Two days after a deranged neo-Nazi (redundant, I know) attacked the Holocaust Museum in Washington and killed a security guard, the rightest of America's right-wing pundits are scrambling to claim that they bear no responsibility for the tragedy.
Their reasoning? James von Brunn was actually a leftist.
Therefore, President Obama and the liberals are to blame.
Really.
Harry Binswanger of the Ayn Rand Institute told an approving Glenn Beck that "von Brunn's culture is a tribe of racist anti-Jewish, anti-Negro, anti-immigrant, everything, and therefore he's the phenomenon of the left, because racism is a form of collectivism. The right wing is individualist, believes in individual rights, freedom, the dignity of each individual life. You know, Hitler was national socialism, right?" (Of course, Adolf Hitler was no more a socialist than was Gordon Gekko.)
Latching on to Binswanger's nonsense, Beck one-upped his guest by jumping through hoops to attack Obama: "We have a guy in the White House right now who, if you're gonna link people to this guy [von Brunn] who have nothing to do with this shooting, let's talk about the relationship with Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright."
The right-wing NewsMax website targeted Obama directly as well, claiming that "it is no coincidence that we are witnessing this level of hatred toward Jews as President Barack Obama positions America against the Jewish state."
Rush Limbaugh also got into the act, saying that von Brunn "has more in common with the marchers and protesters we see at left-wing rallies."
And in what may well be the most offensive and insane take on the tragedy, conservative blogger Erick Erickson writes that "the gunning down of guards outside the Holocaust Museum in Washington has [Daily Kos founder and über-blogger] Markos Moulitsas and his band of leftist brothers positively demanding a ticker tape parade for the deranged shooter."
All this frantic activity shows utter desperation on the part of the right-wing media. Limbaugh, Beck and their ilk know all too well that by shoveling out bizarre delusions 24/7 that Obama will take away everyone's guns or set up concentration camps or bring back the Hitler Youth, they stoke a climate of fear and paranoia.
And eventually, fear and paranoia boil over, resulting in what we saw on Wednesday.
They did it.
They know they did it.
They created and maintained the atmosphere which allowed von Brunn and who knows how many other like-minded nuts to believe that their insane ravings are right and good and well within the mainstream. And they do so while consistently opposing common-sense laws which would keep guns out of these people's hands.
So they have to blame someone else - anyone else - for the inevitable results of their own actions.
How many more killings will it take for them to wake up?
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