Holocaust Museum Shooting Should Teach Conservatives To Tone Down Their Rhetoric

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

James von Brunn has been an idiot all his long, hate-filled life, so it is hard to blame the right-wing wack jobs at Fox for luring this particular insect out from the baseboards.

At the Holocaust Museum in D.C. yesterday, von Brunn allegedly walked in with a rifle and started shooting. A 39-year-old security guard, doing his job, protecting the visitors and tourists, was shot before von Brunn was wounded and captured.

Mr. von Brunn, a lifelong white supremacist, has done time in prison for previous acts of political terrorism, so (barring some further revelation about what apparently spurred him into action yesterday) it's probably not accurate to claim that Bill and Sean and Laura and their ranting, paranoid pals fueled this incident.

But maybe we can all be a little less hysterical the next time that Janet Napolitano's team at Homeland Security issues a warning about increasing dangers from right-wing terrorism.

An abortion doctor. The Holocaust Museum. It is clear now that the DHS report was not an attempt to stifle dissent, as conservative commentators insisted at the time, but an accurate warning about what was to come.

Before we are all treated, as at Oklahoma City, with photographs of firemen carrying bloodied toddlers from the ruins of a bombed federal day care center, the Right should think less about ratings and ratchet down its rhetoric.

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