I Don't Know Whether To be Terrified Or Scared Outta My Fucking Mind

Chekhov declared a gun on the wall in the first act must be fired by the end of the third.

In the way of life imitating art, with guns falling to the floor, or loonies packing 'em to attend Presidential rallies, the measured yet playful tones of the blip by Megan Garber, on CJR today, seems to me to belie a very serious, very dangerous, very consequential line has not already been crossed. She conveys the news that David Frum, Bushevik speech-writer and apologist, is worried about the tenor of the 'conversation":

Frum: “The guns are coming out. The risks are real.”

By Megan Garber

This has been, in the health care debate, The Week of the Gun.

David Frum shoots back:

It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable.

The by-play in the comments includes this, from Y'r Ob'd't S'v't...:

I am greatly afeared that that horse is outta the barn.

Banking back the rhetoric isn't gonna put the genie back in the bottle. The Right's eliminationist rhetoric has struck a chord. Racism is rampant (albeit mostly tacit and implicit).

Frum and his fellows are hoist on their own petard. Give them joy of it, and hope nobody actually gets hurt (though it was clear to me that Beck, and Limbaugh, at least, were doing their Regal impressions: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest," hoping that they could shake loose another Scott Roeder, who'd mebbe get off a "lucky" shot at Obama).

NOW they're backing away from it? They've aroused and fed the beast. How they now kill it is their problem, but it IS their problem...