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Keith Olbermann didn't parse any words during his Worst Persons segment on Countdown this Thursday and went after Sen. Tom Coburn for his eliminationist rhetoric where he said that “It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor." And then as John already noted, proceeded to attack President Obama as an affirmative action recipient and claimed the country was better off before we had Medicare in place.

Keith called for Coburn to resign and I agree with him. Not that he's going to care what anyone thinks since he's not running for reelection anyway.

OLBERMANN: But when he moved from health care and casual racism to the debt ceiling deal, Sen. Coburn took a step down from the simply mean spirited, out of touch, whiny elitism which has marked his political career and moved towards ineligibility for the office which he holds.

He called his colleagues “cowards” and then added “It's just a good thing I can't pack a gun on the Senate floor.”

Yes it is, but apparently that's insufficient protection for the rest of us. For a sitting U.S. Senator to say in public that he even daydreams or jokes about the prospect of shooting other Senators is not just to ignore the supposed lessons of the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims of Tuscon. It is not just to ignore the years before the Civil War when Congressman Preston Brooks of Georgia went up to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate chamber and beat him into unconsciousness with a cane and kept him out of office for a year.

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Mo Brooks, my congressional representative, got special attention from Chris Matthews last night. He's not the first Alabama politician to use eliminationist rhetoric regarding the undocumented, or the worst. But this is not the representation we need in Alabama's 5th congressional district:

Brooks had a little to say about immigration at the town hall I attended a couple of weeks ago. What struck me at the time was the tone of doom he had, which was in tune with the general tone of the affair. (Click here to watch the whole thing; I dare you). Illegal aliens are out for your job and your life -- be afraid, very afraid! Because no one ever gets murdered or killed in a car wreck with an American citizen.

Tourists leaving for Egypt are warned that if they are in a car accident, they should leave the scene as soon as possible so they don't get blamed for the accident -- on the supposition that if they had not been visiting Egypt, the accident would not have happened. That is exactly the logic Mo Brooks is using. He uses anecdotal, not empirical, evidence to paint undocumented immigrants as especially violent and prone to dangerous behavior. It's an old meme, one used on people of color in times past. It's ugly. It's also completely false. Someone should put a bullet in the brainpan of this zombie idea.

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Apparently Chris Matthews doesn't follow any of Media Matters reporting or what David Neiwert and others have been documenting here at Crooks and Liars for some time now since he appeared to be completely unaware that there have been numerous assassination attempts where the perpetrators were fans of Glenn Beck.

Heaven forbid that might entail some time... you know... reading and researching a bit instead of talking over his guests or repeating the latest Villager common wisdom talking points of the day.

During a discussion about Sarah Palin's latest attempt to feign victim-hood to deflect criticism of her crosshairs map, Media Matters' David Brock pointed out to Matthews that yes, words do sometimes have real world consequences when it comes to riling up mentally unstable people who take to heart the type of eliminationist rhetoric we've seen from the likes of Palin and others, and in these cases, Glenn Beck.

BROCK: But this is not street theater, as you know.

Glenn Beck himself has been responsible for three thwarted assassination attempts this year. And Sarah Palin --

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: How is he responsible for them?

BROCK: Well, you want to know what they are?

MATTHEWS: You said it.

BROCK: Sure.

So, he burned Nancy Pelosi in effigy on his set. He tried to poison her with a chalice. OK. Some three weeks later, somebody tried to firebomb Nancy Pelosi`s house. That guy`s mother went on television and said he gets all his ideas from FOX News.

Do you know about Senator Patty Murray and the death threat that she got?

MATTHEWS: No. Go ahead.

BROCK: OK. It`s recorded. The guy says after the health care vote, he says, you have a target on your back and I can accomplish what I want to accomplish with one bullet.

He`s tried, convicted, and in the sentencing phase, his cousin writes in for leniency and she describes in a very chilling memo -- it`s on our Web site -- that he was slowly drawn into Glenn Beck`s world. And she portrays the guy, the attempted assassin, Charlie Wilson, as a victim of Beck.

And, number three, which you probably do know about, this liberal foundation in San Francisco was targeted by a gunman, Byron Williams, in June. The shooter gave jailhouse interviews -- and we published them -- and he says Glenn Beck is a schoolteacher on television and points to specific episodes of the Glenn Becks show that inspired him to do it.

MATTHEWS: Oh, God.

Maybe someone can ask Chris Matthews or his staff to spend a little time taking a look at Media Matters site before he has another one of their contributors on as a guest again.

Full transcript here.

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Looks like someone has had quite enough of Sarah Palin and her eliminationist rhetoric:

Shooting prompts legislation to protect lawmakers, officials:

Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pennsylvania, said he will introduce legislation making it a federal crime for a person to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a Member of Congress or federal official.

Brady's decision to offer the legislation comes less than 24 hours after a gunman attempted to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, in a shooting that claimed the lives of a federal judge, and a nine year-old girl, among others.

"The president is a federal official," Brady said in a telephone interview with CNN. "You can't do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator or federal judge.

"This is not a wake up call, this is major alarms going off," he said.

Brady is particularly incensed over a web posting by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin during the 2010 election in which she targeted 20 House Democrats, including Giffords for political defeat. The posting showed a map of the United States with the 20 Democratic congressional districts identified by gun sights.

"You can't put bulls eyes or crosshairs on a United States congressman or a federal official," Brady said. "I understand this web site that had it on there is no longer in existence. Someone is feeling a little guilty."

But a Palin aide Saturday denied the web posting from the 2010 congressional campaign was designed to incite violence. Rebecca Mansour told conservative host Tammy Bruce that it was a political tool and noted it should have been removed after the November election.

Brady said he is hearing that the spouses of some of his congressional colleagues, specifically the newly elected members, are terrified and questioning whether they should remain in Congress. Upon hearing the news of the shooting Saturday, some spouses attending a freshman retreat in West Virginia, were "taking their children out of the daycare," Brady said he was told.

"The spouses are in an uproar," he said. "They are panicking."

Brady said it is now time to put an end to the hyper-charged language.

Well, we'll see if Republicans go along with it, and what's in the legislation, but I could see something like this being abused pretty easily, depending on the language in the bill.

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We had to know this was coming, didn't we? Let the false equivalencies begin:

LEMON: Dana, before the break, I talked to you about the mood and the tone in Washington and politics these days. We know it's out there. We've seen what's been happening on social media, some people blaming, you know, certain members, certain elected and non-elected members. We don't know the motivation yet but does this send some sort of signal to us and to our law makers about how we view politics and tone?

BASH: Well, you're absolutely right, we don't know the motivation but regardless something like this tends to be... tends to be a wake up call and we've already heard from some members of Congress who have been on our air earlier today saying that they do hope that this is a wake up call, a wake up call for both parties to try to get out... get the word out their to their supporters, to constituents, to maybe even the blogosphere, which is not easy, to tone it down a little bit.

You know we actually got a statement from John McCain, the senior Senator from Gabby Giffords' home state of Arizona, who obviously didn't point the finger that way but was very, very strong and I think maybe indicative of what we're talking about. He said “Whoever did this, whatever reason they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race” and he said “They deserve and will deserve the contempt of all decent people and the strongest punishment of the law.”

When you're hearing a Republican like John McCain say that and we're hearing John Boehner and other Republicans say that, it's hard to imagine that there isn't going to be a coming together of some sort of both the parties in Congress after this.

If anyone needs to be told to tone down their rhetoric, it's John McCain and his former running mate, Sarah Palin. Sorry Dana, but “both sides” don't have a 24/7 hate television network and hate radio spreading lies and whipping up the fear and anger in their audience week after week. And there aren't any Democratic politicians out there doing what Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and company have done with repeating eliminationist rhetoric at every opportunity.

No one does know what this man's motivation was in this shooting yet, but when it comes to the politicians who obviously have little concern if this type of tragedy could end up being the result of their rhetoric, there's just one side that needs to get that message, and it's the Republicans and their enablers on Fox and right-wing hate radio. We don't have any Democratic members of Congress out there telling their constituents to "reload' or that we need investigations looking into whether they're anti-American or not.

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WTF is Michael Steele talking about here? The Republicans just can't stop themselves from using this sort of eliminationist rhetoric can they? When asked about the Health Care Summit and how he thought it went, Michael Steele throws in some Sarah Palin rhetoric for no good reason I can think of other than some red meat for their base with his prediction for election losses. And of course Steele also doesn't think the President spent enough time listening to the petulant children in the room while they lied and repeated Republican talking points ad nauseum. Steele continues to peddle the lie that if Democrats just adopted more Republican ideas into the health care bill than they did already, Republicans might work with them.

Sorry Michael, but even if the Democrats adopted a bill that was made up of nothing but Republican ideas I think they still would not vote for it. They’ve already proven that by voting against things they championed for in the past and now pretend they didn’t time and time again. The media however continues to let them get away with the hypocrisy. I want to see Steele come on Maddow’s show and try to peddle this same crap. Won’t ever happen since she’d actually call him out for his lies unlike Blitzer.

And honestly as bad as some parts of the health care bill are, does Steele honestly think that it's going to be good for Republicans if they do manage to roll it back once and if it becomes law? People thought that Romney care was awful, but it seems the people in Massachusetts are generally happy with it if the polling done on Scott Brown's election is accurate. And I'd just add if they did try to roll parts of it back, it sure as hell would not be the bad parts. These guys have got nothing to offer that helps every day Americans instead of corporations. Nothing.

Transcript via CNN.

BLITZER: Let's get to Michael Steele right now. He's the chairman of the Republican Party. Michael Steele, thanks very much for coming in.

STEELE: Hey, Wolf. Great to be with you, man.

BLITZER: Do you just assume that when all the dust settles in the coming weeks, the Democrats are going to have the up or down vote in the House and the Senate that they need to get healthcare reform passed?

STEELE: I really don't know, right off the top but I would suspect that wherever they are, it's not going to be in a good place. I mean, you had a lot of folks going into yesterday's event, if you will, calling it a dog and pony show for the president and his democrats. Well, I took a slightly different tack on that, a different point of view on it.

For me, just the whole approach of this thing represented more of a death panel for Obama-care. You know, if that wasn't enough, when you come out of this thing and you're looking at the reconciliation fight that may loom ahead of us, it certainly will have represented a death panel for the Democrats this fall.

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Glenn Beck with a bit more of his revisionist history at CPAC 2010 and red meat for the audience there where everything that Ronald Reagan did spread magic fairy dust on the country and the only reason anything is wrong with America is because the evil dirty f%#king hippie progressives are a cancer that is destroying the country.

Pretty much more of his same schtick he's been doing on his show on Fox, but for a live audience. If this sounds familiar it's because he said the same thing back in June -- Glenn Beck: 'The progressive movement ... is the cancer' destroying the country:

One of the identifying signs of eliminationist rhetoric, some of you may recall, is that it compares its target bloc of people to a disease (and the deadlier the better).

Last night, Glenn Beck did just that for his national audience on Fox News:

Beck: All right, now, if all of this sounds like a government out of control, go back to the progressive movement. It is not what our founders of this country intended. One hundred years of this movement, and the government growing while our rights are shrinking. I've been saying now for awhile, and it really has clicked in my mind, um, that it is the progressive movement, it is the cancer that is inside both parties. It's why you don't feel like there is a choice. It's why John McCain and Barack Obama, you're going, 'You gotta be kidding me, right?'

Yeah, whoda thunk? John McCain was secretly a progressive this whole time!

And he repeated this same nonsense on Bill-O's show as a little preview to his speech at CPAC -- Beck previews CPAC speech: "There is a disease in the republic, and it is the progressive movement". If Glenn Beck is the future of the Republican Party this sort of eliminationist rhetoric should make all of us fearful for the future of our country. The clowns who drove it into the ditch are calling for civil war if they're not allowed to finish the job, led by their clown in chief, Glenn Beck.

John Amato:

If you live in LA then please join me and a host of bloggers to hear David Neiwert talk about his explosive new book (and a timely one I might add) The Eliminationists: How The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

There are rare moments in time when an author is in sync with the political surroundings that in habits our culture, but Neiwert is right on the mark.

As Digby states:

There times when a writer publishes a book at exactly the right moment and this is one of them. With violent mainstream rhetoric hitting peaks we haven't seen in nearly 40 years, the village is struggling to comprehend where it's all coming from and what it means. They haven't been paying attention. And because of that there are many people out in the country who are shocked by it too.

Here's the info:

Date: Tuesday, September 1st

Time: There will be a reception at 6 pm. The program will begin promptly at 6:30 pm.

Note: Please be aware that they are filming this event so the studio door will be shut at 6:30 pm sharp.

Location: 10536 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232

Please enter through the gate behind the building.

RSVP: Please RSVP by emailing ewagner-at -bravenewfoundation.org

Seating is very limited, so we will be taking a small number of RSVPs.

Parking: There is free parking on the streets on either side of our building.

Please do not park in the parking spots behind the building as they are reserved.

Well worth a half hour or so of your time if you've got it to spend.

I'll be hosting it and leading the Q&A section so be there or be square.

Heather: If you're not in LA for the BNF event---here's our own David Neiwert on I believe Jon Elliot's show talking about the theme of his new book, The Eliminationists.

Dave N.: A brief promotional plug. I'll be in California this week, putting in an invitational appearance at Brave New Films in Culver City on Tuesday. I'll also be in the Bay Area on Thursday, Sept. 3, speaking at 7:30 p.m. at Books Inc. in Mountain View. If you live in the area, hope to see you there.