If you have led an abject 88 years, killing someone is a surefire way to put an exclamation point on your life. A white racist yesterday murdered a black security guard at the museum to memorialize the Jewish Holocaust. Chris Matthews responded, "Is there something really bad happening out there on the far right?" I don't follow the logic. I do follow the political strategy. Perhaps if conservative broadcasters could get away with it, they would tar the Left with, say, the murder of Army private William Long. After all, anti-war leftists publically hoisted hateful banners proclaiming "We Support the Troops When They Shoot Their Officers." But broadcasters barely got the word out about Long's murder, so the idea of some theoretical conservative broadcaster linking the Long murder to the hateful rhetoric directed toward the American military by elements on the Left seems far-fetched--and not just because it is far-fetched. Anti-war doesn't equal the drive-by at the Army recruiting center and right-wing doesn't equal racist murder at the Holocaust Museum. The media understand the former. Why can't the get the latter right?

It's because they draw the lines, Dan. They and they alone. They can feel that any two things are alike, we need to hear them out. But if they don't like a linkage, then it is just an example of what lengths you'll go to do make your point.

Liberals can wax nostalgic about shutting down the city of San Fransisco with barricades, because nobody can get to where they wanted to go without considering their point of view. But they want to treat you like a protection racketeer if you cross the path of some woman going to an abortion, because you're keeping her from her business and subjecting her to your POV.

It is amazing, isn't it? The leftist press will an@lyze and study this from all angles, ad infinitum, because it has to do with some crazy old racist white guy. Much as they pick and chose the murder of a fourth trimester abortion doctor by a pro-lifer and inferred more crime by those crazy Christians.

But, let a Muslim convert murder and wound two U.S. soldiers or 4 Muslim terrorists get arrested for planning massive bomb attacks on synagogues and national guard aviation depots and it’s – move on, nothing to see here. If it gets barely any press at all.

It turns out this deranged gunman ranted against neo-cons and a big fan of far-left activist Rachel Corrie. Sounds like a left-winger to me.
This reminds me how the rev. Jim Jones was made out to be a Christian fundamentalist when he was a radical Marxist.

Why are racists considered right wing? Let alone neo-Nazis. It is a mischaracterization to begin with.

Good point Rob. And he was a 9/11 conspiracy believer as well, convinced that our government, under the Republicans, planned and executed the WTC horror.

"Why are racists considered right wing? Let alone neo-Nazis. It is a mischaracterization to begin with."

You know you're talking about the left here, don't you? They consider any similarities between the right and Nazism as significant and deny--until they are brought to dismiss--any ties to the left. I think they get that from Hitler's railing against "the liberal". It's a huge equivocation to get from this that Hitler must totally other than what I define as liberal simply because he railed against them.

We have a problem in this dialog of buying the relationship: Fascism death camps. However Fascist is, of first reference, an Italian under the sway of Mussolini. If you can show me death camps in Italy, then you might have something. Otherwise we would have to say that Mussolini was not a fascist, even though it gets its name from that party. So the similarity with Nazism must always be cross-referenced with similarity to Italian fascism. There were very similar social forces going on in both countries. Both were recovering nations, both invoked Roman/Gothic imagery of a mythic age, both were under the sway of a charismatic leader. One had death camps, and the other--to my knowledge--did not.

One was far more mechanistic than the other and saw people not as citizens who could use a timely train but some as "useless eaters" and euthanized the infirm long before they started on the Jews.

All of this ana-lysis is lost when trying to play pin-the-swastika. I hear that liberals have a penchant for understanding for this thing called "nuance". I've just barely ever seen it. I haven't seen one recent conservative response yet that Thomas Frank can't characterize as "a ploy", and my guess is that he also thinks whatever it is is "shallow" as well--not to mention "hypocritical".

It didn't come through (because I didn't use the right elements), but the first sentence of the seconds paragraph should read: "Fascism <=> death camps."