In Facebook, veritas.

Used to be you had to pay the local pub a visit to get the scoop on what people were "truly" thinking about all things great and small.

Now, Facebook gives you a glimpse at people's true feelings.  Convenient for a news reporter, but regrettably it prevents me from blaming alcohol for some of the more crackerdoodle opinions I've read in the past couple of days.

Within a few hours of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford's shocking shooting, Facebook-sheriffs and their Twitter-deputies began rounding up virtual posses to bring various ideologues to justice on one virtual frontier after another. Smoking guns ranged from a year-old Sarah Palin website "cross-hairs" graphic and accompanying "militant" language to the presence of Communist literature and "skull shrines" in the gunman's home.  (If we locked up every Marketing exec who used military graphics and language in their Powerpoint presentations there'd be no room in the prisons; and if ownership of far left, far right, or far out books and decorations is damning, then I'm brake-less on a highway to hell.)

Unfortunately for those who saw an opportunity in the tragedy to either trash the Tea Party or repeal the First Amendment, preliminary evidence would suggest that the suspect arrested in the Congresswoman Gifford shooting is a deeply disturbed individual obsessed with "government mind control."  Gifford would have been in danger no matter what letter was in parentheses after her name.

I'm still hopeful the "last call for alcohol" rhetoric will lessen in the days ahead and folks will come to realize that the accused gunman was perhaps more motivated by the demons inside his head than any political agenda. Because as much as we all like to pretend that anyone who doesn't believe exactly what we do must be nuts, crackerdoodle isn't married to any one ideology.