The mother of a man charged with making threatening phone calls to House speaker Nancy Pelosi says Fox News was to blame. The National Review, meanwhile, say that Pelosi should be threatened more often, particularly while traveling on planes.

The right-wing media love them a bit of violence-inciting. Fox News, with its dazzling array of dog whistles, winks and nudges to the lunatic fringe, has been credited with pushing one particular man, Gregory Giusti, mugshot above, to threaten Pelosi. Quoted in the Daily News, his mother explained that her son's "really radical ideas" came from Glenn Beck and co.

He's almost certainly not the only one. Charlotte Hays in the National Review cites a Washington Post article that says threats against members of congress have increased threefold since the healthcare bill passed. Good, she seems to imply. And then she paints a bizarre picture whereby if Nancy Pelosi had flown coach more often before healthcare passed, she would have been threatened more often and thus been scared into not pushing to help millions of sick Americans. Or something.

What if our legislators had known in advance of that dastardly vote that that they would have to rub elbows with us? What if (heaven forfend!) Nancy Pelosi had to sit next to one of us on an airplane? Call me crazy, but I think a lot of what ails America could have been prevented if we had refused to pamper Congress. As Marie Antoinette might have said, Let Them Fly Commercial. This should be part of any new Contract with America.

Democracy in action.