As far as crackpots go, James Von Brunn sure ticks all the boxes. The 88-year-old ex-con who opened fire in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, fatally wounding a guard is not only possessed of a creepy Germanic name, he’s a failed artist, an author of self-published anti-Semitic diatribes, and was arrested in the 1980s for hanging outside a meeting of the US Federal Reserve.

At that time he had a bag with a sawn-off, some knives and the usual paraphernalia — duct tape! Duct tape! — and calmly explained that he was simply trying to perform a non-violent citizens arrest on the traitorous money-wreckers who had taken American off the silver standard.

As he subsequently noted in a memoir, he was then “convicted by a negro jury after being railroaded by Jew/negro lawyers.” So, at least we know the international Jew/negro system works.

Von Brunn (what’s the betting he’s really plain old James Brown, hell of a name for a white supremacist to have) served six years for that excursion, and shouldn’t have been able to buy a weapon legally — the US Parks Police are investigating. The Parks Police? Yes, they have jurisdiction over US Museums, as Jerry Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo has reminded us (see — the Jews have infiltrated the Parks Police).

Coming a week or so after the killing of late-term abortion provider George Tiller, Von Brunn’s attack — his declaration about it calls it a blow against the “Holocaust cult” which is being celebrated while the genes of the white race die out — would appear to be a sign that the hard right in America is now starting to bubble over with crazies.

Even FOX News anchor Shepard Smith — one of the only halfway decent people on that network — now says he is frightened by the ferocity and volume of clearly intentionally violent emails he is getting into his show, “over a hundred a day” that would be potentially reportable to the Secret Service for investigation.

Of course, while Smith is revealing this, the other parts of that network are doing their best to stoke the fire — as for example the recent selective editing of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech “there are still those who would seek to question or even justify the events of 9/11 — but let us be clear: Al Qaida killed three thousand Americans that day…these are facts, not opinions for debate” etc etc. FOX cut it off just before the dash, to make it sound as if Obama was saying the exact opposite of the point he was making.

FOX isn’t the only outfit finding itself in close proximity with the violent paranoid fringe of American political life. This morning Free Republic, a major right wing libertarian blog, pulled a whole bunch of comments from its site that had been made by a James Von Brunn over the past whiles. No-one’s responsible for the comments they get — but they are for the ones they let stay up, until the author turns out to have actually acted on the sentiments therein expressed.

Though the crazies have been working themselves up since the day Obama was elected — an event that many right wing whites simply did not believe could possibly happen — recent events have brought things to fever pitch, the most recent of which was the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as a pick for the Supreme Court.

Quite aside from the very fact of her being Latina, Sotomayor’s opponents are focusing on some of her comments about whether people from hitherto oppressed minorities could make “better” judgements than a white person, and a recent ruling she made favouring a fire department’s decision to re-run a promotion exam, after a legal challenge from black firemen, arguing that it was culturally biased.

The latter one turned on a point of law, and most of Sotomayor’s decisions have actually been against special rights and/or limits on free speech, but the somewhat right-on comments about politics and judgement and the fire department case have made her a target for those who want to re-start the culture wars.

This is something that Barack Obama wants to avoid, but not at all costs — not at the cost of starting to change the complexion of the Supreme Court for example. Politically his hope is that the various grassroots stimulus packages, the jobs flowing from new green industries, the GM bailout etc will keep him onside with the white working class, giving him leeway to make cultural change in terms of race relations and opportunities.

Bill Clinton lost a significant section of those people by advancing (not by much) racial and cultural policies while also bringing in NAFTA, which dealt killer blows to the north-eastern states.

Indeed so long as he doesn’t get a bullet — and most of these cowardly loons can only get at soft targets — such unrest could prove not unhelpful. The much vaunted “tea parties” from a few months ago haven’t sparked anything like a real social movement — and the violence is partly in response to that failure, the action of isolated people crazed by the widespread acceptance of Obama.

The more FOX panders to the sort of sentiments that supply the ammo for the distinctly American folk activity of social assassination, the further it will depart from anything resembling a middle-ground audience. Should they really push it too far, they may find the tolerance of the American people for lying mendacity has its limits.

But whatever happens, we know that, out there watching over the Republic are … the Parks Police.