Threats are always unacceptable, and I never said anything less. Have you ever personally been threaten? I have. It’s scary. I am a highly principled person and anyone who reads my blog should understand that fact.

Obviously, you aren’t a conservative, because we’ve all been threatened and hated. Look at all of the pundits. Ann Coulter travels with bodyguards. Sean Hannity, Rush, O’Reilly, and others have actually had people trespass and threaten their families. Sarah Palin has had effigies of her hung up, and her former church burned down. Prominent celebrities have openly expressed their desire to see her “thrown down stairs” or raped. In the Tea Party Movie, FreedomWorks experiences a bomb scare.

The current political environment is sad, but how do you change it? Does it show the end of democracy? Not at all. Have you ever heard of the Gunpowder Plot? The IRA? Even during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there was a lot of domestic terrorist activity. Every age and political party has fragments that engage in it. Domestic terrorism sadly goes with most free countries and always has. It’s a risk of liberty, which is why an armed populace is the safest populace. Crazy people will always exist.

However, the media focus on this unfairly targets the Tea Parties does incite violence and encourage those fanatics. If serious incidents do occur, the media deserves much of the responsibility. The people who engage in those actions want attention. By glamorizing or victimizing as Van Hollen and Hoyer did this week, they encourage the fanatics.

We are reaching a tipping point here. I get it that America is divided. I get it that political rhetoric is increasingly overheated in order to get attention in a 24-hour news cycle. I even get the fact that change is hard, that it makes people uncomfortable.

But if democracy has reached the point where the tradition of majority rule encourages threats of violence and people throwing gasoline on a grassfire they themselves started, it is dangerous to the democratic tradition. Instead of trying to excuse and downplay threats of violence, it would be decent of you to condemn them. That’s what principled people do. Whether from the left or right, from liberals or conservatives or the lunatic fringe of either side, these threats are unacceptable. They fit the very definition of terrorism, which is people using violence or threats of violence to achieve poplitical ends.

If it has reached the point where domestic terrorism is embraced, encouraged or excused by either side, our grand democratic tradition has failed.