Leaving aside the specifics of what he said — or what he didn’t say yet, but hinted at — the largest political benefit of President Obama’s address to Congress (and the nation) last night may have been how he said it.

This week, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) will hold long-awaited hearings in the House Homeland Security Committee on Muslim cooperation with law enforcement in terror investigations. King pretty much has his mind made up before entering the hearing room – he believes that Muslim-Americans haven’t aided enough in investigations against extremism, despite a long record to the contrary.

You can dismiss the particulars of this pretty quickly. Wisconsin teachers, for example, have given back hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several years and personally capped their pay. All public employees in the state agreed to pension and health care concessions. Public-sector pay is lower than private-sector pay for similar jobs. You can go down the line.

But let’s focus on the image of public employees putting a machine gun to the head of local officials.

The efforts we’ve seen in recent years by Democrats to placate the other side, through weakening of that moral imperative, only serve to weaken the public policy goal.

I think it’s a worthwhile exercise, instead of pointing fingers, to look inward, to ask ourselves what we could do better with the limited time we have on Earth, how we can do our part to build a better America. This call to service is a feature of Obama’s rhetoric.

You have an establishment at least somewhat concerned about the vituperative Tea Party movement, and not just their rhetoric but their ideas. In another corner of the conservative coalition, you have this contretemps over CPAC allowing a gay group to participate in its annual conference. Yesterday the first actual member of Congress pulled out, Rep. Jim Jordan, joining multiple conservative groups, including the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation, in boycotting the event.

I have to figure whoever wrote this for Palin knew precisely what that metaphor was all about. It’s not an accident that Palin likens herself to a persecuted religious sect. She has the victimization thing down pat.

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.

Rep. Chellie Pingree is absolutely right, and it would be worth it to back her up on this. I’m sure Republicans will try to laugh it off, but if everyone’s calling for civility and a change in how we conduct politics, it seems to me accusing the opponent of “killing” anything as a metaphor in legislation is a good place to start.

There have been a lot of attempts at false equivalencies (the last Republican Vice Presidential candidate of the United States is exactly the same as a random Daily Kos diarist) and a lot of attempts to explain away incendiary political rhetoric with a wave of the hand and something like “both sides do it.” But the responses above on their own refute this. They resort to the pretty common rhetoric of demonization to make their points. I have no interest in censoring their speech, but I sure want to highlight it.