Brevik? Hitler? Geller? Can anyone tell them apart? (Oh, right. Hitler was occasionally coherent.)

Who: Charles Johnson
What: "Perfect Timing: Pamela Geller's New WND Book Echoes Oslo Terrorist's Book", Little Green Footballs
When: August 2, 2011

In the wake of each new isolated incident, the American right wing continues its desperate scramble for cover. After years of telling us how movies and television and books and music can transform normal people into complete psychopaths, American conservatives now want to convince us that there is no possible way the incendiary rhetoric of the right wing could possibly ever contribute in any way whatsoever to a political atrocity.

And then they all take a breath, and the right wing opens its mouth again. Charles Johnson checks in from the Little Green Football front:

With impeccable timing, today Pamela Geller is hyping the release of her new book, published by the far right’s craziest pseudo-news and Birther site, World Net Daily: Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance ....

.... It's impossible to miss the similarity to another book: the manifesto of Oslo mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, with the same themes, the same over-the-top paranoia, the same mindless hatred, bigotry, and conspiracy theorizing.

In the synopsis at Amazon, if you substituted "Anders Breivik" for "Pamela Geller," and "Norway" for "America," it would describe Breivik’s book exactly.

It is worth noting that Norwegian right-wing mass murderer Anders Brevik cited Geller twelve times in his manifesto.

And Geller, for her part, allegedly posted on her blog in 2007 an email from Brevik himself. She denies it, and has also apparently scrubbed the original post of violent rhetoric ("We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.") Still, though, her update is incredible insofar as it attacks Muslims and leftist shills for connecting her to Brevik, despite the fact that the very same addendum expressing sympathy with the shooter as her motivation for reposting the note: "After the monstrous massacre in Norway on July 22,2011, I re-ran this post as evidence of the deteriorating conditions in Norway. Clearly it had been decaying for sometime ...."

In defense of Geller specifically, and the right wing in general, one might plausibly argue that there is no way they can be so stupid. And on its face, that point seems to carry weight. But this is also the same right that thinks music can turn children into mass murderers. How can they possibly argue with a straight face that violent rhetoric normalized in the political culture has absolutely no effect on the mentally ill?

The point there, of course, being that they should either ditch the influence argument entirely, or admit their contribution to the state of things.

In the case of Geller's latest book, which Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic compares to Nazi anti-Semitism, perhaps the question of Geller's credibility in anything depends on whether we look at her actions in the context of a string of isolated incidents, or a sum effect of interrelated processes.