…matter:

Talk of the “atmosphere” of hate will be familiar to anyone who read the left’s reaction to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. But whereas Jared Loughner​ was a nonideological madman, Lee Harvey Oswald​ was a communist bent on assassinating an anticommunist American president. At Hot Air, Allahpundit wondered why on earth Democrats wouldn’t just blame Oswald’s communism:

Oswald wasn’t a mainstream liberal or, Lord knows, a mainstream Democrat. He was a fringe leftist, an honest-to-goodness commie. The Oswald apologists could, if they liked, simply emphasize his ideological extremism — his fringiness — as the key to his anti-Kennedy mania.

But they didn’t – just as they defend the Occupy Wall Street protesters, whose movement has been marked by violence, rape, and in one case sympathy for – you guessed it – a would-be assassin who shot at the White House. This is one reason anticommunists had mostly left or avoided the Democratic party. Ralph de Toledano, Whittaker Chambers​, and others like them argued there was a design flaw in the American left which would forever hamper their ability and willingness to cast out the crazies, even when they didn’t sympathize with them.

They argued, as the historian of the right George Nash once aptly put it, “that there was a philosophical continuity on the left and that this was disabling to American liberalism, because it could not quite bring itself to have a vigorous enough response to the communists.”

And it still can’t. Nor can it to the Islamists.