January 11, 2011 08:49 PM UTC

Even More Threats Against Democrats

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• by: Colorado Pols

7NEWS reported last night, at the end of their story on the recent threats against the offices and staff of Sen. Michael Bennet:

Another Colorado man — Jesse Michael Arispe, 20 — was also indicted last week for sending a July 2010 letter “containing a threat to the life of, and to inflict bodily harm on, the President of the United States,” according to court records.

Arispe was being held in Weld County Jail on unrelated state kidnapping and rape charges when he sent the letter threatening the president, according to court records. He previously threatened to blow up Greeley government offices and federal buildings, the Greeley Tribune reported.

A third man, Donald Edward Hatten, of El Paso County, was charged by criminal complaint last week for threats against the president. Hatten has not yet appeared in court, Walsh said in the statement.

The second case, reported on in better detail by the AP, is a man who walked into the Colorado Springs FBI office last week and announced his plans to travel to Washington DC and carry out his threats–like the threats against Sen. Bennet reported yesterday, we’re talking about someone who is more pitiable and deranged than dangerous. You don’t know about the real threats until it’s too late, because they actually carry them out instead of marching into the FBI office to talk about it.

Since the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and attendees of her “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson Saturday, many commentators have cited a rhetorical difference between Democrats and Republicans in the last couple of years, and a tendency on the part of Republicans, in their zeal to win back power in the recent midterm elections, to employ “eliminationist” rhetoric against Democrats. Eliminationist rhetoric is defined as characterizing one’s political opponents as an implacable enemy who fundamentally opposes one’s basic values, and who must be destroyed. It ranges from quite subtle and fairly benign rhetoric to more extreme examples, such as Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada’s talk of “Second Amendment remedies” being taken up by citizens–should the elections fail to provide a lawful one.

In addition to whipping up the kind of furor that inspires perfectly sane citizens to show up at rallies with their firearms and, no question, builds urgency for your get-out-the-vote efforts, there seems to be a permissive, enabling effect on the already crazy. There are all kinds of citizens out there absorbing these messages, and some of them don’t understand, in the absence of anything to spell it out for them, that you’re speaking metaphorically with the rifle targets “surveyor’s marks.”

But there’s another question that seems to be much more uncomfortable than whether there are impressionable crazies in our midst. The question is, tragic moments that put everyone on the defensive notwithstanding–how much of this rhetoric is completely serious? Ask yourself that next time Tom Tancredo says President Obama is a bigger threat to America than nuclear war, or Dave Schultheis says Obama is “flying the U.S. plane into the ground” 9/11-style. Or Jane Norton says that Democrats care more about terrorists than American citizens.

Do they–from Schultheis to Tancredo to Sharron Angle–do they mean what they say? Do they really believe it? If they do, this is really not about a few deranged “lone nuts.” It’s something much worse, and the nuts acting out the rhetoric are a red flag that had better not be missed.