Playing with fire

Another writer, this time Mike Lux at Open Left, has seen some troubling signs related to the threat of violence coming from the Right. He doesn't connect it to a possible rise of fascism, perhaps because he doesn't know how fascism takes hold. He wrote:

Members of Congress have death threats issued against them, while other Members make jokes about lynching their colleagues.

With all of this hateful and violent rhetoric going on, I haven't seen one Republican leader asking for people to cool their rhetoric, or heard them condemn any of these tactics. My question for Republican party, and their allies at conservative media companies that employ the kind of people making these remarks: what exactly would have to be said for you to distance yourself from these people? How far would someone have to go before you got uncomfortable with it? What would have to said before Fox News considered firing someone?

Lux notes we have a long history of political violence in this country (protests about Vietnam, especially at the 1968 Democratic Convention). He concludes with:

What concerns me, though, is that the Republicans seem to have crossed some kind of line to where they actually tolerate and even defend all this violence. They have stopped doing that now, and are even egging the violence on now in some cases. I fear the answer to my question- what would it take for you to condemn the hatefulness- because the answer seems to be that there is nothing that could happen that would make them say "Stop!" And that's a very scary thing for a democracy.

Terrence Heath, who is black and gay, is very familiar with the reasons why blacks were
lynched -- If you don't know your place and stay in it you will be next. If blacks got too uppity, just displaying a noose was frequently enough to put offenders back in line. He documents some of the threats of violence that have occurred recently. Terrence says one of three things is true about the GOP. We may not yet know which it is.
* They don't know what they are playing with.
* The violence is what they want.
* They're willing to risk violence for the sake of ideology.

Terrence is convinced there will be blood.