Alex Koppelman: Right: DHS extremist report was "crap." Really?: James von Brunn's shotgun assault on the Holocaust Museum reminds me of Marx's quip about history repeating itself first as tragedy then as farce. I don't mean to take this lightly: the guard who was killed wasn't a specific target for assassination like Dr. George Tiller, but he is just as dead, certainly mourned, and all the more poignant for being such an arbitrary victim -- a point we've come to accept as normal for terrorism, because we're always more comfortable talking about innocent victims who bear no responsibility for the causes the terrorists embrace. Another is that it is easier to show that random acts of terrorism don't work -- indeed, that they often backfire on their architects. Targeted killings, on the other hand, sometimes do appear to work. Killing Tiller, for instance, has closed down his clinic, depriving Wichita KS of its last local provider of abortion services, and depriving the nation of one of the last providers of late-term abortion services. It would take considerable political will to reverse those losses, something that no US political leader is likely to muster -- unlike, say, tearing up a country on the other side of the world, like Afghanistan.

The difference here is that Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, is part of an active, widespread political movement that has demonized doctors and clinic workers, that has harrassed women who have a legal right to abortion services, and that has frequently resorted to violence, including murder, to further its aims. Von Brunn, on the other hand, is way out of step from the conservative movement. I've seen him described as a "neo-Nazi" but at 89 he's old enough to be an old school Nazi, not a "neo" anything. The antisemitism that was rather common when he was young has lost its grip and fallen from favor, even on the far right, where support for Israel is nearly unanimous, and Holocaust denial is a mere accident of general ignorance.

So I don't see von Brunn's example as one that will have any effect or resonance beyond the damage he's already done. Still, he does, like Roeder, fit in the broader category of would-be vigilantes willing to martyr themselves for right-wing causes. The DHS report saw this coming, and indeed if you look at the backgrounders on von Brunn and Roeder it wouldn't have taken a lot of detective work to sniff them out. Whether sicking the FBI on them would be worthwhile isn't obvious: the FBI caused more trouble than they found on the left, and they don't appear to have done much better with the al-Qaeda threat. The more interesting question is why the right's pundits and politicos got so upset about the DHS report in the first place. I think it's because the emotional triggers that set off individuals like Roeder and von Brunn are the essential stock in trade of the right. What you hear repeated ad nauseum on their radio is fear and loathing of others, the underhanded dominance of the left, and a wail and cry meant to tease right-thinking people to action -- which given how enamored the right is with guns, with harsh and capital punishment, with torture, with war, can easily slip in to violence. One wonders how they can look at themselves in the mirror, but their reaction to the DHS report shows they refuse to.

Paul Krugman: The Big Hate: Another take on the same news. Again we see the parallels with the early Clinton years, peaking with the Timothy McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City.