you can live by the gun or die by the bullet

For the Right, it's great to be a hard-ass, except when it isn't.

From PhoenixWoman at FireDogLake:

It's interesting to watch the obsession in the GOP/Media Complex with the Virginia Tech shooter's ethnicity. We go through this every time something like this happens.

Remember when the Murrah Building was blown up in Oklahoma City in 1995?

I do.

In the early hours and days after the blast, people like Rush Limbaugh and right-wing blowhards were a) convinced that evil Islamofascists did the deed, and b) were calling for them to be strung up.

But when it became apparent that the perps were white archconservative militia members, suddenly Rush and his buddies went all touchy-feely on us.

Suddenly — just as with Eric Rudolph, Vernon "David Koresh" Howell, the idiot who slammed his plane into the White House when Clinton was president, and a host of other right-wing and nutball terrorists such as the anthrax mailers who targeted Democratic Senators and the media, and the Noonday, Texas suitcase bombers — it became important to understand their motives. You know, the reasons they gave for doing what they did? So we could be compassionate towards them?

Indeed.

The Right picks strange issues to cozy up to. Cherry picking which terrorists to hate and which to revere (David Koresh, Randy Weaver), and which moralities to legislate, seem somehow similar.

More on that later.