Sara Robinson

There's an appalling (though, sadly, hardly surprising) amount of conservative myth-making going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. They've come up repeatedly in talk shows and online forums, so you're likely to encounter them as well. Here's what you need to separate fact from fiction when the talking points start flying.

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer -- and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

You have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks.This escalating level of violence is adding data points to a potentially emergent pattern that we need to be looking at and preparing for. So far, there are at least five things I'm particularly concerned about.

Republicans have been running on immigration as a signature issue for the past several elections, so it's ironic that progressives are the ones with the most to gain from solving the immigration problem. But before we can do that, we need to understand—and agree—on what the problems are, and what can and should be done.

There's an appalling (though, sadly, hardly surprising) amount of conservative myth-making going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. They've come up repeatedly in talk shows and online forums, so you're likely to encounter them as well. Here's what you need to separate fact from fiction when the talking points start flying.

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer -- and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

You have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks.This escalating level of violence is adding data points to a potentially emergent pattern that we need to be looking at and preparing for. So far, there are at least five things I'm particularly concerned about.

Republicans have been running on immigration as a signature issue for the past several elections, so it's ironic that progressives are the ones with the most to gain from solving the immigration problem. But before we can do that, we need to understand—and agree—on what the problems are, and what can and should be done.

One of the things I'm really liking about the new regime is the way the stark, terrified silence of the Bush years is giving way to noisy, energetic public discussion of subjects that would have been considered hardcore political pornography just a year or two ago.

Somewhere back in February, about three weeks into the Obama Administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives. The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.

The muddle we're hearing out of Washington these days on issues such as torture and the Wall Street collapse is based on the seriously crossed wires between conservative and liberal ideas of accountability. We're all using the same words, but we're also all hearing very different things. Given that, we need to be very concerned that the Democrats, as the liberal party, have apparently completely forgotten how our liberal system of laws is supposed to work.