This weekend, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down in cold blood by a disturbed gunman during an hours long standoff in what is an otherwise quiet suburb. You probably wouldn’t normally think that’s a source for clever one liners, but then, you aren’t a DailyKos kid are you?

Tommy Christopher was reading his Twitter page last night and saw a disturbing tweet from Markos Moulitsas. It was a retweet (in other words, resending something another person posted) of a message on Dana Houle’s twitter feed. Houle is a front-pager at DailyKos. Here is the relevant series (from DailyDose.us):

DanaHoule With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck

DanaHoule “He said he’ll be ready if there’s ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled foods and guns…” Wolverines!! about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas RT @DanaHoule: With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

TommyXtopher What does this mean? RT @danahoule @markosmoulitsas With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas When we were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk “revolution” and kill cops. about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

Tommy Christopher is rightly offended by the Kos Kids turning a tragedy into a chance for one-liners. Sadly, though, this is only the latest in a long series of such commentary by Markos and his legions of like-minded liberal ghouls.

Here is the portion of the news story that Kos and Kompany are using as an excuse for their loathsome behavior:

Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Nevermind that the story goes on to elaborate on numerous incidents highlighting the shooter’s instability. Kos and his Komrades find this to be sufficient grounds for suggesting that conservatives like to kill cops.

Here is what Tommy has to say about Kos:

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I think this is shameful. This is the kind of thing I would probably delete at Political Machine. I don’t even see the humor in it, even setting aside the heartless ghoulishness involved.

More broadly, I’m starting to feel like a lot of the liberal blogosphere is forgetting what it means to be a liberal, or maybe I’m using the wrong word. After 8 years of mortal kombat with the right, we’ve swung too far, become too belligerent.

More and more, I find the left taking shots at targets that they ought to leave alone, or even reach out to. Take the Palin family, for instance. The same writer, Houle, goes Full Snarkal Jacket on the Palin family. Now, I am as staunch an opponent of Sarah Palin as there is, but I fail to see how her troubled family validates my policy disagreements with her. In fact, her family, and Levi’s, are precisely the people we should be reaching out to. Normal people have dysfunctional family members whom they a. don’t think represent themselves and b. they still love.

That is a good argument and he makes a very valid point, but it’s not the whole story.

What Tommy doesn’t understand, as Ed Morrissey points out, is that this isn’t a momentary lapse for Markos, or some new development born of years of combat online. This is how the Kos wing of the Democrat party operates. Whenever there is a shooting, you can count on the commenters at DailyKos blaming Limbaugh and Hannity. Note, I don’t say, whenever there is a shooting which involves something right wing, just whenever there is a shooting.

Diaries and comments at DailyKos indicting conservatives as inciters of murder are utterly commonplace. And not just at DailyKos. To a whole wing of the Democrats it’s axiomatic that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck cause violence. I’m reminded of a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, wherein he and his panel claim that the invective and hyperbole of conservative pundits is so excessive and that it invites harm on Obama, and then equate Glenn Beck with Nazi sympathizer and apologist Father Coughlin. Yes, all in the same segment. Yes, Keith “YOU’RE A FASCIST, SIR” Olbermann.

It’s very telling. Calling conservatives Nazis isn’t even hyperbole to their minds. But calling Obama’s socialist policies socialist is an incitement to murder.

Maher inserts a little speech about free speech into the discussion – which elicits a chuckle from Keith I might point out – but that lip service is belied by the content. It’s belied by story after story at DailyKos calling for the ouster, even arrest, of conservative talk radio hosts. It’s belied by their elected representatives who continue their assault on conservative radio. It’s belied by their President, who uses his bully pulpit to mock and belittle radio and television hosts who criticize him.

This wing of Democrats, Kos and those who follow him, they want only one thing from conservatives: Silence. And convincing people that being conservative is enough to warrant cop killing is just one example of how they expect to attain it.

Something ugly has been growing on the left for many years, most visibly the last eight. It’s a closed loop ideology that holds that opposing points of view are de facto violence. It is filled with a rage and contempt, a vile and sneering disdain which views conservatives as less than human, that considers conservative thought to be … thought crime. It is festering and spreading, and it carries with it the specter of the silencing of dissent. Because it does not engage, it does not debate, and it does not quibble over policy or argue on the merits.

Instead it points an indignant finger at the whole of conservatism and names us murderous. That is not political discourse, it’s not any kind of discourse. It’s Olbermann and Garafalo claiming conservatism represents mental disease and Frank “once an evangelical” Schaeffer urging Obama to purge conservatives from the political arena. And it’s Markos Moulitsas and his minions routinely pinning murder on talk show hosts. It isn’t political discourse, it’s invective and spittle-flecked rage masquerading as commentary.

Tommy Christopher is suprised that his fellow Democrats would behave in this way. But nobody should be surprised. This is nothing if not utterly routine for Kos and his wing of the party.

- Caleb Howe

UPDATE: See what I mean? “How many more people are going to die due to right-wing fear and paranoia before the wingnut media finally dials back its inflammatory rhetoric?”

UPDATE II: Tommy puts up a quit blog at Kos, check out the madness in the comments, such as this gem from Dana Houle, the original Tweeter.

…it wasn’t a “joke,” and one would probably have to be looking for that meaning to conclude that it was. The reality is that the rightwing has been scaring the hell out of people about how Obama is going to take away their guns so much that it’s practically inevitable that now that he’s president we’re going to see more instances of vulnerable people on the edge of paranoia taking these fearmongering claims to heart and go on shooting sprees. David Neiwert is just one of many people who predicted long ago that if a Democrat won the 2008 election that we’d probably see an increase of rightwing violence. While I don’t count the shooting yesterday as militia-like activity, it’s clear from the statements about the guy that his mind was completely addled by the garbage being pushed by the right that Obama is a threat to their rights, their liberty, that the man is comin’ for their guns, we’re becoming a police state, etc.

With authoritarians out of office, we’re seeing more authoritarian-inspired rhetoric coming from the right. And that rhetoric is going to contribute to more unstable people like yesterday’s shooter acting on that authoritarian rhetoric and shooting people…including cops.

UPDATE III: King of the moonbat league chimes in. The only surprise is that he didn’t manage to shoehorn in some dig at Palin.

Many of us have worried that the heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces might spill over at some point into violence in the hands of individuals prone to lashing out. We now have what seems to be a clear instance of that and three dead police officers. One wonders whether Fox News or the Second Amendment fanatics will chill it out a little. And then one realizes who we’re talking about.

UPDATE IV: Just found this story by Don Surber on Maher’s commentary, which is very relevant here, and well worth reading. Also here and here from Confederate Yankee (h/t Instapundit) … must reads.

UPDATE V: Go figure. Kos Kommenters think Tommy deserves to DIE for his heresy:

Good bye. Scum like you should not be allowed to breath[sic]. More or less allowed to use a computer. What “Kos” said was true in every since of the word. I just wish you the best of no luck.

Apparently the irony is lost on this Kossak.