The conservative outrage over the DHS report on right-wing terror threats — the one that alerts law enforcement that right-wing extremist groups may make special efforts to recruit returning veterans, and was released in a rush without considering possible civil liberties violations — is largely unmerited, it seems to me. Hate to agree with lefties, but it seems to be true.

I know I’m late to this game, but I need to point out the best conservative take I’ve seen on the topic, which comes from Plumb Bob Blog (with my emphasis):

At the near extreme, this report might be nothing more than the opinion of a paranoiac leftist at DHS thinking out loud that the militias are likely to use current turmoil as a recruiting vehicle. If it’s that, the only problem is that the wording is so unspecific that they’ve taken the entire political right in a net that was aimed at catching hard-right militia. They could solve the entire furor by retracting the report and re-releasing it with tighter wording, including a definition of “extremist” that excludes ordinary Republican and Libertarian issue voters. Let’s hope they do that.

At the far extreme, however, a government that plans to institute restrictive and anti-libertarian measures in the near future might issue a report like this in advance to categorize as “extreme” the expected outrage of ordinary citizens against the loss of their liberties.

And let’s be candid, here: if the Obama administration does intend to remove Constitutionally-protected liberties and criminalize their political opposition, in a style reminiscent of the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Maoists in China, then they are correct in warning against violence from opponents. That will happen; they can count on it.

He’s not making a threat, he’s stating a rather obvious truth. And his analysis is very level-headed (as usual, though some of the commenters at his pst find it sensational). No shrieking or hyperventilating.

And in doing so, he also demonstrates the ridiculousness of the debates we keep having, and especially those we have had since 9/11, over the legitimacy of tactics instead of ends. At best it is unproductive, at worst it is a dishonest tool wielded by both sides of the political spectrum.

Plumb Bob Blog suggests violence from even mainstream conservatives would occur if their very right to advocate is criminalized and reform by any lawful means is made impossible. And by “impossible,” I mean in the sense that reform is prohibited because democratic functioning has been replaced by a totalitarian government that makes no mechanism for peacefule change available and criminalizes dissent. And I also mean that the government must do this in reality, not just in the fevered brains of its opponents. We wouldn’t have condemned violent German resistance to Hitler as terrorism. And we wouldn’t condemn it in the nightmare scenario I have painted, at least so long as it was targeted.

When you’re a member of the radical left or right, on the other hand, you set the bar for revolution much, much lower.  When the establishment of the utopia imagined by Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground group in the early ’70s was stymied by the political process — that is, when they were unable to effect lawful change through the political (or legal) process (assuming they were ever interested in doing so, and that’s a generous assumption)  they decided that the deaths of 25 million Americans was a perfectly acceptable price to pay for imposing the utopia by force and stifling dissent after that.

Is there any doubt we would support violent resistance in the first scenario and condemn it in the second?  Same means, different causes.

The radical right described by the report is undoubtedly subject to the same temptations as the fringe left. And the report does seem to concentrate only on the fringe. As the lefty blog Crooks and Liars notes (emphasis in the original):

[The report] delineates that the subject of its report is“rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language.

Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.

And these fringe elements will believe that peaceful reform is impossible, and revolution thus justified, despite the fact that their right to organize politically is not hampered  in any way, let alone criminalized. Just think back to all the wailing about Bushitler — wailing that continued for his entire administration precisely because the wailers were free to wail.

Still, there is room for concern about how the report defines radicals in part by their issues. And the administration left itself open to the charge that they were linking mainstream conservatives and radicals by releasing the report just prior to the nationwide tea-party protests. While I think Michelle Malkin’s arguments that the report slams mainstream conservatives is over the top — the language she cites appears only to describes radicals on those views who are unwilling to abide the democratic process — DHS would be wise to take Plumb Bob Blog’s suggestion to explain itself and the report — and modify it, if necessary, to demonstrate that it does indeed draw a distinction between mainstream conservative political opposition and violence-prone radicals on the same conservative issues. (Better than their buck-passing, to be sure.) The administration needs to make clear that mainstream conservatives opposed to illegal immigration or abortion are no more allies of radical groups willing to do violence over these issues than Nancy Pelosi is of some modern-day version of the 70s lefties ready to kill millions to impose their utopia.

So, am I pissed if DHS is concerned about fringe right-wing groups? No, not really, as long as they are concerned about fringe lefties and radical Islamists. Concerned, I said. Not criminalizing opposing political viewpoints.