I REMEMBER WHEN TRYING TO "UNDERSTAND" TERRORISTS WAS TREASON

You probably already know about this ... and once again we learn that everything's OK if you're a Republican:

... a man flew a plane into a Texas federal building in an apparent domestic terrorist attack....

Newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appeared on Fox's Neil Cavuto and ... quickly shrugged off the attack....

BROWN: Well It's certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things effecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better....

Remember Karl Rove, in a 2005 speech, saying that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers"? Sounds as if Brown saw the savagery of this attack and wanted to offer therapy and understanding for any other taxpayer who's feeling a murderous rage similar to Stack's.

And Rove's line of argument actually has a long history on the right. From the "juvenile delinquent" '50s through the Nixon '60s to the Reagan '80s and Giuliani '90s, a standard right-wing critique of liberals was that they were overly concerned with finding the underlying reasons for crime -- in the stereotype, liberals said crime was all society's fault. The more sensible approach, right-wingers told us, was to say that the problem with crime was criminals, and you should just lock 'em all up. Apparently Scott Brown's reaction to Joseph Stack is to ask whether his crime is mostly society's fault.

As the GOP and the right become more and more extreme, I wonder if we're going to see more and more apologies by prominent right-wingers for anti-government pathology.

(And yes, I know I was trying to "understand" Stack yesterday. There's reason to do that -- but he did cross tyhe line into sociopathic behavior. What he did was born of craziness, I think, but it was also a crime. It wasn't a valid or reasonable response to what was happening in his life.)