Back in April, responding to Bill Clinton's comments that media figures should be careful not to advocate violence, the Washington Examiner's Byron York said that only the “fringes” of the tea party movement are “people who talk about revolution.” In order to make this blanket statement, York conveniently ignored Sarah Palin telling the Tea Party convention that “America is ready for another revolution and you are a part of this” and Glenn Beck asserting that “the second American revolution is being played out right now.”

Since then, conservative media figures upset with the Obama administration over health care reform, possible immigration reform, and other legislative items they disagree with have apparently become more comfortable with talk of revolt, openly discussing potential “civil war” or a “Second American Revolution.”

Glenn Beck has only amped up his rhetoric, insinuating that the administration is intentionally trying to destroy the country and push us towards “civil war,” and has even stated outright that he thinks “we're headed for a civil war.”

This week, conservative media figures are seizing on an Investor's Business Daily editorial from the weekend that asked in its headline if “Washington's Failures” will “Lead To Second American Revolution.” Limbaugh labeled the editorial “amazing” yesterday, adding: “I would not call it a revolution; I'd call it a restoration.”

Conservative blogger Bob “Confederate Yankee” Owens -- who was recently hired by the Washington Examiner -- also weighed in on the IBD editorial. In a post titled “A Nation on the Edge of Revolt,” Owens discusses how our current Congress has “won in a bloodless coup” and that nations collapse at this point unless “people reform or replace their governments.” Owens adds that “reform increasingly seems to be a fleeting option.”

While Owens states early in his post that he is not making these statements as “hyperbole,” or to “incite violence,” he later discusses how “revolution is a brutish nasty business,” in which “innocents will fall along with patriots and the corrupt”:

Whether they actually win or not depends upon how much you love your family and your nation and the principles that made this nation great. Our founders themselves believed in the right of revolt, and knew better than any of us that governments must be replaced from time to time. They were wise enough to provide us with a constitutional framework that will outlast any government, including this one. We can dispose of this government, and restore the Constitution that has served us and the rest of the world so well for so long.

We stand at the brink.

We are on the right side of history. Our would-be rulers, fat on self-appointed largesse and drunk on their own purloined power, imagine us subjects, not free men and women.

Revolution is a brutish, nasty business. Innocents will fall along with patriots and the corrupt, and success is not assured.

In a letter to James Warren in 1789, Samuel Adams foresaw our current state.

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.

The question for you, my fellow Americans, is simple.

Will you fight, or will you surrender your liberties?

I pray for peace.

But I prepare for war.

This is not the first time Owens has openly discussed armed revolution. After the passage of health care reform, Owens expressed“some hope” that the bill would be ruled unconstitutional and Democrats would be voted out of office so that Owens and “freshly-experienced combat veterans” would not be forced to resort to the “morally-required alternative.”