Guilty conscience? You guys remind me of the poor defense attorney tasked with defending the indefensible. It is not a specific single thing, it is an atmosphere of anti-government and anti Obama that is the cause of so much renewed violence and hatred of government. You libertarians are even worse than conservatives when it comes to this nonsense. You live in a fantasyland in which because you are doing OK everything is fine with the world - with no consideration of the whys or the structure that supports you.
"As the president said in Tucson, we lack not just civil discourse, but honest discourse. Much of last week’s televised bloviation was dishonest, dedicated to the pious, feel-good sentiment that both sides are equally culpable for the rage of the past two years. To construct this false equivalency, every left-leaning Web site and Democratic politician’s record was dutifully culled for incendiary invective. If that’s the standard, then both sides are equally at fault — rhetoric can indeed be as violent on the left as on the right.
But that sidesteps the issue. This isnÂ’t about angry blog posts or verbal fisticuffs. Since ObamaÂ’s ascension, weÂ’ve seen repeated incidents of political violence. Just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last yearÂ’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Beck." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16rich.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=frank rich&st=Search
"The anti-tax arguments of conservatives and libertarians also rely heavily on denying the connection between the people and their government. They do not want us to see public money as “our” money being spent for “our” benefit. Grover Norquist, for instance, rankles when people refer to the government as “we.” When the interviewer Terry Gross pointed out to him that “The Bush tax cuts would cost us about $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and we're going to be hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.” He responded by saying: “Well, there's a very interesting use of the word 'we.' Every time you use the word 'we,' you meant the government, and I tend to use the word 'we' to mean the American people and to speak of the government as the government.” "
Government is Good - Taxes are Good
"That is why they equate Sean Hannity with Keith Olbermann. That is why most celebrate an ever loosening of gun control laws; that is why they act as if “entitlement” programs are socialistic; that is why they campaign militantly against financial and corporate regulation in the name of a pure market that has never existed anywhere; that is why they speak in the name of a single, bellicose God for all Americans rather than a society of deep pluralism; that is why they resist unemployment insurance for the lower middle class; and that is why they push the filibuster envelope to the most extreme degree in the history of the country." <a href="http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2011/01/radical-right-extreme-right-and.html">Read article here.</a>