The fire next time? Probably lit at home.

Nancy Pelosi drew arched eyebrows and a fair number of sneers when she worried out loud that overheated rhetoric from the Right could lead to violence. Here’s coverage from The Hill.

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric was very frightening and it created a climate in which violence took place,” Pelosi said.

“And so I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that some of the people — the ears it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume,” the speaker cautioned.

Republicans — who also grimaced at a government report earlier in the year warning of an increased threat of home-grown extremism — dismissed the anxieties as political theater.
Here’s the UPI’s treatment of the conservative response:

House GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia told Politico he thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “is in another world” if she believes the demonstrations could lead to violence.

But a growing number of independent (and even conservative) sources are echoing Pelosi’s fear.
In today’s Politico, reporter Eamon Javers reports that she’s “right to fear violence.”

But it’s not just Pelosi who is worried. In interviews with POLITICO, five former Secret Service, FBI and CIA officers say that they, too, are concerned that today’s climate of supercharged political vitriol could lead to violence.

Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough also weighed in, arguing that right-wing pundit Glenn Beck (and conservatives who fly under Beck’s flag) will be culpable if violence occurs. (See the video here.)

You need to call out this kind of hatred, because it always blows up in your face…You cannot preach hatred…

I want to repeat this again because I wonder where Republicans are and where conservatives are…but when you preach this kind of hatred and say that an African American people hates white people you are playing with fire and bad things can happen.

And if they do happen, not only is Glenn Beck responsible, but conservatives who don’t call Glenn Beck out are responsible.

I want to say explicitly: A passingly small percentage of critics of Barack Obama and the Democrats are dangerous or racist.

Obviously, 99.999% are not.

They have legitimate policy disagreements and valid differences in values and beliefs.

If opponents of the current President and congressional leadership can muster the votes to boot the Democrats out of office, fine and good.

But as we’ve seen in the Muslim community, rhetoric matters. A culture that tolerates extremism in its midst is morally culpable when that extremism erupts into violence.

So what do you think? Is Scarborough right? Do the national security experts have a good reason to be concerned?

Does the Republican Party need to do more to distance itself from this kind of language?

If not, why not? Comments welcome below…