Mission accomplished, Markos Moulitsas.

The Left gets its violent responder to hate speech, after all: the only problem is, from their point of view he’s aimed the wrong way.

I started following the saga of J. Eric Fuller a couple of days ago: the short version is that he was one of the victims of the Tucson attack of last week that killed six people and nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Despite the fact that the consensus is, from the President on down, that harsh political rhetoric had nothing to do with the attack (the shooter is generally conceded to have been motivated by violent paranoid schizophrenia, not political beliefs), Mr. Fuller has made a name for himself by declaring that the right wing is responsible for the attacks, to the point where he is calling for Sarah Palin’s arrest for treason. And I was going to let all of that go: the guy did get shot*, he was a hardcore Democrat beforehand – and, honestly, Fuller didn’t sound all that much different than this fool (more here) or this fool or the fools found here (and see here for much, much more). Free speech is free speech, even when the guy’s cynically milking the fetishes of the Left, am I right?

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Except that Mr. Fuller wasn’t being cynical. He really, truly believes what he’s been told by the netroots; which is why he’s under arrest tonight for making actual, public death threats against Trent Humphries, who was not involved with the Tucson attacks in any way, shape or form but who is the president of the Pima County Tea Party. Mr. Humphries has, in fact, been getting death threats all week; this was just the first time it was done in a fashion that the media couldn’t ignore.

Now, this sort of intimidation will of course not stop Mr. Humphries; unlike some groups, the Tea Party is not made up of mostly cowardly scum. But it is fascinating to see that, after a week of the Online Left’s increasingly-shrill insistence that unwise speech leads to threats, it turns out that possibly it does… if you’re talking about the weak-willed wretches who actually take certain members of the Online Left seriously as a moral, ethical, or intellectual movement. Which is fortunately not very much of the population – but it only takes one programmed dupe, doesn’t it?

– At least, that was what we kept getting told.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I won’t ask the netroots if they’re happy, now – pretty much because I dread that the answer will be ‘Yes.’ Or just a strangled hoot of pleasure.

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*I’ve never been shot: I don’t have any real frame of reference for how much and how long having been shot affects your judgment and behavior.

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