House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is pissed off at Democrats. Why? Because they are complaining about a wave of threats and acts of violence in the wake of the health care reform bill passing. The bastards. How dare the Democrats make public the fact that they are being terrorized. If right-wingers are being unduly violent and bullying, Democrats should just man up and take it quietly. Mentioning them at all is equivalent to using them as a “political weapon,” a phrase Cantor repeatedly used.

Cantor demonstrated this by mentioning a recent “threat” made against him:

Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I’ve received threatening e-mails. But I will not release them, because I believe such actions will only encourage more to be sent.

Wow. OK, a bullet was fired at his office. That’s equal to what the Democrats have suffered, so of course if he’s not using the fact that liberal extremists are firing weapons at his premises, then Democrats should follow his sterling lead, right?

Except that the bullet wasn’t fired “at” his office. It was fired randomly up into the air from a distant location, and by chance happened to strike his window from the sky.

Oooohhh. Scary. Those damned liberals extremists, firing guns up into the air from distant parts of the city until the bullets randomly hit Republican campaign offices. Yes sirree, that’s about as direct a threat as you can get. And I am sure that the emails Cantor will not release are just as legitimate.

The threats that Democrats have been getting include direct, immediate threats to shoot and kill their children, coming from an extremist element that is well-armed and eminently willing to use those weapons, from whose number have come people like the one who killed the doctor in his church in Kansas, or the man who shot three police officers in Pittsburgh. The acts of violence were numerous and direct, the threats were far more volatile than the norm and had infinitely more potential to be carried out than what Cantor said he received himself.

For Cantor to use a random bullet falling and generic hate email and say that this is somehow in any way equivalent to what Democrats have been subjected to this week is reprehensible, and Cantor should be ashamed. Of course, he would not be.

This is not your usual level of background threats and violence, nor is it isolated, nor is it bound to decrease over time. It is escalating, and not a little because of the wildly hysterical rhetoric coming from people like Cantor himself.

It should also be noted that (a) Cantor, while “not condon[ing] violence,” did not condemn the threats or acts of violence either, and (b) he did condemn the Democrats for complaining and essentially blamed the Democrats for future acts of violence, saying that they were encouraging it. Which is BS, of course; making such things public will bring about public censure and harm the opposition’s cause, thus providing far more impetus to reduce the violent acts. But instead of trying to calm things down, Cantor instead only continued to use inflammatory rhetoric while at the same time sending the message to the instigators of the violence that what they are doing is just business-as-usual, and that the Democrats actually deserved it. In short, Cantor was the one “fanning the flames.”

That said, Cantor should take more care in choosing his examples; I have noted that Republican politicians often do this, using bogus illustrations to make their points. This reminds me of the time Dan Quayle was on the campaign trail in 1992, and the Bush administration was criticized for the poor job market–not just the lack of jobs, but also the decreasing quality of available jobs. He actually stopped his motorcade and pulled the media caravan over so he could show them a “help wanted” sign that he had spotted from his limo. The sign, he said, showed that there were in fact jobs out there to be had, and the economy was looking up. When reporters asked the establishment–a Burger King franchise–displaying the “Now Hiring” sign, they found that the job in question was a part-time, minimum wage job.