From today's column, headlined “The Obama Haters' Silent Enablers”:

Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party's big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight's devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren't warned.

Rich's emphasis on the enablers is an important one and really does represent Part II of the frightening, ongoing unhinged response to Obama from the right. And especially the right-wing media in America.

Part I is that it's even happening. Part II is that virtually nobody--nobody--within the conservative movement will stand up and say boo about it. Even after a private physician was hunted down and murdered in his church, I couldn't find a single voice within the conservative movement who had the temerity to suggest Bill O'Reilly just might have gone over the line with his on-air crusade against the “baby killer” with “blood on his hands.”

Conservatives spent an awful lot of time and energy explaining why O'Reilly's radical rhetoric wasn't a big deal. (Defending this wave of militia rhetoric has become something of a full-time job for the conservative movement.) But nobody had the guts to stand up and suggest that everyone just calm down before more violence unfolds.

Fox News is guilty, as Rich notes, of stoking the fears. But it seems to me that everybody else in the conservative media is guilty of playing along. Of enabling the hate.