Gee, I'm sorry that I fired the shots at the Holocaust Museum...

... by arguing (with real facts) that the DHS Rightwing Extremism report was politically slanted and horribly flawed.

This is apparently the case that DelawareDem seeks to make by including my name in a thread in which I was not commenting:

Steve Newton, I am so relieved you that you and other right wingers saved us from the hellfire known as the DHS Report.

Yeah, right wing extremists are not violent at all.

OK, asshole, I've had enough.

You want to make the charge that I ever said there were no rightwing extremist groups, or that law enforcement should not investigate legitimate leads on groups or individuals? Back it up.

Here's the link to virtually everything I have written since the DHS report came out.

Find it, or have the stones to admit you're wrong.

Here's what I actually said:

Don't get me wrong: there are violent, nasty people out there: skinheads, black separatists, eco-terrorists, Muslim honor-killers, fag-bashers, beltway snipers....

There are also blowhards like Glenn Beck, Chuck Norris, and any drunk Texian who will boast about secession with a couple of beers in him whether he's the governor or not....

But what's going on now--and our local blogging community gets it quite well--is primarily an exercise in selective outrage, faux paranoia, and partisan politics as a contact sport.

It has damn-all little to do with real law enforcement activities which will keep any of us any safer.

And this...

Now, I'm going to tell you carefully--and in bold type--that the existence of extremist groups of African-Americans in no way minimizes nor exculpates anybody who advocates or participates in political violence.

And this...

From one perspective, there are a lot of volatile issues that people can feel passionate, legitimate differences about, and which may be exploited for recruiting purposes by some groups, even though the primary domestic terrorist threat remains the lone wolf individual.

The other perspective shifts several inches further along of the paradigm of laying the groundwork for denying the legitimacy of some political arguments, and asserting the existence of certain conditions (an African-American president and debate over gun control issues to name but two) as sufficient in themselves to spark major, group-organized, aggressive violence.

The result is a report that, quite frankly, is almost as useless to law enforcement officials as that Missouri Militia report, because it tells them absolutely nothing they didn't already know, and it is ambiguous enough to support any interpretation those LEOs would like to place on it. It is a piece of bureaucratic double-speak that hedges virtually every single statement it makes.

I am not sure if the poor quality of the report bothers me more or less than the intimation that within the homeland security apparatus there are obviously some pretty powerful voices willing to tie anybody with an anti-immigrant, anti-gun control, anti-big government point of view very closely to white supremacists, hate groups, and militias.

The Missouri report told us those folks were around, and in positions of some power. This tells us that their reach is probably much higher than we previously thought.

Or this...

In one sense, I cannot fault Missouri law enforcement for some of its anxiety. Missouri has seen militia violence, anti-abortion violence, and has the misfortune to have the utter nutcases of the Westboro Baptist Church in nearby Kansas ("God Hates Fags!).

Or this about the MO MIAC report on miltias:

Here's the unfortunate dynamic set up in this case:

On the one side: the law enforcement mandate to prevent domestic terrorism and the legitimate survival instincts of every police officer in Missouri, added to which there is a real history of anti-abortion and anti-government violence in the Show Me State.

On the other side: increasing reliance by law enforcement on secret databases, about which we have significant evidence that (a) they are often used for purposes of tax collection rather than law enforcement; and (b) that Missouri law enforcement has a documented history of placing illegal private information into such databases--information that once is entered cannot be deleted or challenged because the databases themselves are secret. Add to that the fact that law enforcement officers in Missouri and other areas has already been primed to examine items like bumper stickers or anti-government signs as direct evidence that their lives are in danger whenever they approach such a vehicle ("You are the Enemy" the MIAC report reminds them).

This is an unhealthy situation, a dangerous situation to say the least, before we even get into privacy and civil liberties issues.

Regardless of the intent of the authors of this report, there is at least a considerable body of circumstantial evidence to suggest that it will be interpreted by some if not many individual police officers in exactly the way that Libertarians fear it will be interpreted.

This is a serious issue, reaching into other states and involving whole homeland security apparatus that we have allowed to be set overtop of this nation since September 2001.

So when an 89-year-old white supremacist anti-semite with a prison record who has been at his "work" since 1981 goes nuts at the Holocaust Museum, you explain to me DelawareDem how a single thing I have written, a single point of view I have expressed regarding the DHS Rightwing Extremism Report, the Missouri MIAC Militia Report, or any of the other shoddy pieces of work by DHS and allied LEOs (which have been condemned by the obviously right wing Boston Globe, numerous academic experts on civil liberties, and veterans' groups around the country) in any way suggested that law enforcement should not be watching individuals with violent track records.

Show it to me.

Otherwise, keep your mouth shut so that people will only assume you make stuff up.