Sometimes I feel as if Rush Limbaugh isn't entirely to be trusted

Another day, another act of lone-wolf right-wing terror. In what is sure to a standard-issue argument from the right, Republican Party Leader Rush Limbaugh claims that the attacker was inspired by the American left. According to Limbaugh, you can make this connection because:

He hated both Bushes...he hated neocons...he hated John McCain...he hated Republicans, he hated Jews, as well. He believed in an inside job conspiracy of 9/11. This guy is a leftist, if anything...

Unfortunately for Rush, it does not take long to find von Brunn's connections to the world of right-wing extremism (emphasis mine):

(Von Brunn's) book, "Kill the Best Gentiles," is a screed against the Talmud and is dedicated to Revilo Oliver, a well-known denier of the Holocaust. Von Brunn's writings condemning "Negroes" and Jews were prolific...

...Todd Blodgett, a former Reagan White House aide who later worked with several extremist groups, met regularly with von Brunn in the 1990s and early 2000s.

"Von Brunn is obsessed with Jewish people," Blodgett said. "He had equal contempt for both Jews and blacks, but if he had to pick one group to wipe out, he'd always say it would be Jews."

Blodgett was part-owner of Resistance Records, which distributed music by white racist groups, and worked for Willis Carto, the founder of Liberty Lobby, a radical right group...

...Von Brunn apparently supported himself through much of the 1980s and '90s by distributing copies of the Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby's racist newspaper. "A lot of people like Von Brunn made some good money taking those around to senior homes, restaurants, gun shows and places like that," Blodgett said.

Unless the political scene has altered greatly, I don't believe aides to the Reagan administration, owners of white racist record companies, and frequenters of gun shows distributing racist literature are people regularly associated with the left wing, at least not since the Southern Strategy during the Nixon era.

Then there is this:

On Dec. 7, 1981, he (von Brunn) walked into the Federal Reserve headquarters on Constitution Avenue NW with a handgun and threatened to take members of the Board of Governors, including then-Chairman Paul A. Volcker, hostage.

Police said he had an 11-page document, which he characterized as an exposé of an "international bankers' conspiracy to rule all nations from one central seat of government." Court records said he intended to place them under citizens arrest and charge them with treason.

At his trial, von Brunn said that his goal was to "deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations" and that statistics on IQs of black and white Americans "proved that there is one race that is better than another." He also testified that "Jews were the greatest liars that have ever afflicted mankind."

This conspiratorial obsession with the Federal Reserve is a well known facet of right wing extremists, a much discussed and disseminated belief amongst right-wing "Patriot" groups and considered to be a key part of rule by ZOG (the so-called Zionist Occupational Government). These groups are right wing, consider themselves "real" Americans by virtue of the "organic" Constitution, and amongst other things, often believe the paper money printed by the Federal Reserve is counterfeit, part of a general belief about the sovereignty of America being usurped by outside (usually Jewish) forces long associated with the right wing in groups like the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus. It's the same belief system that explains the far right's obsession with leaving the United Nations, or their obsession with Mexico reconquering southwestern America.

Rush is, as usual, very careful in his choice of examples, focusing on targets-the Bushes, neocons, an inside job on 9/11-that are often associated with anger on the left, which can make his claim seem plausible on first hearing it. And that's the point-by weeding out the larger context of von Brunn's belief system and only focusing on a few disembodied, cherry-picked items, he can make it seem like this was an act of left-wing extremism, if you are inclined or wish to think it so. However, right-wing extremists were always suspicious of the internationalist Bushes, the mostly-Jewish neocons, and Israel. This by no means makes such people leftists.