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Ginned up by publications of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, Oswald first tried to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher. Oswald next plotted to kill former vice president Richard Nixon, but was waylaid the day Nixon was in Dallas.

So he shot President Kennedy. Upon his arrest, Oswald immediately called John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, planning to ask Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs. (And who hasn’t used his one phone call after being arrested for murder to make arrangements to share Marxism with the world?)

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, was part of Charles Manson’s countercultural hippie cult. She pulled the gun on Ford because she was incensed about the plight of the California redwood.

Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Ford because, she said, “the government had declared war on the Left.” (Would that it were so!)

In the entire history of the nation, only two senators and two congressmen have been assassinated.2 Both the first and the last were killed by Democrats for political reasons, and the other two were killed for nonpolitical reasons.

The first member of Congress to be assassinated was Republican James M. Hinds of Arkansas. He was killed in 1868 by secretary of the Democratic Committee of Monroe County and Ku Klux Klan member George A. Clark. (This was contrary to initial reports on the Rachel Maddow Show that he had been killed by a right-wing anti-government Tea Partier.

Senator Huey Long was shot and killed in 1935 by Carl Weiss for no political reason, but apparently because Long had targeted Weiss’s father-in-law, a judge, for removal from the bench.

Senator Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. Sirhan keeps coming up for parole these days and is hoping to be released in time to get his own prime-time show on MSNBC. (It was a strange name for an assassin, unless you think about it.)

The last assassination of a member of Congress was in 1978, when Representative Leo Ryan was killed by members of Jim Jones’s left-wing cult in Guyana.

Conservatives, we’re endlessly told, create “an atmosphere of hatred and fear.” This is as opposed to liberals who just go around shooting elected officials.

Among recent examples of political violence on a massive scale in this country—not rhetorical violence, but real violence—was that committed by the Weathermen and their ilk just a few decades ago. Not only were those people embraced by the establishment, they would be welcome today at any Democratic gathering. America’s current president launched his political career in the home of two such radicals who incited violence, set bombs, praised Charles Manson—and only through their own ineptitude avoided murdering anyone.

Guess which political group both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI consider the most dangerous in America? Moveon.org? Tea Partiers? The Kennedy family?

The answer is: environmentalists.

Citing the $43 million in damage done in the past two decades only by the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes, “Extremists within the environmental and animal rights movements have committed literally thousands of violent criminal acts in recent decades—arguably more than those from any other radical sector, left or right.”3 In 2002, the FBI described the Earth Liberation Front as America’s most dangerous domestic terrorist group.4

There are other hard comparisons to be made. No conservative has ever charged at a liberal testifying before Congress, waving bloody hands in the witness’s face—as was done to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Or as liberals would put it if she were a Democrat: the first black female secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.)

No conservative has ever sneaked