BIG however - it is clearly and unequivocally the Tea Party that is repeatedly sending out the message that violence is an acceptable form of political protest - that we should "not retreat, reload", or that we should use "Second Amendment solutions", or even going so far as to suggest that the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to give the citizens of this country the ability to overthrow their own government. In that sort of climate it really does not matter what a person's individual politics are - they have heard repeated over and over by the Tea Party's leadership and then rebroadcast endlessly on every news station (and Fox) that it's ok to pick up a gun and shoot someone, so those people who are truly unstable, like Loughner, are more likely to actually do it. And with the NRA continuing to fight to weaken even the inadequate gun regulations we have left, it becomes easier and easier for someone like Loughner to act on his impulses.