The Violent Rhetoric On The Right

As many of us feared, it's getting worse in defeat. As a reader noted, the real trouble with the New York Post cartoon - part from its lazy, dumb conflation of two completely unrelated stories - is that it presented gun violence as a legitimate response to an economic policy disagreement. The racism is so unconscious it's sometimes more salient to observe the slide into legitimizing violence. Note here Limbaugh's latest populist excrescence, his description of his opponents as engaging in a kind of coup, or as rapists or murderers and Jihadist beheaders.

The right is going to become much more extreme as it becomes less relevant. There is a pattern to these things. You saw what was coming at those Palin rallies. As the economy worsens, as resentment against bail-outs for bankers and car-makers and reckless mortgage-owners swells, we are in for a very bumpy ride. I hope the Secret Service is beefing up.

[In an aside, in a first draft of this post, I linked to a now-debunked story on John Gibson.]