The AP is reporting that the FBI has arrested a Northern California man for making threatening phone calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Several federal officials said the man made dozens of calls to Pelosi's homes in California and Washington, as well as to her husband's business office. They said he recited her home address and said if she wanted to see it again, she would not support the health care overhaul bill that since has been enacted.

One official said the man is believed to have spoken directly with Pelosi at least once.

Creeptastic. Gregory Lee Giusti, 48, was arrested in San Francisco this afternoon and will be in court tomorrow. This comes one day after a man in Washington state, Charles Alan Wilson, was arrested for threatening Senator Patty Murray over her vote on health care reform:

According to the criminal complaint, between March 22 and April 4, 2010, Wilson called Senator Patty Murray's office on multiple occasions leaving expletive laden threatening messages. Wilson stated that Senator Murray "had a target on her back." Wilson stated, "I want to (expletive) kill you." Wilson discussed assisting others in an attempt to kill the senator. Wilson's threats were in response to the passage of the Health Care Reform Act.

It's not the guys who are calling Congressional offices that we should be really worried about (though I do fully support them being taken off the streets). During my very brief tenure as a Capitol Hill intern, I did a lot of mail sorting -- and we were told then that every letter or call we received represented probably 10 other people who didn't bother to pick up a pen or phone on that given issue.

That was a pretty unscientific measure, sure, but it's the kind of yard stick congressional offices still use to judge public opinion. Now extend that measurement to the threatening call market, and you have some very scary statistics. For every crazy guy or gal who Googles Nancy Pelosi, finds her home phone number and address, and tells her he's going to burn the place down, there are at least ten (and I'd guess more) that have done that quietly, without alerting her staff or, along the way, federal investigators.

I'm glad to see arrests made, but they have to be treated like what they are: a sign that things are getting more dangerous, not a sign that the streets are being cleared of those who would use violence in place of debate to settle the questions before us. Hatred, as Thomas McGowan  put it aptly, has become mainstream.

We have a national history of contentious debate. Everyone who thinks there was a golden age of civil discourse is deluding themselves; our forefathers went at each other with every bit of damning evidence they had at hand. They fought dirty: pamphlets were published anonymously accusing Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton both of scandalous affairs in attempts to reduce their political power. Even George Washington wasn't immune -- during his tenure, he was accused of everything from having fathered illegitimate children (including Hamilton) to being too senile to really understand what was happened (that one came from Jefferson). Debate in America has often been loud,  slanderous, and full of violent emotion.

The ugliest moments in our national history have come when those emotions bubbled over not at massive rallies but in private homes. We are not a society marked by mob rule; we are a society scarred by the violent actions of individuals who have believed they are operating for the good of the country. Consider the Oklahoma City bombing; consider the various assassinations the United States has survived. Consider all the protests of the 60s, all the protests of the past few months. What's more troubling, the mass rally or the lone gunman?

It is too easy to sit on the left and blame the Tea Partiers and the right-wing militias. They, too, may be symptoms, but they're not the problem. The problem is disenchantment. The problem is disenfranchisement. It's people not knowing how government works, and believing, in the absence of understanding, that it works against them and without them. It's a failure more of media outlets and education than of current leaders.

I don't think the Tea Party's mere existence openly encourage violence against members of Congress. In fact, their existence could work to diffuse some of this frustration. Though we may disagree with their statements, though we may disagree with their tactics, I consider everyone who shows up at a rally someone who's much less likely to ever take up arms. If they're shown there's another outlet for their anger -- be it through making new, equally frustrated friends, through shouting insults, or through crafting new, obscene signs -- they're less likely to turn violence. People who think they're being heard don't have a need of guns or bombs.

Say what you will of Obama's strategies on compromise, but I think he gets this.

Americans don't see eye-to-eye. We've never figured out exactly what our country is about, except that we want it to be about everything we like and nothing we don't, and it will never be that way. That means there will never be a time without conflict. There will never be a time when some group isn't scheming for the overthrow of some other. We're polarized. We're impossible.

Right now, it seems worse than ever. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe there are more crazy people willing to take up arms than ever, more people who don't feel there's any alternative. When both sides contribute to the rhetoric about how broken and corrupt our national capital is, the growing distance everyone feels from their government is inevitable.

I want to see further action toward making the marketplace of ideas safe for everyone. I want to see more arrests, not just of the guys stupid enough to get recorded making threats, but of the guys who are quietly locking and loading at home.

More than that, I want someone -- anyone -- on the right to acknowledge that the problem is coming from their side right now. Maybe that's going to take someone on the left acknowledging that we've had our crazies, too, and I'd like to see that happen. Whatever the case, both sides need to stop, right now, calling Washington the root of all evils. Demonizing of the process of representative democracy isn't helping anyone. Deals have to be made. That's how we work. Fights are going to happen. People are going to be angry. Americans do not, will not, have never, and won't ever agree on anything. The more we idolize consensus, the more people are going to be pushed into the category of extreme disagreement.

When they're denied the chance to vent that anger in a productive way -- be it at a rally or at the ballot box -- some people will turn to violence. Maybe only a fraction of one percent, but that's still a staggering number of people who are ready to reload. When they feel that voting doesn't mean anything and they hear only criticisms of their rallies, they'll find another way to make their voices heard.

I, for one, would like to see the GOP stop telling Americans that their votes didn't count, that their voices aren't heard, that they're being ignored and railroaded by an unfair process in Washington. That's the dangerous language -- not the crap about reloading or targets or whatnot. When you tell Americans that their votes don't matter, you're encouraging them to act outside of the system.

That's why it's up to those who frame these debates, those who encourage disagreement and dissent, to consider their responsibility toward keeping debate open, keeping anger from turning into hatred, keeping frustration from turning into violence. Debate in America needs to be open for our country to work. Not friendly, not tame, not neutered: Open. People need to believe, more than ever, that they have not just a stake in the outcome but also a say in the process.

Real defenders of freedom don't rely on fear. They don't rely on stirring up anger. They don't push frustrated people into believing the only avenue left for them is the exercise of physical violence. They offer people hope. They offer people a chance to engage in government. They remind them that we've got a government built on laws and a society built on peaceful but passionate disagreement.

Why am I not seeing that from the Republican party?