There's still a lot of interesting writing about the Tucson shootings. I pretty much agree with all that George Packer writes, particularly with the point that Republicans are trying to sell a false equivalency between their violent-themed rhetoric and any scrap of such nonsense they can find from Democrats. I also agree with many who've written that you don't have to be able to draw a clear line between someone's over-the-top political diatribes and an act of violence to argue that the diatribes are harming this country.
I see lots of people who have apparently decided firmly on what the Arizona shooter's political leanings were and — oh, my! — he belongs to the other side. I still think these people are looking at very little evidence and believing what they want to believe. We don't know what, if anything, was on this guy's mind. His widely-publicized reading list sure doesn't prove anything. One of his acquaintances said he was the kind of guy who liked to say rude or controversial things just to provoke reactions from people…and I guess I find that easy to believe about a man who walked into a public place and began madly firing a gun at everyone around him. This list of books he said he read could have been compiled with a milder but similar desire to be provocative. Just because you say you read Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto doesn't mean you actually read them or agreed with them. (You'd have to be pretty unbalanced to find a way to agree with everything in both of them at the same time.)
Sigmund Freud once supposedly said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe sometimes a crazed psychotic is just a crazed psychotic. There doesn't have to be some political spin we can put on his actions that helps us in our ongoing debates. That said, I still think the inflamed rhetoric will, one of these days, lead to some tragedy where the cause-and-effect is undeniable. Even if it doesn't, it's still unhealthy.