Activists Scramble to Paint Occult/ Liberal/ Drug Usingl Killer as Conservative

(From The Blaze) According to Business Insider, a woman claiming to have been a classmate of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords‘ alleged shooter Jared Loughner says he has run into the Congresswoman once before and that he’s “left wing” and “quite liberal.” That comes as some on the left are trying to paint Loughner as one who succumbed to angry, Tea Party rhetoric.

Business Insider says Laughner’s classmate made the revelations about his political persuasions via her Twitter account: "As I knew him, he was left wing and quite liberal. & Oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy."

But when news of the shooting broke, some conservatives, especially Tea Party officials, expressed concern that the left might try to label that gunman as a radical right-winger.

While Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips condemned the attack on Giffords, he told The Hill was concerned the Tea Party movement would be blamed for the incident.

“While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing,” he said.

Debbi Dooley, a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, echoed a similar sentiment to Congress.org. “A lot of people have bets on how long it will take before they blame this on the tea party and that’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said. Her group condemned the attack via Facebook.

“This heinous act will change the interaction between elected officials and their constituents,” the group’s Facebook wall said. “People also pray for the safety of congressmen, senators, President Obama and other elected officials in the aftermath of this shooting.”

Phillips and Dooley were right.

“Some prominent liberal bloggers wasted little time before politicizing the horrific and tragic shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona on Saturday,” Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis writes.

For example, Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal website DailyKos, sent numerous tweets chiding Palin and the right for the attack: "Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin."

UPDATE: Not all the efforts to exploit the tragedy for political purposes has worked, however. Someone attempted to create a false MySpace page for the killer in order to link him to Sarah Palin, but misspelled his last name (as the media did early on in the reporting). Also, information about the killer's love of pot, heavy metal music, the occult, and the Communist Manifesto has leaked out, which his undermined the left's effort to paint him as a tea-party conservative. Even the local Sheriff has been forced to admit that he has no evidence whatsoever that the killer was motivated by angry rhetoric, but he is still not backing down from public statements that he "suspects" he was. The Congresswoman who was shot was a conservative Democrat, and the Judge killed was also a Conservative. So 1+1=3?