The bricks have been thrown, the death threats made. At some point, the hate speech was bound to produce hateful acts.

The final vote on health care reform was still echoing in the halls of Congress when the violence started. Bricks were thrown through the windows of Democratic offices, congressmen and their families received death threats, a gas line was cut at a house mistaken for a Democratic congressman’s home. And the social media was inundated with calls for the President’s assassination. The Tea Partys have become a witch's brew of fear, anger, hatred and violence. Can we stop the madness now, please?

But, you insist, we are just concerned citizens – the people shouting the violent rhetoric and doing the violent acts are just the lunatic fringe. They are not us. House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement distancing himself from the violence – after having called Ohio Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus a “dead man” for supporting the reform. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele urged voters to send Nancy Pelosi to “the firing line.” When teabaggers marched on Washington, protesting with signs and rhetoric proclaiming violence and righteous bigotry, conservative representatives including Michelle Bachmann (MN), Jean Schmidt (OH) and Louie Gohmert (TX) stood on the Capitol balcony to applaud and encourage them.

You can insist all you want that these people are not you. But when you participate in a “movement” whose essential character is anger and whose primary mode of discourse is extremist rhetoric and intimidation, they are you. Your protests of innocence are simply not credible. Your actions betray your guilt.

You claim to be a grassroots movement opposing big government. But this is a democracy – you are the government. If, as you say, your objection is to the control of government by big faceless corporations (banks and financial institutions, insurance companies, oil and gas companies), why do you keep voting for Republicans, the party of big businesses? You can vote out a bad congressman every two years, an idiot governor every four years and a corrupt senator every six years. When you, time after time, reelect people who consistently vote for corporate interests over your interests (while pretending to throw you a bone on abortion and gun ownership), you have no credibility.

You claim to be stalwart patriots defending the Constitution, fighting government tyranny with its insidious plan to take away your freedoms. Yet because you stood conspicuously silent while the Bush administration curtailed your freedom of speech, spied on you, invaded your privacy, eviscerated the principle of habeas corpus and fundamentally emasculated the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th ammendments of the Bill of Rights, you have no credibility.

You claim to oppose health care reform because it will increase the deficit and burden your children with higher taxes. But the only nonpartisan (read: unbiased) organization capable of making a reasonable analysis of the budget consequences of the reform bill states that it will actually reduce the deficit somewhat over the first 10 years and significantly over the following 10 years. Meanwhile, you stood silent while the Bush administration cut taxes for the wealthy, mired us in two costly foreign wars with attendant nation building, and turned a budget surplus into the largest deficit in the nation’s history. (You also persist in idolizing Ronald Reagan, who tripled the national debt during his Presidency.) You have no credibility.

And when you then shout absolute bunk about imaginary “death panels” and the horror of “socialism,” or you rail against the terrifying notion that a government worker might “ration” your health care while you meekly acquiesce to a mid-level insurance employee doing precisely that, a person whose job requires that he maximize company profits by minimizing your health care, then you lack credibility.

You claim to oppose a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion because you are deeply religious, with a profound love and respect for human life. But when you also oppose birth control and sex education that is based on the real world, and resent using your taxes for safety-net programs that help poor single mothers and their children, and insist on the dealth penalty even for the mentally impaired, then you have no credibility. And when, in your rallies against health care reform, you verbally abuse sick people and mock children who have lost their parents because they lacked medical care, then you have no credibility and you cannot, cannot, cannot claim to be thoughtful, caring or respectful of human life.

No one would question your right to your religious beliefs. But when you discount 2,000 years of scientific advancement and rational understanding and insist that science education must be informed by theology; when you believe, despite overwhelming scientific evidence and simple common sense, that humans lived with dinosaurs and the earth is less than 10,000 years old; and when you trust oil and coal industry shills and their paid-for politicians over the world’s most reputable climate scientists, then you have no credibility.

You claim to despise President Obama and the Democrats in Congress because they have raised your taxes (or are going to). But Obama cut taxes for every one of you, including small businesses, and has advocated raising taxes only on the very wealthy – basically the owners and managers of the large corporations you claim to hate – and then only to the same level that existed before Bush’s “temporary” tax cuts, the cuts that were so instrumental in turning the Clinton surplus into the Bush deficit.

You claim that you are not racist and your movement is not racist. But when you make up things to hate about the President – he wasn’t really born in America, he’s a muslim terrorist, his speech to school children is indoctrination and a “massive abuse of government power” – and when you march next to Klansmen, the John Birch Society, the Aryan Nations and other white supremecist groups shouting “nigger” and waving signs depicting the President as a mud- and paint-smeared African with a bone in his nose, you have no credibility.

A typical teabagger website

When you characterize the President as – simultaneously – a fascist, a nazi, an islamoterrorist, a communist and the antichrist, you show a complete ignorance of what the words even mean. And when you blithely drag the term “socialism” through the mud while enjoying the freedoms and benefits provided by your national defense, public education, police and fire protection, social security and medicare, public libraries, the postal system, subsidized roads and the interstate highway system, homeland security, the food and drug administration, state and national parks, air traffic control, environmental health protection and hazardous waste cleanups, the border patrol, and the federal election commision that guarantees your right to vote – then you have no credibility.

And when you insist that you are not the violent, lunatic fringe, but stand among people carrying guns, and signs picturing guns, and statements about watering the tree of liberty with blood and how conservatives need to “reload” and “target” Democrats, then you have no credibility.

At some point all your hate speech was bound to produce hateful acts. The bricks have now been thrown and the death threats are very real. We already had the teabag version of a suicide airplane attack on the hated IRS, taking with it an innocent American life. What’s next? A congressman’s home burned down? A gun battle at an immigration reform rally? Or will the madness only end in the worst scenario imaginable, the murder of our so cavalierly vilified American President?

A tweet sent out immediately after the health care reform bill was passed.

Some 50 years ago our nation faced a wide range of difficult challenges, among them the distinct possibility of annihilation in a nuclear war. Then, as now, we had an energetic, charismatic young President pushing a progressive agenda, one that bothered – even frightened – a lot of conservative people. And even though there was nowhere near the level of anger and violent rhetoric heard today, one crazy, angry man still found the will to assassinate the President of the United States. It was an act that finally brought a divided nation together, in a bond forged by intense grief and communal disbelief that we as a nation could do such a thing to ourselves.

So today, will some angry “Real American,” hopped up on the frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric about terrorist loving-neonazi-Marxist-liberals coming for his guns and destroying his freedom, who only wants “his country back,” make Michelle Obama a grieving widow and their little children fatherless. Is that what will finally end this debate of hatred? Must we witness, a grim echo of that dark past, Michelle standing brave but stunned in the gathering dusk as a marine honor guard lowers her husband into the ground, little Sasha like John-John vainly waving an American flag for her lost President, her lost daddy, her lost hope. Must we, once again, go through a national mourning before we can pick up the pieces of a nation shattered by hatred, self-delusion and cynical media illusionists who see rousing the rabble as a way to pad their bank accounts?

Will you then join the Becks and Limbaughs and Hannitys in dancing gleefully in front of your televisions while the rest of the nation – the Real America – mourns for the loss of this wonderful, hopeful and so very good man...and for our country?

No, I guess many of you will look on in disbelief. You’ll claim that this is not what you wanted, you’ll wring your hands and cry out that this was the act of a madman, the lunatic fringe, and you had no part in it. But your sorrow, your regret and your protest will fall on deaf ears because, frankly, you have no credibility.