Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, or neither

I've touched on the whole bring-your-guns-to-the-town-hall-meetings phenomena before, but things continue to spiral a little out of control. It seems the craziest people are not the ones at the meetings with the guns, but the members of the media who continue to be completely appalled by these actions. Of course, they are mostly ignoring the fact that there has yet to be a violent incident involving one of these gun-toting citizens.

Last week, Megan McArdle did a great job exposing some of the loonies. Her recent post is here.

Apparently, not even the esteemed New York Times columnist Frank Rich can avoid jumping on the crazy train. He compares the current state of "violence" with the violet threats made against Kennedy by right-leaning radicals who feared he was the sign of a new liberal order in the 1960s:

"As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order. Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed."

Of course, he fails to note that most of the violence in the 1960s (including, most importantly, the ACTUAL ASSASSINATION of a U.S. President) was perpetrated by leftists. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and a Castro sympathizer, not a conservative nut-job.

Of course there are plenty of dangerous extremists on the right as well, but Frank's attempt to compare these protesters (who are entirely within their rights and have not done any actual violence to anyone with their firearms) to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (one of those previously mentioned dangerous extremists) is more than a little bit of a stretch.

In fact, the only real link he can establish is that McVeigh once wore a T-shirt that proclaimed Jefferson's quote about the "Tree of Liberty" being refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots (a quote that has become popular with some health reform protesters). Obviously, this is a fool proof method of proving that these legal gun carriers have the same motives as the man who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City.