Crime is rising, not necessarily in number of incidents but certainly in public attention paid. Yet, while this concern over urban violence grows, there’s another form that gets less coverage; increasing right-wing violence.

Some names to ring the bell; Jim David Adkisson, James W. von Brunn, Scott Roeder.

This past Friday, Bill Moyers looked at the public representatives of political beliefs attributed to these, exploring the blame to be placed at the doorstep of men who use their pulpit to inflame and incite. One such man, Randall Terry, is using the health care debate as a platform to unveil threats of violence:

RANDALL TERRY: Do not expect us to betray God, and to pay for the murder of our neighbor. If you do, you are deceived, you are deluded. We will not comply. And there will be unthinkable, horrifying ramifications. People will react — whether they react peacefully yet forcefully and with forethought, or whether they react viscerally, with eruptions of rage.

As they do so well, the pundits of the far right are casting themselves as victims at the hands of unpatriotic and freedom-crushing liberals.

Sean Hannity during an interview with Joe the Plumber:

"If you have a pro-life bumper sticker on your car, if you have an ‘America is overtaxed’ bumper sticker, if you have a pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker, they’re viewing you potentially as a radical." April 15th, 2009.

But as Hannity cavalierly dismisses concerns over the radical right with an intellectually dishonest mischaracterization, his colleagues in the media are sympathetically covering groups that promote violence against our own government:

One of the Free Staters describes her America, "embodied in a story of the time a tree fell on a friend’s house near Concord and, instead of waiting for government, neighbors responded with their own chain saws. She says she can’t imagine shooting a living creature, but she’ll do it if the need arises. "A bad guy might be the individual crook," the new rifleman says, "Or it might be somebody who’s taken over government."

Either way, she’s ready.

These are half-veiled threats of assassination. Coming from Fox News it’s despicable, though expected. But go back and follow that link. Check the tag line: this is an anonymous AP article treating an insignificant radicalized group to a sympathetic, 44 paragraph article. As Reverend Chris Bruice notes on the Journal, such irresponsibility has consequences:

If you look at the history of like– situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There’s the sense that these aren’t human beings. You know, they’re not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist– that’s hate language. You don’t negotiate with evil people. You don’t live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

Tolerating this sort of anti-government, anti-liberal rhetoric can lead to no productive end. Introducing a guest on his program, John Stewart gave this intro: “author of a new book about the civil war. The one that already happened, not the one obviously that’s coming. That book’s not out til 2012."

With so many voices stoking right wing anger and so many incidents already on the books, that doesn’t seem so far-fetched.