Today, someone tried to assassinate a member of the United States Congress.

[TheWraith]

A man, now identified as 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner, walked up to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) as she was beginning an informal town-hall style meeting at a strip mall in Tucson, outside a grocery store, and shot her in the head at point blank range.

Loughner then fired indiscriminately into the crowd before attempting to flee, at which point he was tackled by a surviving staffer and restrained. 6 people are dead, among them a federal judge and a 9 year old girl. A further 13 are wounded. Giffords survived surgery, and her prognosis is unclear at this hour.

Police don't believe that Loughner acted alone, and are seeking a second man for questioning.

So far, Loughner has refused to talk, so what we know of his motivation is drawn mostly from his online activity. His YouTube profile shows him to be obsessed with the type of beliefs popular on the right-wing fringe--immigrant bashing, demanding gold and silver currency, worshiping Ayn Rand, etcetera. He had recently attempted to join the military, but was rejected.

This act doesn't exist in a vacuum. Giffords was among the Democrats whose offices were vandalized during the healthcare reform debate. Giffords was also number four on Sarah Palin's "hit list" last year, a map of targeted Democrats laid out in the crosshairs of a gun sight. That poster has since been scrubbed from Palin's website, without acknowledgement or apology. And we all know the laundry list of right-wing commentators, candidates, and media figures advocating "Second amendment remedies," "the ballot box then the bullet box," to "take them out," or "make them afraid to leave their homes."

Of course, none of this has stopped certain people from trying to spin Loughner as being a disgruntled left-wing activist, or simply asserting that "everyone" needs to tone it down, and that "both sides" have been using extreme, violent rhetoric.

If "both sides do it," I'm certain it's just a coincidence that every time a lunatic goes off and kills a guard at the Holocaust museum, or shoots up a bunch of cops, or murders someone in a church, it's a member of the fringe right. I'm sure George Tiller would affirm that that's just a coincidence, even though nobody's tried to knife Randall Terry.

I bet all those folks who got killed at the Unitarian Church in Tennessee, or the builders of the mosque in Tennessee that had an arson attack, would agree. And so would the Democratic officials and "liberal media" figures targeted by the anthrax terrorist in 2001.

The black Congressman who was spit on and slurred by Tea Partiers during HCR? The rocks through the windows of the Monroe County Democratic Committee headquarters, less than an hour's drive from my house? Coincidence. The guy who flew an airplane into the IRS building? Accident. The vandalism of Louise Slaughter's office? The liberal activist who got curb-stomped by Tea Partiers? No big deal. It must be, if as people say, "both sides do it," because I haven't heard one single instance of some disgruntled MoveOn member trying to shank John Boehner, or an activist driving their Prius straight through a crowd of Tea Partiers trying to run them down.

From Glenn Beck's follower wanting to wipe out the Tides Center, to the would-be assassination of Representative Giffords, from mail-bombs for Janet Napolitano to the guy in Pittsburgh who murdered three cops with a shotgun because he hated Obama, every single case of domestic political violence in recent years has come from the extreme right.

You cannot find one single Republican congressperson who has been letterbombed, or powder-mailed, or shot at, because it hasn't happened. So don't tell me that it's a universal problem. Don't give me false equivalences. Don't try to tell me I'm paranoid when I say that there are people on the right who want to exploit this violent rhetoric to draw attention and command followers, without taking responsibility for the consequences.

I won't bring a broad brush to this discussion--there are people I know or have met who I would consider right-leaning, or even far right, who I completely believe want to do the right thing for this country, and in a few cases even have my respect. All the more relevantly, the people I'm speaking of are Tea Partiers. But there is a cancer in the right wing of American politics, and extremism, violent rhetoric, and by extension violence itself are among it's tools, and to pretend that it's a bipartisan problem is to hide the truth.

As many of you already know, I live in an area of the state which has a large and active fringe-right community--probably overlapping to a great degree with the people using Confederate flags as curtains. I once heard it remarked that a particular person didn't want to put an Obama sign in front of their house, because they "didn't want to get a burning cross in their lawn."

A few months ago, I and a number of other contributors to The Albany Project all co-signed an open letter to the New York media in support of the Park 51 mosque project. Since that day, my 12 gauge shotgun and about two dozen shells for it have never been far from my bed when I go to sleep, because I am acutely aware that the level of hate, bigotry, and violence that is being ginned up towards liberals doesn't have an "off" button, and that this sort of fringe extremism can spiral out of control quickly. It's this sort of witch's brew of xenophobia, hatred, and desire for control that brought the Brownshirts to Germany, or the genocide to Rwanda. Political violence isn't exclusively an "over there" problem--we've simply been lucky enough to have a civil, nonviolent political process for the last hundred years.

So don't tell me "it can't happen here." Because it already has.

[sandnsea]

I would say blacks and abortion activists and gays have been their political target. We've haven't really had a nonviolent political process for a hundred years. I guess they feel like they can add politicians to the list.

Nice post. Thanks.

[Beetwasher]

Well said. Thank you for this, you tied a lot of it together. This is an important post. Thank you.

[firedupdem]

Thanks for posting this. Those spreading the hateful rhetoric should be called out and now.

[nofurylike]

very well said, TheWraith. thank you for spoting this.

[spazito]

Well said, Wraith. Very well said.

[mzmolly]

Agree with the "very well said" consensus.

[Julie]

I'd like to see this on every editorial page across the land. Well done!

Julie

[Cliffordu]

Very well said.

[KonaKane]

Late word is that Jared is being investigated for his involvement with a fanatical right-wing, antigovernment, anti-immigrant, ANTISEMITIC group called American Renaissance.

Giffords is Jewish.

[Cha]

I appreciate you tying all this history of violence together, The Wraith. I was sporadically thinking of it yesterday and you've come up with a lot more.

"The liberal activist who got curb-stomped by Tea Partiers?" at a Rand Paul rally and Rand Paul decided not to give back the donation made by said Stompers.

[OptimistesMaddie]

Well said my friend.

All of the events that you noted are now trying to be erased or rewritten in history by the Right.

Just as Texas is trying to rewrite the history of the Slave trade and not mention the word, "slave" and the fact that they were kidnapped from Africa is just another instance of flowering up history.

We are obligated as citizens of the United States to make sure that the history stays writen as it occurred.