A Loudoun County Republican group in Virginia circulated an email to its members over the weekend that has many Democrats in an uproar, and many Republicans too. The email shows a zombie-fied President Obama with a gaping bullet hole in his forehead. There were other images on the email as well, a ghoulish House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and pictures of a pumpkin and some other zombie photos. The email seems to have been a simple Halloween-themed holiday card from the organization done in incredibly bad taste. Of course, incredibly bad taste in politics is usually met with a healthy does of vitriol.

The Northern Virginian Republican Blog Too Conservative was the first to notice it and derided the holiday email as “disgusting and shameful”. Other Republicans followed suit, separating themselves from the controversial image. The chairman of the GOP state party said that the image had “no place in American politics,” and adding that the Republican Party of Virginia condemned it in “the strongest possible terms.” Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell’s office releasing a statement  saying that he, “calls on those involved to apologize for their actions, and to immediately ensure that such imagery is never used again.”

The Loudoun County Republican Committee sent out an official statement after the backlash attempting to explain and apologize.

“The Loudoun County Republican Committee yesterday sent an email to its members that represented a light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday. Apparently, some individuals have interpreted an image of Barack Obama that appeared within the email as intending to portray the president as a victim of a violent crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we deeply and sincerely apologize to the president and anyone who viewed the image if that was the impression that was left. The LCRC deplores any effort to display, suggest or promote violence against the president or any other political figure.”

It seems to me that every couple of months there’s an issue in which the naturally vitriolic rhetoric of the right occasionally crosses the line of “defensible”, and becomes something that is so flagrantly antisocial and belligerent that even their own party, who is often just as guilty, joins the chorus of criticism. However, there’s a larger issue in this, that the conservative discourse so often tends toward the divisive, the insulting, the demeaning. That’s not to say that the liberal media propagandists don’t do their part, but they don’t have nearly the delivery system that the right employs to spread their hateful messages.

Sarah Palin’s “Don’t retreat, reload”, was spread far and wide during the Tea Party’s rise, but when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and almost a dozen other people were shot, her previous party turned against her, deriding the slogan as “counter-productive”. To say the least. A trip down the AM dial in just about any state in the union will provide one with a tapestry of poisonous political rhetoric, soundbites that I’ve heard repeated verbatim by avid listeners from the dinner table to the DMV. Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and many other high profile pundits and talking heads spread their own version of derisive drivel to the same effect, often cannibalizing one another’s media spots and recycling the messages.

If I were younger I would share in the violent reactions to these equally violent messages, but I’ve come to see this kind of conservative propagation for what it is; a conservative closed-loop feeding cycle. The people of a certain position create these grotesque images for their audiences to pay the bills, and their audiences, whether out of hate, or fear, or both, are happy to pay them for it. When the left reacts in kind, it only fuels the fire. So, like the patient teacher ignoring the loud-mouth attention-seeking child in the back of the room, I knowingly shake my head and wait for them to say something so outrageously stupid I can send them to the office. After all, just as the child would profess their innocence, the childish Republican that finally crossed the line that month will simply cry, “It was just a joke!”