Dave Neiwert, the blogosphere's leading expert on the eliminationist movement, has a typically excellent post about the weekend's tragic shooting at Crooks and Liars.
You have to wonder if right-wingers will ever get it: Difference isn't a threat.
They were mewling like wounded hyenas this weekend after some of us pointed out that there was a direct connection between the irresponsible fearmongering in which they've been indulging since Barack Obama was elected and Saturday's tragedy in Pittsburgh.
Michelle Malkin, for example, whined to her cultlike audience that liberals were being mean to them: "You killed these police officers. It’s all your fault." As Oliver notes, the Instawanker has been thrashing about angrily too.
My favorite, though, was Neil Sheppard at Newsbusters:
Let's be clear what these attacks on folks like Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity are all about -- the left-wing in our nation want to silence ALL opposing voices in the media, and they will do it using all tools at their disposal INCLUDING blaming journalists and political commentators for the criminal behavior of others.
This is a familiar refrain that comes up every time anyone raises a socially damning issue like this one: We're trying to oppress them, to silence their voices, by pointing out how morally and ethically bankrupt they are.
Actually, we're just pointing out how bankrupt they are. No one here has said anything about silencing their voices -- we just want them to face up to the consequences of their irresponsible rhetoric. It's called culpability: They obviously are not criminally culpable, nor likely even civilly culpable. But they are morally and ethically culpable.
We do have serious differences of opinion here. We strongly believe that there's a clear, common-sense connection between the paranoiac fearmongering that has passed for right-wing rhetoric since well before Obama's election (and has become acute since) and violence like that in Pittsburgh, or in Knoxville: horrifying tragedies, in which the sources of the criminal's unambiguous motives are that very same hysterical fearmongering -- whether it's about the evil socialists, stinking immigrants, or conspiring gun-grabbers who've taken over the country since Election Day.
Read the whole thing.