I guess the day of pundits’ clucking about “angry liberals” is over. They’ve finally noticed the Raging Right.

Of course, going back several years now Dave Neiwert, Jeff Feldman and others have documented that speech coming from the American Right is far more eliminationist and violent than speech from the Left.

Sure, every time some adolescent punk at an anti-war rally held up a picture of George Bush dismembered, Michelle Malkin would feature it on her blog and shriek about “unhinged” liberals. But even during the darkest times of the Bush years it was extremely unusual to see a major leftie bloggers call for the death of or violence toward any rightie politician, including Bush. And if any national liberal spokesperson or elected Democrat in Washington ever suggested, even as a “joke,” that a member of the opposing party should meet a violent end I can’t remember it. (I have argued in the past that “joking” about the violent demise of someone you don’t like is not a joke.)

But as Paul Krugman said in his column today,

What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.

All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.

A big reason why it’s irresponsible to suggest — even as a “joke” — that someone should be killed or physically harmed is that there are people who can easily be incited to do terrible things. Eugene Robinson wrote,

When tea party leaders talk about the threat of “socialism” and call for “a new revolution” and vow to “take our country back,” they can say they are simply using vivid metaphors. But they cannot plausibly claim to be unaware that there are people — perhaps on the fringe of the movement, but close enough — who give every sign of taking these incendiary words literally.

And does anyone doubt that the movement attracts the kind of people who take these words literally?

Of course, we expect this sort of thing from Fox News. And, sure enough, the Faux Nooz website is asking people to send in graphics showing what Nancy Pelosi should do next. The results are pretty ugly.

You might remember, six or seven years ago, Moveon held a video contest asking people to make videos critical of the Bush Administration, with a chance the winner would be shown on national television. People were allowed to upload their videos directly for public viewing without going through a moderation filter. A couple of videos were uploaded that portrayed President Bush as Hitler, and the Right had a screeching fit about it. And Moveon took them down immediately. But I swear to this day righties complain that Moveon made a video (One more time: Moveon didn’t make the videos) that compared Bush to Hitler. Yes, I know — IOIYAR.

But back to the bad behavior by Republicans in Congress. See Timothy Egan, “House of Anger.”

Unfairly or not, the defining images of opposition to health care reform may end up being those rage-filled partisans with spittle on their lips. Whether the outbursts came from inside Congress — the “baby killer” shout of Rep. Randy Neugebauer, and his colleagues who cheered on hecklers — or outside, where protesters hurled vile names against elected representatives, they are powerful and lasting scenes of a democracy gasping for dignity.

Now, ask yourself a question: can you imagine Ronald Reagan anywhere in those pictures? Or anywhere in those politics? Reagan was all about sunny optimism, and at times bipartisan bonhomie. In him, the American people saw their better half.

I say again, Reagan’s genius was that he could make hate speech seem wholesome and virtuous. He could appeal to racist voters with his stories about inner city “Cadillac Queens” and hold up a response to the AIDS virus because some people needed to be taught “lessons,” and everyone still remembers him as “sunny.”

But Reagan was elected when “movement conservatism” was on the upswing, liberalism was routed, and a white, tax-free and God-fearing Utopia seemed just around the corner.

But that was 30 years ago. Now you’ve got a generation of “conservative” politicians who are accustomed to leading America around by the nose with rhetorical bullying, demagoguery and fear mongering, without actually having to govern, which they don’t know how to do. But the old tricks aren’t working, so they have to escalate. It’s all they do know how to do.

See also Josh Marshall, Scott Lemieux, Jeff Feldman.

Josh Marshall writes that “crowds of anti-Reform/Tea Party activists” are going through the halls of the Longworth office building “shouting slogans and epithets at Democratic members of Congress.” Also, “We’re now getting reports that other protestors yelled ‘nigger’ at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).” And they think government is oppressing them.

Think Progress reports that protesters outside the Capitol Building are carrying signs threatening gun violence if health care reform passes.

I’d say they are behaving like baboons, but that would be an insult to baboons.

Update: Think Progress reports that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MD) was spit on by a protester. Several reports say they called Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) a “faggot.” Class to the end.

The big whoop-dee-doo Tea Party anti-health care reform rally in Washington today has drawn only 30,000 people by wingnut estimates Given their normal rate of inflation, this means maybe three dozen people showed up.

Rachel Maddow said on television last night that the Movement was losing steam. It appears it has.

Limbaugh says he will flee to Costa Rica if health care reform passes!

FYI, Costa Rica has an excellent national healthcare system somewhat more “socialist” than what President Obama is proposing, but don’t tell Rushbo. Please.

Yesterday I wrote about the futility of pegging extremists as purely “Right” or “Left.” I postulate that, just as an absolute moderate is neither Left nor Right, the closer one gets to absolute extremism the more the ideologies of “Left” and “Right” tend to blur.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the political beliefs of people like John Patrick Bedell (Pentagon shooter) and Joseph Stack (flew plane into IRS building) don’t neatly align with any one partisan group.

I also think that sometimes extremism becomes its own point; people who are psychologically hellbent on being extremists are not necessarily all that discriminating about the cause to which their extremism is committed. Whatever loose nuts and bolts are rattling around in an extremist’s psyche no doubt push him/her in one direction or another. But if the Great Cause were to suddenly disappear overnight, an extremist will have latched on to another Great Cause by suppertime.

However, that doesn’t mean external stimuli don’t play a part in pushing a person predisposed to extremism into becoming more extreme, to the point of becoming dangerous. There’s a progression from apathetic to interested to opinionated to obsessively opinionated to hair-on-fire enraged/paranoid to self-and-other destruction. Inflammatory rhetoric is something like a positive feedback loop that makes the extremism “progress” from one stage to the next.

And, while they refuse to admit it, right-wing rhetoric in the U.S. tends to be much more violent and much more oriented toward eliminating the opposition than left-wing rhetoric tends to be. And while the most extreme left-wing rhetoric generally is limited to off-the-beaten-track websites and fliers handed out at the occasional mass protest, the inflammatory right-wing rhetoric gets spewed out by national radio and television networks.

That said, I think the meme — justified or not — that John Patrick Bedell was mostly a Right-wing extremist seems to be the meme that has taken hold in mass media narratives. This has infuriated the rightie blogosphere, which is sputtering that the guy is a registered Democrat, for pete’s sake, so he must be a leftie. But if it’s true he is a devotee of Ludwig von Mises, then he’s staunchly pro-capitalist, which more or less puts him on the Right, per our current partisan configurations.

I mean, last week the Freepers decided that Joe Stack was a leftie because he appeared to be (although I’m not sure it’s clear) anti-capitalist. So by that standard, someone who is pro-capitalist must be a rightie. But no; the Freep are not claiming Bedell, either. Go figure.

But the pattern we keep running into is that somebody is inflamed enough by rhetoric to kill or attempt to kill somebody else in the name of the Cause, and afterward the leaders of the Cause issue statements saying it is so unfortunate that this happened, but they are not to blame because they don’t condone violence. They think websites with “wanted” posters on them don’t count.

Partisan violence is rare in the U.S., compared to some other places (i.e., Afghanistan; Somalia). But it also seems to come more from the Right than the Left. According to a story in the New York Times,

Between 1990 and 2009, there were about 120 attacks in the United States by far-right extremists that led to deaths, according to a study funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The number of incidents has hovered around three per year since 2002, down from an average of eight annually from 1990 to 2001 and a peak of 16 in 1999, according to the U.S. Extremist Crime Data Base.

About 45 percent of incidents were motivated by white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant or other racist ideologies, and 15 percent by extreme anti-government views, the top two categories, according to researchers Joshua D. Freilich of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and Steven M. Chermak of Michigan State University.

I guess we have to admit to “eco-terrorism” as left-wing violence, but U.S. eco-extremists are more into destruction of property than homicide. I can think of some anti-military “protests” that resulted in minor property damage. Both sorts of “demonstrations” are stupid and counter-productive, IMO.

It doesn’t surprise me that a truther pulled a gun and started shooting outside the Pentagon yesterday (let us be grateful no one was killed). It also doesn’t surprise me that now rightie bloggers have identified the shooter as a “Leftist.” Because, you know, even though the Right celebrates rage, violent rhetoric and guns, only lefties ever actually kill anybody. Right.

At Patterico’s, one commenter gets the Sanity Award:

Everybody feel better now? You should, because THIS time the shooter is not tied directly to the unhinged, violent anti-government rhetoric of the right. No, this time he’s tied to the unhinged, violent anti-government rhetoric of the left. So, good job, unhinged, violent rhetoricians of the right, you are clearly the better of two viles this time.

Once again, what the wingnuts don’t get is that political ideology is circular, not linear.

Taken to extremes, the unhinged and violent of whatever political persuasion end up at the same point on the circle. And the absolute north and south poles of the circle are neither Left nor Right. The die-hard truthers have been hovering around the north pole for quite a while.

That said, is David Brooks right to call the Tea Partiers “Wal-Mart Hippies“?

To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

If the Right wants to copy the tactics that helped to marginalize progressivism for 40 years, who am I to argue?

The parallels are not perfect. The New Left, for the most part, organized to address legitimate issues such as civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam. The Tea Partiers are organizing around fantasies about tax increases and gun grabbing.

Also, when you’ve got people like Dick Armey speaking for you, you just lost the Pure Grassroots Anti-establishment Power to the People Award.

And isn’t it odd the way Saul Alinsky, of all people, has suddenly become a fixation of the rightie hive mind? Back in the day I sorta kinda knew who Alinsky was, but that was about it. From what I know of him, he was more of an organizer than an anarchist. According to Wikipedia,

Alinsky described his plans in 1972 to begin to organize the White Middle Class across America, and the necessity of that project. He believed that what President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew called “The Silent Majority” was living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically-active citizens. He feared the Middle Class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, “making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday.” His stated motive: “I love this goddamn country, and we’re going to take it back.”

Wow — “some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday.” He foresaw the rise of Reagan.

Update: It appears the shooter was a devotee of libertarians’ favorite economist, Ludwig Von Mises. If so, then whatever the shooter was, he was no “leftist.”

Scott Shifrel writes in the New York Daily News:

Brooklyn prosecutors on Monday cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing after a four-month probe that began when undercover conservative activists filmed workers giving what appeared to be illegal advice on how to hide money.

While the video by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles seemed to show three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide ill-gotten gains, the unedited version was not as clear, according to a law enforcement source.

“They edited the tape to meet their agenda,” said the source.

Big surprise, not. Of course, this won’t make any dents in wingnut opinions of ACORN.