The GOP's violent hyperbole: Killin' is on the minds of vocal wingnuts these days. Sen. Rick Santorum compared filibustering Democrats to the world's most notorious genocidal maniac yesterday:

What the Democrats are doing is "the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.'"

But his comments (now clarified but not retracted) are matched in hyperbole by others of his ideology.

Bill O'Reilly is outraged that the Los Angeles Times suggested that "Shutting down Guantanamo and giving suspected terrorists legal protections would help restore our reputation abroad." While he seems to forget that the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo have been released without charges, and that many of them are innocent (not to mention that innocent-until-proven-guilty part of our legal system), he says, "They'll never get it until they grab [LA Times editor] Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off." And maybe when the blade sinks in, he'll go, "Perhaps O'Reilly was right."

Then there's Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck who opined:

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong?"

And on Wednesday Judge Joan Lefkow, whose mother and husband were executed by a man Lefkow ruled against, testified on Capitol Hill about courtroom safety, while presidential hopeful Bill Frist called Democrats' efforts to oppose extremist judicial nominees a "leadership-led use of Cloture vote to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees.” Democrat Dick Durbin called him on it:

When words are expressed during the court of the debate that those of us who oppose these nominees are setting out to 'kill, to defeat or to assassinate these nominees, those words should be taken from this record. Those words go too far.

What's with the violent fixation? Can these people, with their histrionic rhetoric, connect with real human suffering? I mean, if they believe cloture is akin to murder and political procedure is like Hitlerian logic, how can they possibly relate to someone who's experienced real violence?