Watching Glenn Beck and the other mountebanks who incite and egg on the cowardly racist thugs known as the Teabaggers is like watching a "re-imagining" of another group of charlatans who fomented a similar mob of cowardly racist thugs back in the late 1800s.
During Reconstruction, when slavery was abolished and black men allowed to vote in the very states where they had once been treated as livestock, a group known as the Red Shirts was founded for the express purpose of terrorizing blacks and liberal-minded whites in North and South Carolina into submission. They wore red shirts to mock the bloody shirt of a white "carpetbagger" whose plight was described in the U.S House of Representatives by Benjamin Butler.
Like the Ku Klux Klan, they were fond of lynching black men, beating "nigger-loving" whites, and burning churches and schools to the ground. Unlike the Klan however, they made no attempt to hide their identities behind hoods or masks. They were open about who they were and what they were doing and were proud of themselves. In effect, the Red Shirts were paramilitaries just like the later Blackshirts of Fascist Italy and the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany, including a putsch to overthrow a local government in Wilmington North Carolina.
Even the dishonest rhetoric of the Red Shirts' apologists is echoed by carnival barkers like Glenn Beck and the assorted mouth breathers of right-wing radio. When Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, the leader of the Red Shirts, Senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman responded as follows:
"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."
Now we have Glenn Beck, Eric Cantor and Karl Rove claiming that when Teabaggers and other miscreants make death threats and try to assassinate members of Congress and their families, it's not the fault of the cowardly thugs who do it (let alone the right-wing carnival barkers who egg them on), but the victims' fault.
Since morality and the rule of law mean nothing to these Red Shirt wannabes, I think the solution is very simple: The Attorney General and the heads of the FBI and Secret Service need to announce on no uncertain terms that those who make death threats or act upon them will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as will those who incite them verbally, electronically, in print, or via the public airwaves.
Inciting acts of terrorism is no more protected by the First Amendment than inciting a riot or placing a contract on a person to be killed. Enough is enough.