"I know how the "tea party' people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their 'Obama Plan White Slavery' signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."
That's how leftist Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy calmly and civilly registered his measured disagreement with conservatives in a March 2010 column.
Now that there's a tragedy to be exploited, Milloy today jumped aboard the media's bash-conservatives-for-coarsening-American-political-discussion bandwagon.
In doing so, Milloy didn't disappoint, turning up the nuttiness knob to 11 with his anti-conservative screed, comparing House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other conservative Republicans to bloodthirsty gangbangers who inspire violence without having to explicitly authorize it:
Where are John Boehner's tears now?
You'd expect a man who cries at the drop of a hat to at least show some emotion over the mass shootings in Arizona. But while addressing the tragedy at a news conference Sunday, the newly elected House speaker was as dry as tumbleweed.
[...]
[C]ould it be that some emotional circuit breaker had cut off the speakers' tears to protect him from a surge of guilt over his role in helping to create such a charged political climate - his support for nearly unfettered access to handguns?
[...]
Just last year, Boehner declared that then-Rep. Steve Dreihaus (D-Ohio) "may be a dead man" because he voted for President Obama's health-care law. "He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati," Boehner told the National Review.
That's how thugs talk, and from the way Boehner and other elected officials have sounded lately, you'd think the only oath they'd taken was to uphold the code of the streets.
Just as gangsters use symbols to send intimidating messages to their rivals - say, pointing a finger, thumb cocked like the hammer on a pistol - Boehner's political gang has taken to drawing crosshairs on opponents, posting inciting images on the Internet and calling for "Second Amendment solutions" to the nation's problems.
Trading in ambiguity and veiled threats, thugs, whether on the streets or in the political suites, can always deny they meant any harm.
But no one is surprised when a street kid picks up on the gangland signal and carries out a hit. Nor should anyone be surprised when misguided ideologues start showing up at town meetings armed with assault rifles - or at supermarkets with handguns.
Later in his column, Milloy threw in the obligatory disclaimer, conceding that "[t]he shooter's motive in this case could have nothing at all to do with the statements of people such as [Tea Party leader Stephen] Broden and [Rep. Michele] Bachmann."
Of course, at time of the publication of today's paper, the media were well aware that suspect Jared Loughner is a mentally unstable individual with incoherent political beliefs who has admitted to counting The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as among his favorite books.
But why let the facts get in the way of a good screed?
