Reductio ad Oswald

It should surprise no one that "experts who track hate groups across the US are increasingly concerned" about hate groups. How often does one read that experts on the topic of A are 'decreasingly concerned' about A, anyway?

Anyway, now that the White House and the Democrats have failed to tar the town hall anti-Obamacare protesters as pharma-shills and teabag-toting loonies, they're proceeding to label dissent as a threat to the leader. Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is quoted thus:

I think the president has, in effect, triggered fears amongst fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country, that the battle is lost.... The nation that their Christian white forefathers created has somehow been taken from them.

My question to Potok is, if there was in fact this huge lake of white folks angry at the election of a black president with a Muslim father and a black-liberation pastor, why did they wait until Nancy Pelosi talked about passing the most consequential piece of domestic and economic policy in a generation to start gathering torches and pitchforks? (For bonus points, explain why they are doing it at congressional town hall meetings.)

Anyway, I'm more amused than concerned by this line of argument, because I think it's liable to backfire even worse than "astroturf" allegations that flopped worse than Lindsay Lohan's last movie. Leaving aside the fact that the moonbat left constantly indulged in assassination fantasies about W with little consequence, the suggestion that honest policy disagreement lies on a continuum that ends with a lone gunman will probably serve only to push blue-dog Democrats and indies into the "anybody-but-Dem" coulmn.