Andrew McCarthy isn't furious that Jared Loughner has a lawyer -- after all, it's not like he's a Muslim or anything. He's furious that liberals are so mean and dehumanizing of their ideological opponents:
If wanton violence has a cause other than mental illness, it is a culture that lionizes the savages. That culture is not the culture of the Tea Partiers so despised by the Left. Many Tea Partiers are part of what until recently was called “the Christian Right,” an amorphous group of Americans, not all of whom are actually Christians, tied together by their shared acceptance of basic Judeo-Christian principles, such as equality and the sanctity of life (even the lives of their ideological opponents). They love liberty, because in their hands it is guided by virtue. It leads to the good life and the good society, not to dissipation and anarchy. Many of them pray for President Obama despite their revulsion at most of his policies. All of them consider him their president and would rally behind him if the good of the nation demanded it. Their dissent does not diminish their patriotism.
For our opinion elites, though, they are a punch line or, when disaster strikes, a punching bag. Those elites scoff at the very idea of real, knowable virtue — unless it is rhetorically useful in showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it with their vapid “values.” Under these, the young learn, a terrorist can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.
And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.
The argument McCarthy is making: It's "stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence," but if anything caused the shootings in Arizona, it's the permissible culture of liberals, who, because they "like Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist critique of America," are secretly working with extremists to create a society bound by Taliban-style Islamic law. They'll do this in part by reducing conservatives to reductive caricatures of who they really are.
McCarthy is the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, about how liberals are like Muslims, because both are working together to destroy the United States. Liberals by supporting expansions of the welfare state, and Muslims by killing people.
