Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Tucson Underscores the Need to Control the Mentally Ill, Not Guns

Disbarred Attorney and Christophobic Hate Blogger Lindsay Taylor Thompson
In the three and a half years that this blog has been publishing, we have had only two persistent critics - one is a hack and the detritus of the liberal McClatchy Newspapers, now working for the South Carolina Policy Council on a blog with half of our traffic; the other was an attorney who was found to be so lacking in honesty and professional ethics that the State of Washington disbarred him.  And when we revealed the latter's sordid past, he admitted to a history of mental instability.  Over the course of several years, each of these two bloggers has been very supportive of the other.

We pay about as much attention to the political commentary of these two as we do to the political philosophy of the Unabomber, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Son of Sam.   Nevertheless, within hours of the tragic events in Tucson this past weekend, Lindsay Taylor Thompson, the disbarred lawyer, gay activist, and Christophobic hate blogger, was mimicking the mainstream media by suggesting that right-wing rhetoric had spawned the tragic events and  that Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint and even yours truly are "ennablers," with blood on our hands.

The mentally unstable, disbarred attorney, like the mainstream media he echoes, have completely overlooked the fact that the shooter is a pot smoking, heavy metal listening, practitioner of the occult, who attended a school affiliated with Obama pal and communist, Bill Ayers.  Hardly a Young Americans for Freedom type!

But what is really audacious about these rantings, and so typical of even sane liberals, is the hypocrisy.  For example, on June 1, 2010, Thompson posted the following about yours truly:
One can only wonder what his last thoughts would be if someone ran him to ground in his parish at confession (surely, as an aside, those sessions must be truly marvelous exercises in magical realism) or taking communion for the astonishing- and popular- spew of hate and bigotry his blog presents daily, and pumped a few lead rounds into him.
Inflammatory? Hate speech? An indicator of a mentally disturbed psychopath?

We think so!

Yet when we called that post to the attention of the Greenville County Sheriff, the South Carolina Attorney General and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), we were informed that threats on the Internet don't count.  One can only be prosecuted if one delivers a threat in writing, to one's home.  Accordingly, we have taken precautions, and we recommend that all conservatives do so, because so many of these deadly psychopaths, contrary to what the media would have you believe, are of the Left.

This left-wing propaganda we have seen since Saturday is itself sheer hypocrisy.  If you accuse someone you disagree with of being guilty of inciting murder, that demonizing accusation itself is no less "hate speech" that might encourage unstable leftists (like the Tucson shooter) to act out actual violence.

If one is defined by one's enemies, as well as one's friends,  we are proud of both.  But the Jared Loughners of the world usually announce themselves long before shots ring out.  The events of this past weekend underscore not only the importance of citizens being armed for their own protection, but the need to ensure that the public is protected and that the mentally disturbed get help they need and are prevented from harming themselves and others.


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the most insightful comment about the AZ shoot that I've seen anywhere:

"This left-wing propaganda we have seen since Saturday is itself sheer hypocrisy. If you accuse someone you disagree with of being guilty of inciting murder, that demonizing accusation itself is no less "hate speech" that might encourage unstable leftists (like the Tucson shooter) to act out actual violence."

Julie said...

Bravo, Dan. I have a relative who is a pyschiatric nurse and when mental hospitals were defunded in the early 90's, she was worried about all the mentally ill who would be left without care and oversight.

Providing adequate mental healthcare is perhaps the only government-subsidized program I would agree with since so many of these patients have fallen through the cracks and have noone to provide for them.

Perhaps instead of subsidizing a decade-long war in the Middle East, we should have been spending a fraction of that money on caring for our mentally ill.

Karen Iacovelli said...

Dan, your insight is absolutely on-target. In his 1993 book, The Dream and the Nightmare, Manhattan Institute research Fellow, Myron Magnet details how the far left worship of civil liberties created homelessness and the rights of the mentally ill to refuse treatment. A series of court decisions in the 1970's put all of this into action, spawned by the ACLU. Former NY Governor, Mario Cuomo, shut down all of NY's psychiatric facilities in the name of civil liberties. This is the legacy of the fanatical left. Quick research of mass shootings since the ACLU decided that the mentally ill are victims of a previously rule-based culture, reveals that all of the shooters had known mental instability and either refused treatment, or families were unable to institutionalize them for proper help. Your post needs widespread attention, as does Myron Magnet's remarkable description of the consequences of failed liberalism.

Julie said...

Karen,

Thanks for the info about Gov. Cuomo. I live on Long Island and must drive through Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital grounds quite often.

It is an unspeakable horror to see the delapidation and utter neglect into which that institution has fallen. There is still one section in operation but it stands amidst fields of rubble and long-abandoned buildings.

It's a complete disgrace and a blot on the landscape and symbolizes how the enlightened statist left has totally given up their responsibilities towards the less fortunate.

Karen Iacovelli said...

Julie,
I am also a (former) Long Islander and worked in admitting at Kings Park State Hospital my senior year of high school. The issue is so complex, but IMO the ACLU was the catalyst that created the mental healthcare nightmare. Antipsychotic drugs and other breakthrough treatments were responsible for rapidly declining population in these facilities, but when the mentally ill were found by the courts in the 1970's to have the right to refuse treatment, all in the name of far left ideology, the consequences continue to be catastrophic. Factor in the drug culture of the 1960's, and the Berkeley psychobabble that pronounced mental illness was the result of oppression, (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest really cast that in stone) and it is a cultural horror story. There are a number of legal tomes that argue the conflict between rights of the mentally ill and the lack of mental competence to understand those rights, act in a responsible manner, etc. A common thread that runs thru much of these analyses is the issue of moral relativism. What a tangled web. And the extremist liberal press and so-called law enforsement officers have the audacity to reduce this nightmare to political speech....

Julie said...

Fascinating insights, Karen. It's not surprising that the social experiments of the last 40 years in this field were dismal failures for the most part and have done little more than produce a generation of drug-dependent zombies and a growing cadre of angry and dysfunctional 'Holden Caufield' types.