For those people, it really doesn't matter if the Dems deliver or not. The only thing that will get through to them is if the left somehow convinces them that, in the event of an assassination or an armed uprising, we will kill them in large numbers, and keep killing them until order is restored. People like Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachman, and Glenn Beck need to be put on public notice that if one of their followers assassinates our president, they will not live to see sunset.

There, I said it.

I've been biting my tongue for the better part of the last year, but that's what I think is necessary, drawing on the lessons of my youth when I was involved in street fighting against neo-Nazi skinheads. When you are dealing with that kind of animal -- an ex-person who has voluntarily seceded from the human race -- the only thing they understand, much less respect, is domination by force.

How did the Nazis bring down the Weimar Republic? The same way their ilk eats away at democracies everywhere: by taking advantage of the civilized misconception that all speech and belief must be tolerated. Sadly, that's just not a sustainable model. At the end of the day, any democracy that doesn't want to eventually vote itself out of existence must recognize that toleration of intoleration is a self-defeating behavior. The post-war Germans learned this lesson, and they banned the Nazi party and its symbols and speech forever. If we don't want to learn that lesson the hard way like the Germans did, we need to be prepared to move against the rapidly degenerating GOP as soon as they step over the line into direct action using the full power of the state.

Tolerating advocates of assassinations and coups d'etat is not a concession a free society needs to make; it is not one a free society can make for long if it wishes to remain a free society. We can either send such people to prison or to the gallows, or we can wait for them to do much worse to us.

Much of the American dream -- the original dream of freedom and equality, not the 1950's crap about owning a house -- was always a bunch of empty promises and ideals admired but never lived up to, grand and lofty gestures made by men who owned slaves and conducted genocide against the original owners of the land. But even so, we made progress, bit by bit, towards realizing those ideals and making the dream real. For all intents and purposes, that progress stopped with the right-wing violence and assassinations of the 1960's.

Today, we are approaching the same kind of real progress that triggered the fascist backlash of the late 1960's. They mean to finish us this time. I say that the time has come for us to finish them, to stop tolerating the implacable internal enemies of the original American dream, to defeat them, if necessary by force of arms, and certainly by force of law. We will not win this battle in Congress or the ballot box alone. The enemy must know that we will defend the American dream by any means necessary. They must know that we will not be cowed by their threats of violence, and that we are fully prepared to meet their force with an order of magnitude more force if necessary.

The alternative is to let the Rahm Emmanuels of the left continue their incremental retreat from the dream until the psychopaths of the neo-fascist right sense that their time has come and they turn our retreat into a rout.