The Rhetoric of Violence

A list by no means complete and in no particular order:

1. From the campaign calendar of Jesse Kelly, the Tea Party Republican who ran against Gabrielle Giffords last fall: "Sat, 6/12/10, 10:00 AM - Get on Target for Victory in November - Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office - Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly"

2. Republican senatorial candidate Sharon Angle, who said she wanted to "cure" Nevada of Sen. Harry Reid and said she knew a Second Amendment "remedy": "I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical...."

3. Florida GOP congressional candidate Allen West, talking to a crowd of Tea Partiers about his opponent last fall, incumbent Dem Ron Klein: "Let me tell you what you've got to do. You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That's the only way that you're going to win. That's the only way you're going to get these people's attention."

4. Someone dropped a gun at a Gabrielle Giffords event in August 2009. Also that August, another man brought a gun to a town hall meeting by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) in Memphis. On August 18, 2009, at least a dozen men were carrying weapons outside the Phoenix convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech. The week before that in 2009, during a presidential health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty" stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.

5. On the May 17, 2005, broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program, Mr. Beck said: "Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong?"

6. Bill O'Reilly mentioned Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller on his radio show 29 times between 2005 and the doctor's assassination in his church on Sunday, May 31, 2009, nicknaming the doctor "Tiller the Killer."

7. In August 2010, a day after talk radio host Laura Schlessinger quit her show, following criticism for using the N-word repeatedly in a broadcast, Sarah Palin told her: "Don't retreat ... reload!" Subsequently, Palin used that line repeatedly in public rallies.

8. On March 4, 2010, James L. Schmidlin placed a call from Tennessee to the office of Democratic Congressman John Boccieri, in which he threatened to set fire to Boccieri's home. (Schmidlin has actually been charged with a crime.)

9. On March 20, 2010, at the Tea Party Republican rally against health-care reform on Capitol Hill, several protestors carried signs reading "If [Sen. Scott] Brown Can't Stop It, A Browning Can." Another: "Vote No Or Else!" Another: "Kill the Bill or Face the November Slaughter!"

10. In September 2010, Justin Carl Moose, 26, of Concord, NC, was arrested by the FBI after posting tips on bomb-making and making threats against Planned Parenthood on his Facebook page. According to the FBI, he had planned the bombing of an abortion clinic in North Carolina.

11. "I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that [health reform] bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country." --Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, November 2, 2009, on the floor of the U.S. House. "All the promises [President Obama] has kept have endangered our lives." --Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, on the Bill Lumaye Show, NewsRadio 680 WPTF, Jan. 5, 2010. "We're talking about four years. If we don't take this country back from the leftists who are running it now, we will lose our country." ---Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, to the Iredell County Republican Party's Reagan Day Dinner, Feb. 6, 2010

Not that any of this would have anything whatsoever to do with influencing the mind of a Jared Lee Loughner. No never.

"Vote Right, Or I'm Gonna Keel You!"

Via BlueRidgeNow.com comes news that we somehow otherwise missed, that NC-11 Congressman Heath Shuler got a death threat over his vote for the Stimulus Bill back last year. A 70-year-old man with "a history of mental illness" and "a large supply of weapons" left a message on the answering machine at Shuler's district office: "If you vote for that stimulus package, I'm gonna kill you. Simple as that...."

When the police followed up and talked to the man, he said, "I was trying to work the political scene."

Wonder where he learned that particular method of working the political scene? Surely not from Limbaugh or Beck, national GOP chair and vice-chair, respectively, or the guys toting side-arms at presidential appearances.

Phony Patriotism

The boorish chortling of conservatives over Chicago's loss of the Olympics in 2016 may end up hurting the Republican Party more than ... say, the last eight years hurt them.

Celebrating an American defeat -- reveling in it -- is not only un-American, in the most basic meaning of that term, but just GROSS, in the medical meaning of that term.

Once again, Republicans seem so bankrupt, so morally uncentered, they're quite content to follow Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and little Billy Crystal off the cliff in the interests of personal animus.

Their laughter and applause at an American loss may echo down the halls of history a lot louder than their pious, empty posturing on "patriotism."

The Alternative: Rabid White People?

For all Glenn Beck and Fox News could gin up, they got a fraction of the 2 million they had hoped for Saturday in D.C. (60,000 - 70,000 actually showed up, according to official estimates by the Washington Fire Dept.). But they were rabid. And lied, incidentally, about their numbers. Of course. Wouldn't you? (More good pics on Scrutiny Hooligans, along with news that promoters of the 9/12 protest used Obama inauguration photos to bolster their claims of 2 million screaming meanies.)

Conservative writer David Frum summed up the current conservative fringe in the Republican Party as a combo of "wild accusations" and "paranoid delusions" arising from "the fever swamps." And he thinks it ain't helping the Republican Party get back on its electoral feet.

Meanwhile, in Raleigh, the John Locke Foundation/Civitas Institute/John William Pope Conglomerate for Doctoring the News hosted a Conservative Leadership Conference which featured (and we're not making this up) a keynote address by deposed beauty queen Carrie Prejean, whose talents include posing topless and opposing gay marriage. The Civitas Institute has been a bit vague on attendance, claiming "hundreds" who were hungry for the philosophical stylings of Miss Prejean, but our inside snitches say they barely hit 200, and several of those paying customers were some young progressive infiltrators from Durham doing oppo.

I dunno. With numbers like these, the Republican Party could hold a really loud, well attended national convention ... which is maybe all they want. Because, clearly, they don't want to attract actual voters.

Return of the Know-Nothings

Ah, the odor of singed hair arising from the Republican Party of North Carolina. They're not so much "rebranding" (the source of that burned hair smell) as they're performing seances over the buried corpses of their ancient fears. The Know Nothings of 1840 were pikers compared to the hysterical mobs of today, taking their intellectual cues from the triumvirate of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh.

Public Policy Polling has found that "in North Carolina 64% of rural Republicans think [President Obama] was not born in the US, compared to 47% of Republicans overall." The statistic in the first part of that sentence is startling on its own, but what about the almost half of statewide Republicans who say they think we have an unconstitutional, unqualified foreigner (not to mention Muslim!) sitting in the White House?

That's what they say. Whether they actually believe it is another matter. It may be that they just woke up and discovered they lost the election and need some ready cudgel to flail at the air. "Foreigner" has had a long history as readily weaponized rhetoric in America.