During the Democratic primaries last spring, Barack Obama almost derailed his campaign with his unfortunate remark about "bitter" people in small town Pennsylvania who "cling to guns." Now after the second Keystone State shooting rampage in four months, that clumsy comment is sounding eerily prophetic.
On their face, the long-planned Pittsburgh area fitness club killings Tuesday by apparent loner George Sodini seem to reflect his personal demons more than a political crusade. But as Greg Mitchell noted, in the past Sodini posted messages on militia web sites. As for his much discussed diary, it revealed a deep racial animus towards black men in general and Barack Obama in particular:

Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama's plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on. Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Long ago, many a older white male landowner had a young Negro wench girl for his desires. Bout' time tables are turned on that s**t. Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes!
Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good. I saw it. "Not my little girl", daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so.

Sodini's butchery followed the April carnage inflicted by Richard Poplawski in Pittsburgh. The 23-year old who slaughtered three police officers sported an eagle tattoo he claimed was "deliberately Americanized version of the [Nazi] Iron Eagle." And as it turned out, Poplawski (a.k.a. "Braced for Fate") was a frequent commenter on a white supremacist web site where he spouted his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. As CNN reported:

"ZOG (Zionist-occupied government) is," he wrote in a lengthy post on March 13. "One can read the list of significant persons in government and in major corporations and see who is pulling the strings. One can observe the policies and final products and should walk away with little doubt there is Zionist occupation and -- after some further research & critical thinking -- will discover their insidious intentions."
"Braced for Fate" made just 52 posts, but in a post late last fall, he wrote that he sees himself "probably ramping up the activism in the near future."
"He didn't like the Zionists controlling the media and controlling, you know, our freedom of speech," Eddie Petrovic, who described himself as Poplawski's best friend, told CNN. "He didn't like the control of the guns that was about to happen. He believed everything our forefathers put before us and thought that it was being distorted."

Last year, when candidate Obama tried to describe the resentment of the forgotten, bitter people whose disappointments produced "antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," he created a firestorm of criticism. Now, it seems, there is a real firestorm is in Pennsylvania.