To the editor:

Sarah Palin and others on the right critical of our wayward drift are now being blamed for the Tucson, Arizona, shootings. Gov. Palin is even being criticized for the use of the term “blood libel” as if she, the politician most supportive of Israel and Jewish interests, is anti-Semitic. It is a tribute to the absolute mania of her opponents that these charges could have any currency even among her extreme leftist critics.

Jared Loughner, the accused murderer of six American citizens, including a 9-year-old child, is, simply put, a lunatic. The mad fantasies and distortions of reality that swept through his mind and finally motivated him into action will forever remain unfathomable to sane human beings.

To advance the notion that Palin and her fellow conservatives have so polluted the pool of American politics that Loughner was ignited through an apparently mystical process is to prove that liberals will seize any opportunity to smear their political opponents. The logical extension of this argument leads to the creation of a society devoid of any opposition to leftist ideology, a society where only the elites rule while the average citizen is prevented from entering the public square.

Two years before the White Chapel murders, Robert Louis Stevenson published his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson was accused of polluting literature. He is no more responsible for Jack the Ripper than Palin is for Jared Loughner.