If the teabaggers are so sure they're right, why do they feel they need to murder everyone who disagrees with them?

So far, aside from the nutball who shot up the Holocaust museum, we haven't seen teabaggers following through on their eliminationist rhetoric. But still, you have to wonder why they feel that disagreements about policy seem to warrant talk of the actual killing of the opposition?

David Neiwert, who has written extensively for years about the eliminationist rhetoric of the right (his book is linked from the left-hand sidebar), notes another example, this one about Washington Senator Patty Murray:

Well, the Tea Party folks held a "Take Back America!" rally last weekend in Asotin, Washington, which is in the far eastern reaches of the state. Stephanie Smith of KLEW-TV in Lewiston, Idaho, was there and filed this report:

"How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove?," asked one speaker from the podium. "What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd. He got hung. And that's what I want to do with Patty Murray."

Violent eliminationist rhetoric like this is part and parcel of right-wing extremism, so this is simply another manifestation of the growing extremism of the Tea Party movement. After all, the Lewis and Clark Tea Party Patriots, who sponsored this gathering, are in fact a classic example of the way the Tea Party movement has become a launching pad for a revival of the Patriot movement of the '90s.

Their blog, for example, is rich with propaganda in favor of the "Sovereignty Winter Fest" (aka the "Washington State Tenth Amendment Rally") -- an event held last month in Olympia that, as Devin Burghart reported for IREHR, not only was rife with Confederate flags and far-right rhetoric, but was primarily an event aimed at bolstering the "Tenther" constitutional theories. As we've reported several times, these theories all originated with the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s.

And we all know how THAT turned out.