Just listening to "Talk of the Nation" on NPR which today deals with the question "Is Right Wing Extremism on the Rise?" The show had Kathleen Parker representing "the right" and Jamie Kirchick of the New Republic representing "the left". Kirchick dismissed the notion that James von Brunn was influenced by right-wing hate rhetoric. Rather, Kirchick makes the astonishing statement that von Brunn was more akin to a "Daily Kos blogger".
Unfortunately, the audio clip of the show is not yet available. But you can get a flavor for Kirchick's apologia for right-wing extremism in his piece that appears in The Wall Street Journal: "The Religious Right Didn't Kill George Tiller". Here Kirchick uses the murder of the Dr. Tiller to beat the left over the head, since he he states that progressives are somehow hypocritical because they don't condemn Islamic extremism but are outraged by the assassination of an abortion doctor:
Yet speak of the disproportionately violent strain in Islam to a "progressive" person and you'll be met with sneering recitations of millennia-old Christian crusades or Jewish settlements in the West Bank. As for conservative Christians' contemporary political endeavors, lobbying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools or forbidding same-sex marriage simply does not threaten society in quite the same way as the genital mutilation of young girls or the bombing of the London transit system.
No wonder the WSJ was eager to publish this piece by Jamie Kerchick.
Not only does Jamie Kirchick compare James von Brunn to a DKOS blogger on Talk of the Nation, he also implies that the murder of a US Army recruiter in Arkansas was somehow an act of "left-wing terrorism", since the extremist Muslim gunman was "anti-war".
I'm sure Jamie Kirchick would love to hear from the DKOS community about how we are just like the neo-Nazi terrorist James von Brunn.