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Michelle Malkin's latest column wants to turn the deaths of police officers around the country -- spurred by the recent horror in Lakewood, WA -- into a chance to blame liberals for the deaths.

The Left has a popular mantra: “Stop the hate.” Why don’t they start applying it to the men and women who protect and serve?

She listed some officers killed in a couple of different incidents involving career criminals and a bizarre recent case here in Seattle.

Well, I've got a few other officers here she seemed to have forgotten about:

Pittsburgh officers Eric Kelly, Paul Sciullo III and Stephen Mayhle, gunned down by budding neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski, because he believed the officers were part of a nefarious plan to take citizens' guns away.

Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot down by extremist nutcase James von Brunn at the Holocaust Museum.

Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies Burt Lopez and Warren "Skip" York, gunned down by right-wing nutcase Joshua Cartwright, who believed right-wing propaganda that President Obama was going to take his guns away.

Later in her column, Malkin asks:

From where does the deadened and deadly callousness toward the thin blue line come?

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it comes from conservatives like Michelle Malkin, who shriek and holler when mean "liberals" at the Department of Homeland Security issue an important bulletin to law-enforcement officers warning them of the threat posed by right-wing extremists to their health and well-being, crying that in doing so they're just "smearing conservatives."

Even though, as we pointed out, the report was an important heads up about the Richard Poplawskis out there:

The Department of Homeland Security more than likely couldn't give a rat's patoot about today's right-wing Tea Tantrums, because they're mostly exercises in futility and stupidity anyway.

But I'll tell you who they do care about: the people in uniform who go out every day and put their lives on the line to keep you and I and our families and neighborhoods safe -- that is, the men and women in law enforcement. People like those three officers in Pittsburgh, who had no reason to suspect a killer was about to ambush them.

A recent study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism lays out in painful detail the very real threat that right-wing extremists pose to people in law enforcement:

Research led by Dr. Joshua D. Freilich (John Jay College, CUNY) and Dr. Steven Chermak (Michigan State University) and funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has revealed a violent history of fatal attacks against law enforcement officers in the United States by individuals who adhere to far-right ideology.

* In the United States, 42 law enforcement officers have been killed in 32 incidents in which at least one of the suspects was a far-rightist since 1990.

* 94% of these incidents involved local or state law enforcement. Only two events—high-profile attacks at Ruby Ridge and at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—involved federal agents. Much more common are events like the tragic Pittsburgh triple slayings.

* Attacks on police by far-rightists tend to occur during routine law enforcement activities. 34% of the officers killed by far-rightists were slain during a traffic stop, and a number of law enforcement officers have been killed while responding to calls for service similar to the domestic violence call that precipitated the Pittsburgh murders.

* Firearms were the most common type of weapon used during these fatal anti-police attacks. 88% of the incidents involved guns, while only 6% involved explosives and 6% involved knives. 81% of the victims were killed by guns.

* Only 12% of the suspects in these attacks were members of formal groups with far-right ideologies. The vast majority—like Poplawski—acted alone. This greatly complicates law-enforcement efforts to anticipate which individuals might pose a threat to police officers.

* Beyond these law enforcement murders, far-right violence presents a broader threat to national security and American citizens. Since 1990, far-rightists have been linked to more than 275 homicide incidents in 36 states. These crimes have resulted in the more than 530 fatalities, including the 168 victims murdered by Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The vast majority of these suspects are white and male, with almost 70% being 30 years old or younger.

Back then, Michelle couldn't be bothered to express even a scintilla of concern about the safety of law-enforcement officers:

This is where I wonder about the grotesquely skewed priorities of the conservative movement and its leading pundits. Because all the yammering has been fearmongering about the DHS potentially targeting ordinary conservatives -- especially VETERANS!!!! -- when in fact there is not a scintilla of evidence they have done so or are considering it.

Yet in the meantime, as we just pointed out, these right-wing extremists who are the subject and the raison d'etre of this bulletin are also known lethal threats for the men and women who work in law enforcement ...

So while the folks at Faux News fearmonger for the sake of yet-unharmed veterans and conservatives, they're completely turning their backs on the interests of the men and women who risk their lives each day serving as law-enforcement officers.

Yeah, well, that was then. This opportunity is now. Even if it means connecting Obama to the Oakland cop killings through Van Jones, just because he was a black nationalist from Oakland ... it's all about Michelle's agenda. Dead cops just make handy props for it.

We know this because on her next post, she argues that funding for public safety and health functions -- like, you know, police -- is the same thing as funding toxic assets:

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[Note: My cohort at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has been nearly as preoccupied the past couple of weeks in dealing with media requests to discuss the recent spate of domestic terrorism now washing up on our shores. She posted her thoughts about it yesterday, and it was so good, I had to pass it along to our readers here. -- DN]

By Sara Robinson

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers, and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through:

1. These are just "lone wolf" psychos who are acting alone. You can't hold anybody else responsible for what crazy people decide to do.

True and false. But mostly false.

It's true that every one of the nine right-wing terrorists who've made the news since January 20 had a history of mental illness, domestic violence, and/or drug abuse. Several were veterans who were having a really hard time adjusting to civilian life. None of these people could reasonably be considered sane; and, for whatever twisted reasons, they made a personal choice to do what they did.

But it's not true that they were acting alone. People who are dealing with these kinds of demons are often drawn into movements that offer a strong narrative that helps them make sense of a world that never seems to add up right for them. They're usually drawn into organizations like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen that are nominally non-violent; but which also indoctrinate them into a worldview that justifies and motivates people to commit terrorist acts. They come to believe that they must do this to save the world, to serve God, and to be the heroes they desperately want to be.

They're already walking sticks of dynamite. But it takes the heat of that apocalyptic, dualistic, eliminationist, pro-violence narrative to light their fuses and make them explode.

Unfortunately, these groups also make it easy to take that final step over the line, because they often have close ties to other more secretive groups that do advocate and plan terrorist violence as a solution. Operation Rescue teaches that killing abortion doctors is justfiable homicide; and then feeds its most extreme members into the Army of God. The Aryan Nations and several other white nationalist groups supplied the nine members of The Order, a racist terrorist group that killed two people (including left-wing talker Alan Berg) and stole over $4 million during a nine-month spree in 1984. Al Qaeda got many of its recruits from the nominally non-violent (but still radical) Hizb al-Tahrir. Of course, when violence actually occurs, these groups always denounce it -- but they also usually have a very good idea of who was involved, because they've been hanging around with the perpetrators for quite a while themselves.

One of the things the public is finally beginning to understand is that the "lone wolf" story has never been accurate, because these guys are never really alone in the world. Every one of them was well-marinated in large, long-established subcultures that put them up to terrorism, and promised to make heroes out of them if they succeeded.

2. These terrorists are really left-wingers, not right-wingers. Because everybody knows that fascism is a phenomenon that only occurs on the left.

False does not even begin to cover the absurdity of this claim.

Fascism has always been a phenomenon of the right. Every postwar academic scholar of fascism -- Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Umberto Eco, and onward -- has been emphatically clear about this. Mussolini admitted as much. It's part of the very definition of the word.

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Last night, Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg tried an exercise similar to Rush Limbaugh's, in which they tried to construct a plausible argument that James von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter, was actually a "figure of the left."

They ran through the same list: He hated Bush, he hated "neocons," may have targeted the neocon Weekly Standard too, and most of all, he hated Jews.

Somehow omitted: He also hated black people, and he especially hated Obama because he believed he was controlled by Jews. (See the note he left behind.) He also hated the Federal Reserve, taxes, the United Nations, the federal government generically, admired Hitler, urged the reciminalization of miscegenation laws, and promoted The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion as fact. He worked at one time for Willis Carto's right-wing publishing house, Noontide Press, and used to sell copies of Carto's house organ The Spotlight.

As Mark Potok put it to Keith Olbermann:

You know, the idea, though, that somehow, you know, this shooting at the Holocaust Museum was in any remote way an artifact of the left or Obama's fault somehow, you know—I mean, it's vile beyond words and just has no basis at all in fact of any kind.

Yep. "Vile beyond words" just about covers it. Especially when it comes to Jonah Goldberg.

Here's how he put it at NRO:

Never mind that von Brunn isn’t a member of the far right.

That is, of course, flatly, demonstrably and outrageously false. Or is Goldberg now trying to cast Willis Carto as a "man of the Left"?

Is there anyone more congenitally dishonest than Jonah Goldberg working in the right-wing media? Deeply, appallingly dishonest?

I mean, I really think Glenn Beck believes the amazingly dumb stuff that comes pouring out of his mouth. Bill O'Reilly is no doubt deeply cynical, but I think his ego keeps him from admitting to himself that he is in fact a bullying and manipulative propagandist. The rest of them -- Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin -- at some level actually really believe the garbage they emit.

Goldberg, on the other hand, comes across as someone who at a basic level realizes he's just playing semantics games as a way to manipulate the debate. Deeply cynical, in other words. Because you can't help read his book, Liberal Fascism without recognizing the profound dishonesty of the entire enterprise -- which is, namely, to declare that "fascism is a phenomenon of the Left". It's not as morally appalling as Holocaust denial, but it's close.

Because anyone with any respect for history, and especially the importance of the its details, and who has studied in any serious sense the historical events surrounding the rise of fascism in the 1918-30 period knows just how profoundly wrong, how meaningfully false, Goldberg's claim is.

Goldberg recently published a length self-defense of his book, upon its paperback publication, in National Review. I wrote a long exegesis on it for Orcinus. You can go here to read it. It's titled: "Fascism is not liberal: The profound dishonesty of Jonah Goldberg".

And you can see the same gobsmackingly deep dishonesty on full display in this exchange.

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We're learning more and more about the man who walked into the Holocaust Museum in D.C. this morning and opened fire on a guard.

First, more personal details from MSNBC:

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as James Wenneker von Brunn, 88, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, NBC News reported. NBC said he may have had connections to hate groups or anti-government groups.

... Von Brunn is believed to have had contact with law enforcement in the past, according to NBC. A D.C. Superior Court jury convicted a man by the same name in 1983 of attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board.

The case involved a 1981 incident in which police arrested Von Brunn at the board's headquarters carrying several weapons. He was convicted and later released from federal prison in 1989, records show.

What this tells us, of course, is that he was "sovereign citizen" -- just like Dr. George Tiller's assassin. If he was attempting a "citizen's arrest" of Alan Greenspan as far back as 1981, that almost certainly means he was an adherent of Posse Comitatus ideology, and very likely Christian Identity as well.

VonBrunn had a Website (now unavailable) where he promoted his online book, "Kill the Best Gentiles". Here's a screen grab:

Here's how he described his 1981 arrest:

In 1981 von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore."

I contemplated putting up the first six chapters of his book so people could see how far gone this guy is, but it's too vile. Here's a sample of his short work:

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