In the US, more right wing terrorism

James W. Van Brunn

Yet another right-wing terrorist has struck in the US:

An elderly gunman known to authorities as a white supremacist fatally shot a private security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington today before being wounded by guards who returned fire, officials said.

A law enforcement source identified the gunman as James W. von Brunn, 88. On an anti-Semitic Web site he apparently maintains extolling a "Holy Western Empire," von Brunn says he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, worked for 20 years as an advertising executive and film producer in New York and then became "an artist and author" living in Maryland.

Remember when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about potential violence from right-wing extremists? Remember when the pinheads at Fox News and in the wingnuttosphere said that it was just a big plot by the Obama administration to attack the right wing (link link link)? In light of this latest attack and the murder of Dr. Tiller in Kansas, I have to conclude that the critics of the DHS report are a bunch of paranoid morons.

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I wonder what Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and the rest of the Muslim haters will say we ought to do about right-wing terrorism. They say that we should jail people who give to Muslim charities, jail extremist Muslim clerics, hold Muslims without trial, and torture suspected extremists in order to prevent attacks from Muslim terrorists in the future. So using their logic, shouldn't we jail people who give to Operation Rescue, jail Randall Terry, and waterboard anyone who's associated with 'pro-life' or white supremacist groups?

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One phrase in the DHS report that the wingnuts thought was particularly reprehensible was the assertion that “Rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”

It seemed obvious to me that extremists would attempt to recruit and radicalize veterans, but the wingnuts claimed that this was a direct attack on the American military. As it turns out, though, James W. van Brunn is a veteran. I guess that just shows that Stephen Colbert was right when he said that "reality has a well-known liberal bias".

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The wingnuts still haven't come to terms with the latest wave of right-wing terrorism. The idiots at Protein Wisdom mentioned the shooting at the Holocaust memorial, but reserve the T-word for the latest Fox News idiocy: a theory that terrorists brought down the Air France flight that crashed in May. I wonder how those terrorists arranged for that storm?

By the way, here's how Protein Wisdom describes the Holocaust shooting: Some anti-originalist down with the idea of a Living Holocaust Museum. Funny, huh?

(cross posted at appletree)