I was going to blog this weekend and was thinking of calling it Two Kinds of Crazy but since then a) I got sick and b) the crazy has just multiplied…

My wife and I watched Black Swan on Saturday night (a screener DVD we had gotten our hands on) in part to take a break from the shooting news. A light alternative, no — an homage to many Polanski films I thought (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant all came to mind) and a very successful one. But Natalie Portman’s Nina is horror movie crazy while the shooter in Tucson was just…crazy.

It was also apparent, even on early Saturday evening, that we were in for a news cycle of blame and deny, with Sarah Palin’s defenders saying those weren’t cross hairs on the congresswoman’s district, for goodness sake! They were “surveyors’ symbols,” because she wanted her followers to…survey the districts of congress people who voted for health care, or something.

Calling something what it isn’t is a time-honored Orwellian kind of crazy talk, of course. Very big in politics, what with death taxes and death panels, for that matter. Though I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that Palin and the Tea Party’s shoot-em-up language made Jared Loughner shoot Gabrielle Gifford — but neither did it have no effect.

What strikes me at this juncture, when the stew is still bubbling and talk of guns and rhetoric and personal freedom is once again the staple of every talk show and many a water cooler conversation, is how many of the same people who demonize rock music and pornography and video games for contributing to a culture of violence refuse to see how their rhetoric might effect a nutter like Loughner. If you want to talk about personal responsibility (and the right loves to), talk about your own. Look in the mirror and see if you see some crazy person looking back at you.

Oops, wrong movie.