THE REAL PROBLEM. One of the best things I've read about this Giffords situation is by "hisnewreasons," made in comments to my last post:

I don't think Sarah Palin's rhetoric has inspired violence, because it's essentially meaningless. Whether it's Glenn Beck's Armageddon talk or the internet blather about gun confiscation and socialism, all of this tough talk eventually leads to rather banal ends -- i.e., the rise of a John Boehner to high office.

It's that banality that you find underneath the rage of suburbanites who seem themselves as Nathan Hale, simply because they joined the Tea Party. You don't find potential assassins, but tourists who practically need cannons to take down a moose on hunting trips...

"Lock and load" doesn't make people violent. It makes them stupid.

Just so. Their deliberately menacing blood-of-tyrants, Second-Amendment-solutions blather looks, in the wake of the Giffords shooting, rather sinister -- especially since, after one of their targets was slain, their first reaction was defensive rather than abashed.

But violent delusions aren't the only kind from which they suffer. Take National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez and her recent mooning over that nice Catholic boy Marco Rubio. Rubio inspired Lopez with some mild fourscore-and-seven-years-ago bombast to a bizarre flight of fantasy:

...Rubio recalled — with a savvy “Señor Smith Goes to Washington” appeal — visiting some of the Founders’ memorials in and around town. They stand as reminders and even rallying cries. Those who fought and died to establish this country, those who worked on its founding, believed that “every single human person had inherent rights that came from God,” he reminded the crowd... And what the 112th Congress does will help determine, Rubio insisted, whether, “when my children are my age,” they will come back here to admire the monuments of our core national values, or merely be “looking at relics of a once-great nation.”

I couldn’t have been the only one to picture the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes — and without feeling entirely absurd.

Normal people may or may not be inspired by Rubio's patriotic mush, but they will be inoculated by common sense from taking it too seriously. When they hear the mournful line about relics, they may not know that it is straight out of a specific class of wingnut propaganda ordnance, meant to portray the brethren as the last loyal defenders of freedom -- like Douglas MacArthur's ravings about wanting the curse on a dying soldier's lips to be Roosevelt's name and not his own, and other such self-pitying bluster. They may even feel a little wistful, observe that freedom isn't free, resolve to teach their kids the Pledge of Allegiance, etc.

But they won't fantasize about liberal apes romping in the ruins of our national monuments while Charlton Heston roars GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! And if they did they'd be embarrassed. But K-Lo is proud. To her Planet of the Apes is a work of social prophecy, like 1984.

That's how her mind works -- and how their minds work. The "eliminationist" tropes we've been hearing about recently are part of the problem, but so are the less violent notions we see them parroting every day: That Obama is a Muslim, an alien, a psychopath, and consciously trying to destroy the United States; that Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical; that America's scientists are engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to bankrupt the nation via global warming fraud; that deficits, which were harmless and even kinda fun under Reagan, are under Obama a menace to the future of our famous statues; etc. etc. etc.

The cumulative impact of this kind of magical thinking may or may not lead to assassinations, but it certainly weakens the sufferer's ability to respond to even obvious problems in any reasonable way. And in the long run this is more dangerous to the Republic than the grrr-lookit-me-I'm-a-Minuteman blood-lust we're currently focused on. The wingnut looks, for example, upon millions of citizens financially unable to visit a doctor when they're sick, and the first thing he asks himself is, "How can we defend these people from socialism?" He sees the stock market doing great while ordinary people can't find jobs, and surmises, "This Administration is anti-business." Etc.

Even if you embarrass them (fond hope!) into talking less about guns and revolution, you aren't touching the real problem. I'm not confident that it's curable. The best we can do is keep them away from sharp objects and the levers of power.

UPDATE. Lotta pushback in comments. I'm aware of the copious evidence of conservatives gone kill-crazy, including the bill of particulars of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence's Insurrectionist Timeline (which makes Michelle Malkin's "progressive climate of hate" list look like a kindergarten bad conduct report). And I can imagine the effect the constant threats of violence, masked and otherwise, have on Democratic organizing, especially in communities infested with gun nuts and tricornered delusionals.

I still say that's a problem but not the problem. These nuts wouldn't be out there going shooty-shooty in the first place if they hadn't been convinced by the orchestrators of their own stupidity that Big Gummint is a tyranny that cannot be effected by voting and petitioning. Why should they take part in working groups or doorknocking campaigns when they've been told, contrary to all evidence and common sense, that because these things worked for Obama they have ceased to work for white rageaholics, who must in consequence attack every policy as if it were Bunker Hill?

UPDATE 2. A long comment on this post from Doghouse Riley. Includes:

So much of our politics seems to be a debate about how best to remove most of the pieces of eggshell from our omelette, and none about figuring out how to properly crack an egg.