From Tucson to Spokane

From Doughboy to Stormtrooper in Washington State

You may or may not have heard about the bomb plot to attack a Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington.  Here.

Basically a pretty horrific IED was found and removed by police thanks to a diligent citizen, and we were spared a redux of Tucson, but on steroids.

Spokane is in Eastern Washington, which is much closer to Idaho's Aryan Nation belt than to Seattle's vegan coffee shops.

There were moments in American history when the Left - broadly speaking - engaged in acts of political violence.  The anarchists in the turn of the 19th century, the Weathermen of the 1960s and '70s.  I suppose there are others.  Labor agitation could be lumped in, but most labor violence was a two way street - a running battle between capital and labor where both sides resorted to violence, because the gulf between their world views was simply too broad.  But it mostly comes down to anarchists and Sixties radicals.

First of all, the anarchists were nuts.  They were a fringe of the fringe of the outliers of the extremists.  American Socialists like Eugene Debs tended to look towards elections rather than violence.  For every bomb throwing anarchist, there were a dozen Socialists or union organizers shaking their heads and bemoaning the dipweeds who made them look bad.

For every self-important student radical and uber-macho Black Panther, there was a dozen MLKs and RFKs sighing for their country.

I understand why Watts rioted in 1965.  I understand that despair ultimately leads to extreme measures.  And LBJ's plaintive whine about "How could they do that to me after all I've done for them" is narcissism at its LBJ finest.

But when we look at most leftist violence in America - with the exception of the anarchists and a few dozen Weathermen - we see people in desperate economic straits bucking a system that has left them marginalized and impoverished.

What do we make of people who leave IEDs along parade routes?  What do we make of people who park car bombs outside federal buildings?  Or fly plans into IRS buildings?

As Louis C.K. puts it, "It's objectively great to be white."  And yet when we see these white supremacists and one world conspiracy nuts, we see people who are wedded to their own victimization so tightly, that they can't acknowledge the ridiculousness of a white American resorting to violence to protest persecution.

Journalists and public officials are not supposed to speculate, but I'm neither.  The person who left the IED on the sidewalk in Spokane was a white supremacist.  With the possible exception of Haymarket Square, I can't think of a single comparable effort by the Left.  I can think of Oklahoma City.  And I can think of Tucson, too.

I realize that suspicion of the government is a part of America's political culture, but it has to be replaced with skepticism.  Suspicion - wild, baseless, evidence free - is creating a climate of paranoia that leads to violence. It is worth noting that liberals hated Bush and Cheney more than any figure in a long time, but when Obama was inaugurated, threats against the president rose by 300%.  That for all of the left's problems with Bush, the left never bombed anything.  No one raked the White House with AK-47 fire or flew their plan into a building (OK, no Americans did that).  They did those last two to Clinton.

And no one on the Right attacked the government with violence either.  Not for eight years.

It doesn't take advanced thinking to come to the conclusion that for the Right, government is only legitimate when the Right runs things.  And please don't feed me tired BS about resisting government encroachment on liberties.  Obama has done NOTHING comparable to the Patriot Act, or the military surveillance apparatus set-up under Poindexter, and the most egregious "federal takeover" is hardly more intrusive than No Child Left Behind or Medicare Plan D.

We have entered an era where about 10% or so of the population simply cannot countenance a Democrat president.  That it is illegitimate simply by being a Democrat.

And you combine those people with Glenn Beck-Sarah Palin-Rush Limbaugh-Michelle Bachman and add a sprinkle of gun laws so loose that Somalis would be chagrined, you have a very dangerous time period.

I think liberals have been saying this for about two years now.  Which is why when Tucson happened, they immediately said, "I told you so."

Loughner does not fit into any neat ideological boxes, but he is clearly part of the paranoid fear of government.  And that climate does not exist in a vacuum or simply within the disturbed reaches of his mind.