Friday, April 20, 2007

Jason Lewis foolishly rants about the VT mass murders

I was not going to post anything about this, but since Jason Lewis went on yet another rant last night blaming liberals for the events in Virginia...

"Despite hitting rock bottom, he appears to be trying to dig deeper".

This ought to be a line on Jason Lewis' next performance evaluation.

The last several days he has been an incoherent fool, on his KTLK radio show, about the VT mass murder case.

The day of the killings, Lewis was ranting about how Cho Seung-Hui was corrupted by his liberal professors at VT, as evidenced by his rant against America's rich.
You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your
golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your
vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those
weren't enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You
thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I
die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless
people.

Why do zealots like Jason Lewis have to assign blame to a political party or ideology for heinous acts such as this?

He completely dismissed the religious overtones of the killers rant. While it would be easy to assign a political ideology to those overtones, it's not right.

The past few nights, his rant has expanded to include the "entire institution of liberalism".

Mount St Lewis erupted last night.

Pinning the VT mass murder squarely on the shoulders of liberalism.

The mental health community (a liberal bastion) failed this young man.

The liberal courts did not imprison this risk to society. Were these activist judges that failed in this instance?

The liberal professors at VT tainted the young mans mind with delusions of class warfare.

Liberals hating 2nd Amendment rights kept weapons out of the hands of students who could have defended themselves.

He went on and on...

Lewis likes to paint those that are left of insane with a broad brush. Difficult to do when one is hardly capable of painting by numbers.

The young man purchased these weapons legally. More guns will not solve the problem.

This young man was a victim as well, a victim of a national mental health system that failed. Students, faculty members and medical professionals all profess that this kid was suffering from some pretty severe depression.

It still does not give a 22 year old man the right to commit the largest mass murder in the history of the United States, but it sheds significant light as to why this young man acted this way.

Access to mental health care is a significant issue in Greater Minnesota. Because of limited resources and facilities, oftentimes metro cases get "outsourced" to Greater Minnesota facilities, leaving a shortfall of already scant resources for those of us in Greater Minnesota.

Lewis would call us "nanny state liberals" for talking like this.

How close is that to being a "compassionate conservative"?

Who needs Don Imus when you have Jason Lewis?

3 comments:

Bob Mooney said...

There are a number of thing that I find irritating in the aftermath of these shootings. They are not red/blue issues.

The first is the insistence on second guessing the actions of people who had to make decisions based on partial information in a constricted time frame. Two hours is not a lot of time to assimilate information. Think about it. Someone gets shot in a dorm. It's 15-20 minutes at best before 911 gets activated and emergency response happens. It's at least an hour before the President of the University has even sketchy details about a shooting in a dorm. If those details suggest a domestic incident and that the shooter likely has fled the scene -easily the most likely scenario at 8AM that morning, do you lock down an entire university?

If you do decide to "lock down the campus", where do you send the kids to? Back to their dorms? Where the initial shootings were? Come on, people, it was an impossible situation that was not handled incompetently.

Another area of second guessing has to do with mental health professionals and university administrators permitting this "nut job" to be on campus. How do you pick him out. For every one of these people who "go off" and make headlines, there are hundreds of others out there who give people the willies. I am a family practice doctor. I can name at least 5 people in my practice who I would not be one bit surprised to wake up one day to discover that they had taken out a McDonald's, a school or a post office. They are everywhere and according to the law of the land, we are not able to lock them away because they do not pose an imminent threat to anybody. Happening to stumble upon them when they are imminently lethal is pure luck.

Another disturbing issue has to do with what creates these shooters. They are created in our schools. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been routinely picked on when they were younger. This kid was the target of abuse at his high school after he emigrated from Korea. This does not excuse his actions. But, if we want to do something to stop this nonsense from continuing, schools need to take more aggressive stances against the bullying that is the reality for many kids that go through our school systems. If the adults present in our schools would manage the bulliers in the same way they would react if their own child was the target of the bullying, maybe some of these mass-murderers would never be created in the first place.

Bob Mooney
State College, PA

Unknown said...

What I've pointed out for a while, even before this shooting, is that Virginia is the Straw Purchase Mecca of the east coast.

Straw Purchases YeeeeeeHaw!

"...But let’s not get bogged down in reality here, because the Pace Picante sauce folks out there have a problem with the mayor of NYC pointing fingers to his neighbors down south. Sure, folks in Virginia make a healthy profit off of murder in cities up north, but that’s “market forces” doing their thing more often than not..."

Since that blog is run by a Republican from Georgia who hopes to someday get elected to the US House (he lost to Tom Price in '06), the willingness to treat the gun issue like he does immigration is not there at all. I reposted some of that stuff on the same board after the shootings, and there have been far less people willing to comment.

http://controlcongress.com/uncategorized/virginia-straw-purchase-heaven-who-brings-the-facts

So clearly this is a situation where the right-wing is on its heels already, and this guy (radio personality I assume) is doing the only thing he knows how. He cannot be honest with himself or his listeners about gun control, because it would mean he was becoming "one of them".

Attack "them" is the only thing he understands.

So we've got to take the facts about all this and turn it into something he and other righties can't handle!

Ron said...

Good lord, the man is screwier than Newt Gingrich.