The Right's undeserved stigma of violence

Over the last few years, the invariably unjustified rush to pin violence on the “right-wing” — particularly the tea partiers — has reached the point of parody. Remember when New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the foiled Times Square bomber might just be angry about Obamacare?

As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein recently noted, among the myriad reasons conservatives take offense at this idiotic knee-jerk slander is that the term “right-wing” is routinely used to describe both terrorists and mainstream Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. I can exclusively report that neither of them celebrates Hitler’s birthday.

Every Muslim terrorist enjoys not just the presumption of innocence until proven guilty but the presumption that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand, too. …

In plenty of cases of multiple killings, from the Unabomber to Christopher Dorner, the perpetrators espoused views closer to the mainstream left’s than McVeigh had to the mainstream right’s. Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis.