Friday, September 03, 2010

Can't Crazy Just Be Crazy?

It's become the standard operating procedure on both sides of the political spectrum when someone does something crazy, criminal, twisted, or otherwise condemnable: Go look for a clear political motivation that will make the other side look bad.

This is So. Fucking. Tiresome. And it happens every time. We've reached the point where we view everything through a politicized, ideologically clouded lens so that conservatives have not only decided that conservatives don't like soccer, but that it's socialist, an utterly inane argument on just about every level but one that numerous pundits proffered during the World Cup without batting an eyelash.

So this James Lee fella goes postal at a cable network headquarters and . . . you guessed it. The search for his political agenda that damns half the politically sentient population was on. Thankfully Michelle Cottle brings some common sense, which will of course get lost amidst the yammering:

But, to state the obvious, we’re not forced to pick sides. Lee wasn’t an ideologue driven by his own political extremism to do something drastic. He was, first and foremost, batshit crazy. We’re talking about someone who so lost touch with reality that he thought the best way to save the planet was to force a television network to run game shows promoting the ideals of “human sterilization and infertility.” (Can’t you just envision the “Jeopardy” spin-off? Thanks so much, Alex! I’ll take chemical castration for $400.)

The guy was a nutter. He had bizarre ideas that don't fit neatly into the left-right, Democrat-Republican paradigm, and even if he did, so what? is that really all it takes? A crazy liberal shoots a bunch of folks and thus we're all tainted? A crazy conservative shoots a bunch of folks and the entire endeavor of conservatism is invalidated? That's reductionist idiocy that smacks of nothing more than substanceless "gotcha!" politics.

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