The Corpus Callosum

 "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, "Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing," and the people - we the people - are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States."

What is deeply strange about this, is that she said it in response to a question about proposed cap-and-trade legislation!  There have been many revolutions in the history of this Earth, for various different reasons, but I am not aware of any that has been staged because of environmental legislation.  While her proposal does not suffer from the complete lack of logic that the Lafayette County Republicans exhibit, it does suffer from a complete lack of common sense. 

I'm not hooked in to the the firehose-of-hate email/talk radio stream, so I don't know if there is any connection.  Media Matters noted, on 30 September 2009, that there is a "trend of extremist right-wing rhetoric."  They gave several examples.  However, they did not really demonstrate a trend.  That would be difficult to prove.  Still, there is some evidence.  Last month, a Boston Globe article mentioned "a new wave of antigovernment fervor."  The article is about an increase in threats against the President:

A [Southern Poverty Law] Center study released in August found a nearly 35 percent growth in racially based domestic hate groups since 2000 - from 602 to 926. The center concluded that opposition to Obama's election has only increased the phenomenon..."One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.''

Threatening language has also found its way into talk radio broadcasts and social networking websites, raising fears that individuals not normally considered threats to the president could be incited to violence...
"The racist extremist fringe is exploiting themes that strike a chord in the mainstream more than we have seen in the recent past,'' said Brian Levin...

Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service, notes that threats against President Obama are four times more common than they were against President Bush.  Frank Schaeffer, author of Patience with God: Faith for People Who Dont Like Religion (or Atheism), states with conviction that these threats are escalating, and are serious.  Moreover, he links them to the evangelical movement.  He was interviewed by Rachel Maddow, as featured on Crooks and Liars (it's the second video on the page):

But there is a crazy fringe to whom all these little messages that have been pouring out of Fox News, now on a bumper sticker, talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him.

Really, this is trawling for assassins. And this is serious business. It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far-right, have coalesced into a group that truly wants American revolution, and if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff any more. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe...

...Look. This is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Qu'ran, and al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Qu'ran, in or out of context, calling for jihad, and bloody war, and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament, Biblical equivalent of calling for holy war. Now, most Americans'll just see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it's facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans or so who call themselves super-conservative evangelicals. Of this, a small minority might be violent. But, the general atmosphere here is really getting heated...

Meanwhile, Glen Beck:

...says he wants to go beyond broadcasting his opinions and start rallying his political base -- formerly known as his audience -- to take action.  To do so, Mr. Beck is styling himself as a political organizer. In an interview, he said he would promote voter registration drives and sponsor a series of seven conventions across the country featuring what he described as libertarian speakers...

In other words, Beck wants to become a community organizer.  I can't tell if this is stranger than it is frightening, or the reverse.