The violent rhetoric of the Tea Party movement in Washington State has escalated from stupid to very serious:
An FBI agent's probable cause statement says Murray's office in Seattle reported the threats, which were left on voice mail from a blocked telephone number. Agents say they traced the calls to Wilson's home in Selah, near Yakima.
Murray's office told the FBI that it had been receiving harassing messages from the caller for months, but they became more threatening as Congress was voting on health care legislation.
Excerpts of the expletive-laced messages transcribed in court documents show the caller saying he wanted to kill the senator, and it would just take one piece of lead.
After the initial stupid threat, caught on video, in which a teabagger says she'd like to see Patty Murray hang, Dave Neiwert wrote
Violent eliminationist rhetoric like this is part and parcel of right-wing extremism, so this is simply another manifestation of the growing extremism of the Tea Party movement. After all, the Lewis and Clark Tea Party Patriots, who sponsored this gathering, are in fact a classic example of the way the Tea Party movement has become a launching pad for a revival of the Patriot movement of the '90s.
Their blog, for example, is rich with propaganda in favor of the "Sovereignty Winter Fest" (aka the "Washington State Tenth Amendment Rally") -- an event held last month in Olympia that, as Devin Burghart reported for IREHR, not only was rife with Confederate flags and far-right rhetoric, but was primarily an event aimed at bolstering the "Tenther" constitutional theories. As we've reported several times, these theories all originated with the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s.
The tea party movement provides great cover for the inherently violent militia movement, and as long as they are welcomed by the tea part movement--and treated as a "mainstream," legitimate movement by the traditional media, expect a lot more of this.