Frank Rich on Rachel Maddow Show: 'We Have to Worry About Right Wing Political Violence'

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, for her relentless disinformation and fearmongering, deserves as much condemnation as Contessa Brewer and her leftist gang of propagandists and smear merchants. New York Times columnist Frank Rich appeared on Maddow's show last night. Maddow, referencing Rich's weekend op-ed, compares the gun-toting demonstrators at town halls and at Obama appearances to the assassins emerging out of "the political climate of the 1960s."

In response, Nick Gillespie has this piece at Reason, "Lee Harvey Oswald: Still History's Patsy":

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As Matt Welch and Jesse Walker and others at this site have been pointing out, loose analogies between between angry, sputtering citizens at town hall meetings and Nazis street thugs and political assassins are pretty damn lame. As important, they are almost inevitably the result of a strange ideological lesion that precludes inclusion of inconvenient facts. A propos of the above: JFK was not assassinated by a right-wing crank, but by a demonstrably pro-Castro defector to the Soviet Union who tooks shots at a rising right-wing freakazoid not long before shooting the president (yes, Oswald done did it). And, you might remember, that revolutionary (coff, coff) violence that wracked the '60s and early '70s was the result primarily not of out-of-control Barry Goldwaterites but by groups on the left.

Precisely what relevance any of this has to the current moment is far from clear. Maddow seemed most freaked out by a recent Arizona incident in which people toted guns to a rally near where President Obama was speaking. The incident has been revealed (on CNN) as a stunt pulled by radio show host and longtime Libertarian Party activist Ernest Hancock, not the nefarious workings of a secret army of camo-wearing zombies mad over mandatory UNICEF collections ...

More at the link.

Hat Tip: Megan McArdle.