Conservatives are often accused of possessing a black-and-white worldview that is impervious to inconvenient facts and thus unsusceptible to revision. The difference between the Left and Right, however, is not that one does and one does not possess a sophisticated worldview, but that each finds nuance and simplicity in different places.

In this case, the self-appointed guardians of nuance on the Left are committing the intellectual and political sins of which they so frequently accuse the Right.

As soon as I heard that a Democratic congresswoman had been shot in Arizona, I knew the accusations were coming. They came so quickly not because the liberals who made those accusations carefully examined the evidence and were reluctantly convinced that their fellow Americans across the aisle bore a share of the blame. The committed empiricists of the “reality-based community” issued their accusations eagerly and well before the facts were in evidence.