My old schoolmate Ricky liked to annoy my friend Danny. Danny usually put up with it.
But once upon a time, Ricky tested the limits. He took a swing at Danny on the school bus.
Mistake.
Danny wasn't particularly stocky, but he grew up in the country at a time when that meant doing chores such as splitting wood and cleaning out the barn. Danny was tougher than he looked. So when Ricky took his fateful swing, Danny got him into something like a headlock and just held him there, calmly advising the bus driver, "He better quit."
Ricky didn't quit. He kept swinging. So Danny didn't let go, and every time Ricky took a swing, Danny took one, too, connecting with greater force because of his superior position.
It wasn't a fight Danny wanted. At any point, Ricky could have stopped taking a pounding merely by ceasing and desisting from the attempt to administer one. But he couldn't help himself. So Danny reluctantly taught him a lesson, and finally, sniveling and worse for wear, Ricky slunk off.
Conservatives don't want the fight that liberals are picking when they blame a supposedly conservative-generated "climate of hate" for the shooting of an Arizona congresswoman and the butchering of six other people. It's a bizarre tussle to try to pick in the first place. Anybody who is paying attention knows the suspect is eight slices short of a loaf. And that public understanding is exactly why the attempt to blame the tragedy on the Fox-Palin-Beck crowd will fail.
But like Ricky, many on the left can't help themselves. They see a political opportunity, and the classlessness of seizing that opportunity from atop six fresh graves and from a bedside in intensive care is no object. They will not concede that plain old lunacy is behind the slaughter in Arizona - no matter how impossible it is to fit the facts into their narrative of Republican psychosis. (Heck, they consider "Republican psychosis" redundant.)
Thus they leave conservatives with two options.
The first is to point out the killer's seemingly radical views and declare, "A-ha! Liberalism creates sociopathic behavior." But that's no better than liberal attempts to remove conservative ideas from polite conversation by suggesting conservatism is rooted in insanity.
The better path for conservatives is to point out the suspect's vaguely radical views and then note that those views are not what killed half a dozen people in Tucson.
While Jared Loughner had a reading list that was all over the map, a strain of strident atheism runs through many of his literary favorites, and he described himself as having no faith in God. A woman who went to high school and college with him said on Twitter that he was a "political radical" and "left wing, quite liberal." Federalism - the Constitution's division of federal, state and individual powers - evidently bothered him.
Whatever drove Loughner, it wasn't conservative talking points. But neither was it liberal ideology. (If every left-winger were prone to creating bloodbaths, three-fourths of the faculty at Harvard would be behind bars.)
No, assuming the authorities have the right guy, he went bananas and shot people because he was ... bananas.
"The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he once theorized. Try to connect that one to anything Barbara Boxer or Rush Limbaugh ever said.
The bloodshed in Tucson was an act of evil or madness, not the product of a clearly thought-out philosophy. Conservatives want to grieve the loss of life in Arizona in peace. They're telling the liberal set that's eager to pin the crime on them, "Quit it. You're not making sense. You're turning a wake into a political pep rally."
But certain heedless elements on the left keep on keeping on. And like young Ricky, they'll wind up taking the political thumping they're trying to dish out. If the 2002 "memorial" for Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., taught us anything, it's that when politics have nothing to do with a tragedy, the American people don't want moments of grief co-opted by partisan shin-kickers.
Yet once again, a portion of modern liberalism has found the humanity of victims less interesting than their political usefulness.
Anything - anything - to win.