THE RICIN GUY SEEMS TO BE AS MENTALLY ILL AS JARED LOUGHNER (AND POLITICS DOESN'T SEEM TO BE HIS REAL PROBLEM)

I don't normally recommend articles at the Blaze, but Glenn Beck's people have rounded up a persuasive collection of links and quotes about Paul Kevin Curtis of Tupelo, Mississippi, who's been arrested in connection with ricin-contaminated letters sent to President Obama and Republican senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

Curtis's politics don't fit into a neat pigeonhole. On his Facebook page, there's a photo of him smiling and pointing to a bumper sticker that reads, "CHRISTIAN and a DEMOCRAT." He calls himself an Independent. But in one Facebook post, he parrots a right-wing line on guns:

I'm thinking that no matter WHAT laws are EVER passed thru the REVOLVING doors of our justice $y$tem & Congress.....that BAD PEOPLE who refuse to allow God into their hearts will ALWAYS find a way to get their cowardly little hands on a weapon......I might also ad that if a person spends enough time on thinking how to take another person's life, he or she could do so with a hair pin, a thumb tack or a wall clock (they just don't have the "CLIP" like those ole nasty assault weapons do....

But the key point here is that the guy is obsessed with ... body parts. As the Blaze post reports:

In a separate 2007 post on RipOffReport.com, a man going by the name "Kevin Curtis" references sending several letters to Sen. Wicker and other lawmakers about some legal troubles....

The Kevin Curtis from Mississippi who wrote the post on RipOffReport.com is clearly disgruntled over allegedly being fired years ago from the North Mississippi Medical Center after he claims he found "dismembered body parts" and a "severed head" backing up the hospital's drainage system. He claims he received death threats and was threatened by police over the incident....

He goes on to claim he was forced to endure a years-long battle in court over the incident....

On Facebook, he's written, "I'm on the hidden front lines of a secret war. A war that is making Billions of dollars for corrupt mafia related organizations and people. (bone, tissue, organ, body parts harvesting black market)...." He's posted an online petition to the president, House, Senate, and Mississippi's governor and senators seeking "legislation on a federal level as well as investigations into the secret world wide business of illegal bone, tissue, body parts and organ harvesting."

I've known someone like this. Years ago, I worked with a woman who was suddenly terminated. We found out that she'd been telling HR that elaborately decadent sexual activity was taking place in regular meetings where we all knew it couldn't possibly have taken place, allegedly masterminded by an eightysomething employee who couldn't possibly have been guilty. Sometime later, after the fired employee had been institutionalized, she wrote letters to government agencies in the names of some of her former co-workers, including one that referred (in the first person) to a co-worker's decapitation. That letter began, "My severed head was found..."

This is pure mental illness, although politics may work its way in. This poor bastard is crazy like Jared Loughner, with his number and letter obsessions ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar"; "If B.C.E. years are unable to start then A.D.E. years are unable to begin"). The trigger in Durtis's brain that made him do this is only incidentally a political trigger.