Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now

You know, once again, the Rude Pundit hits it on the head. And then steals its wallet while it's unconscious.

Oh, dear, sweet conservative Americans, how you must have shit yourself on Saturday when you heard that someone had shot up an event with a Democratic member of Congress in, of all goddamned places, Arizona. And, worse, a Representative who had voted in favor of health care reform, which you have demonized as nothing short of a resurrection of the Nazi Party. It must have been awful for so many conservatives, thinking, praying, "Please, please, please, don’t let it be some Tea Party dick who says he did it because Glenn Beck told him to. Don’t let it be someone who wants to fuck Sarah Palin and thinks that if he starts taking out her congressional crosshaired targets, he’ll get into her pants."

How you must have heaved in relief when you saw that it would be quite easy to portray Jared Lee Loughner as a raving psychopath, an effort that’s helped a great deal by the apparent truth, which is that Jared Lee Loughner is a raving psychopath. Yeah, he's a psychopath whose mad rantings are heavily peppered with an insouciant flavor of Beck or Ron Paul or loony conspiracy theory nutsiness, but a psychopath just the same.

Now, ah, yes, now, lovely right-wingers, you could defend yourself. You could work yourselves into a huff about how unjustly you were accused of driving this obviously disturbed individual into an act of calculated, cold-blooded violence. But that's because you're sitting there in your shit-filled underpants, thinking, "I don't believe in violence. I don't approve this. I hope the government doesn't try to crack down on us."

So, welcome, assholes, because you are Muslim now.

How does it feel to stand in Muslim shoes today? Because, right now, yes, you are being treated like suspects. You are being treated like you are guilty of the crimes that are committed by the deranged in your number. Sure, you may think, you can spout all the blood-filled, gun-toting, war-flogging rhetoric you want against citizens of your own country. But those are just words, you know? You can’t, you know, be held accountable for the actions of a few. And, gosh, it’s just wrong to lump you all together, to stereotype you all as criminals in waiting. Like, you know, you have done with Muslims since September 11, 2001.

Here's the deal, though. The vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims decry not only acts of violence, but the rhetoric of it, too. The vast, vast, vast majority of right-wingers not only stay silent as conservatives shoot at targets with their opponents' names or initials on them, talk about revolution and violence, and accuse Democrats of getting ready to put Americans in forced health care camps. No, you embrace your extremist assholes and anoint them your idiot queen.

How will you live with yourselves in the future? Look, heated, vicious rhetoric is part of the political game. But, frankly, there’s a bit of difference between saying that you’re going to "target" an opponent and saying that there might have to be "Second Amendment solutions" to the nation’s problems. Let's not do the bullshit dance of false equivalence. While there was a period of time when the left was violent (which was met by officially-sanctioned violence by the government), in the last couple of decades, it hasn't been the left shooting shit up. It wasn't the left who let the assault weapons ban lapse. It wasn't the left that made access to guns as easy as a McDonald's drive-thru. It wasn't the left that cried "Fascism" to background checks for someone who wants to own a fucking machine gun. It wasn't the left that supported preemptive war and violence against individuals as solutions to our nation's problems. Time to welcome your chickens home, conservatives. Open your filthy arms.

So, yeah, yeah, cowering motherfuckers, Jared Lee Loughner was monkeyfuck insane. He wandered in the fringes of conspiracy theories and wallowed in the stinking pit of his own mad brain fluids. You can comfort yourselves and have a shaky drink to that.

But you know what, you ridiculous worms? At the end of the day, the Rude Pundit supports your right to say your stupid shit. And it's ironic that Giffords read the First Amendment during the House's big show last week of reading the Constitution. Free speech ain't a free pass. It never, ever comes without responsibility. You wanna spout crazy, violent shit? You wanna talk about end times and revolution, Glenn Beck? Then man up and know that some people will take you seriously, even if you are just a joke.