Link via Ace, who seems willing to believe the fear is genuine. Maybe that’s true for the dimmer bulbs among them but for most I’m sure this is standard calculated faux-horror designed to frame the event as suspect, illegitimate, and otherwise unsuitable for mainstream political consumption. Kind of like how Olbermann is forever referring to the “far right” or the “fringe right.” For people who claim to object so profoundly to the politics of fear, they sure are good at it.

Anyway, Legal Insurrection previews the tedious, inevitable nutroots reaction to next week’s rallies:

The Huffington Post is organizing “citizen journalists” to attend the protests, allegedly to “report.” Which means that they will try to find someone in a crowd who says something stupid, will post it on the internet, and build an argument around it trying to demonize the movement. And left-wing bloggers will react in unison like dogs responding to a whistle, about the “dangerous” and “violent” and “racist” tea parties. This tactic is as old as time; or at least as old as the internet.

Follow the link to Ace up top for the latest on the scourge of insidious “anti-Obama activities” that are destroying our country from within. Meanwhile, here’s a video — swiped from a different post of Ace’s — by Andrew Klavan, the guy responsible for the Limbaugh challenge. I don’t know what made me think of adding it to a post about fake liberal outrage.

Update: The boss was all over this days ago:

It’s already happened once before — at the Denver anti-porkulus rally last month, when the Media Matters/Daily Kos crowd shifted media attention away from the policy message by manufacturing fake outrage about some stunt-puller who showed up with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler that I didn’t see and asked for a picture. The local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, took the bait…

As Beckel signaled, leftists are going to use fear-mongering to paint mainstream taxpayers who believe in the Second Amendment, the Constitution, limited government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility as fringe wackos. They have already exploited the Binghamton and Pittsburgh shooting sprees for political gain. They have no shame. Be prepared. Confront them with their own rank hypocrisy and unhingedness. Don’t get distracted. And don’t let your local media get away with lazily recycling their smears.