YES, I'M THINKING RIGHT-WINGERS -- BUT MAYBE NOT THOSE RIGHT-WINGERS

It's hard to look at the discovery of an IED on the route of Spokane's Martin Luther King Day parade and not speculate that the terrorist culprits were right-wingers. But this is America -- it could just as easily be a bizarre attempt to impress, say, Miley Cyrus -- and even if the culprits turn out to be right-wing, I'm not going to leap to condemn the A-list wingers in our midst. As MSNBC's story notes,

The Spokane region and adjacent northern Idaho have had numerous incidents of anti-government and white supremacist activity during the past three decades.

The most visible was by Aryan Nations, whose leader Richard Butler gathered racists and anti-Semites at his compound for two decades....

In December, a man in Hayden, Idaho, built a snowman on his front lawn shaped like a member of the Ku Klux Klan holding a noose. The man knocked the pointy-headed snowman down after getting a visit from sheriff's deputies.

The culprits could be right-wingers who have nothing good to say about Palin, Beck, Bachmann, Limbaugh, et al. -- not because they find these A-listers too right-wing but because they find them not right-wing enough. I noticed this a couple of y ears ago when Glenn Beck was being named as a likely influence on the shooter of three police officers in Pittsburgh. The man charged with those shootings, Richard Poplawski, was, in fact, a regular poster at the neo-Nazi Stormfront site and Alex Jones's Infowars site. Poplawski posted a link at Stormfront to a video of Glenn Beck talking to Ron Paul about the (utterly insane) notion that FEMA has railcars with shackles poised to transport political prisoners to internment camps -- but the general consensus among the Stormfront folks was that Beck wimped out, because he expressed doubts about the truth of the story. (Beck was also denounced on the site as a tool of "the Juden" and the "ZOG" -- "Zionist Occupation Government," aka (in neo-Nazi-speak) the United States.

I'm not jumping to conclusions -- I'm just saying that the culprits here could be from that strain of the right. If so, don't assume they're Fox fans or Dittoheads. They may be even scarier.