It seems like such a long time ago, doesn’t it?

That probably has something to do with how quickly the story vanished from the news.

But, as a matter of fact, it’s only been three and a half years since the Bernie Sanders supporter pictured above shouted, “This is for healthcare!” before putting a bullet in GOP congressman, Steve Scalise.

James Hodgkinson only failed to murder Scalise and massacre another dozen or so GOP senators and congressman plus whatever family and friends were unlucky enough to show up at their baseball practice because he was such a lousy shot.

One man who survived the attack was Senator Rand Paul.

Rand Paul says media hid key detail about Democratic terrorist James Hodgkinson: "When he came on the field with a semi-automatic weapon firing probably close to 200 shots at us, shooting five people and almost killing Steve Scalise, he was yelling 'this is for healthcare!" pic.twitter.com/E9VQ8EDpHs

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 11, 2018

Well, Senator Paul just asked a very good question yesterday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Show.

To wit: why isn’t Bernie Sanders blamed for inciting Hodgkinson’s attempted murder spree?

Here’s the real question about impeachment. If they’re going to impeach people who incite violence, I have a question. Are they going to impeach Bernie Sanders? Remember the guy who shot Steve Scalise? Steve Scalise almost died. I was there at the ball field when he was shot. The guy was a rabid Bernie Sanders supporter. Remember what Democrats were saying at the time? The were saying, “Republicans health care plan is, You get sick and you die. That sounds like an incitement. If you’re telling people that the Republican party is going to kill you, why wouldn’t you then react violently and say, ‘We must kill you them before they kill us”?

Just so.

But the lucky-to-be-alive senator could have included a whole lot of other big wheel Democrats in his question— and on very much more specific grounds too.

You see, even apart from his devotion to Bernie Sanders, James Hodgkinson left absolutely no doubt about what motivated his murder spree.

In a March 12 Facebook post, the would-be assassin wrote, “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time To Destroy Trump & Co.”

In March, James T. Hodgkinson wrote on Facebook, “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” pic.twitter.com/bIRjIZx4HM

— Oren Segal (@orensegal) June 14, 2017

Where did Hodgkinson get the idea that Donald Trump is a traitor?

Well, President Clinton’s former secretary of labor Robert Reich is one likely source. He wrote a Newsweek column just three months before Hodgkinson’s attempted massacre headlined, Is Trump a Traitor or a Paranoid?

Former MSNBC commentator, Keith Olbermann, Democrat propagandist, Michael Moore, and venerated Democrat wise man, Bill Moyers all also explicitly called Trump a traitor in the run up to Hodgkinson’s mass assassination attempt.

Of course, the Democrat celebrities and politicians who’d accused the president of serving Russian interests without necessarily using the word “traitor” would be way too long to even list.

To take one instance, Rachel Maddow had been incessantly pushing the Russian-collusion hoax on her MSNBC show.

In a report written just two months before the shooting, one of the few remaining honest liberals, Aaron Mate, noted that between February 20 and March 31, 2017, Maddow not only pushed the Russia hoax “more than any other issue.” Maddow’s penchant for divisive slander was so obsessive that she managed to cover it “more than every other issue combined.”

With regard to Hodgkinson’s second deadly delusion that Trump had destroyed democracy, Bill Moyers also ran a piece on his website with the incendiary headline, “Farewell America,” in which he explictly accused Trump of doing just that.

The venerable Atlantic Monthly and Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland also both made the same heinous and preposterous accusation.  And, once again, the list of Democrat celebrities and politicians who’d, in one way or another, accused the president of destroying American democracy would be very long, indeed.

Moreover, we even know that the assassin held such people in high esteem and paid great attention to their pronouncements. In a series of letters to the editor of the Belleville News-Democrat, Hodgkison wrote:

The best book I’ve read in a while is ‘Aftershock’ by Robert B. Reich.”

In another letter, he said:

One of my favorite TV shows is “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

As I noted in a column the day after Scalise was shot:

There can be no real debate about where exactly James Hodgkinson got the ideas that made trying to assassinate a dozen Republican politicians seem reasonable.

He got them from perfectly mainstream political and intellectual leaders of the Democratic Party. For the past half-year, they’ve been cynically trying to undermine President Trump, raise money, and motivate their base by peddling the most extreme fantasies about the president’s relations with Russia and his threat to American democracy. Anyone with half a brain knew all along that it was only a matter of time before someone started taking their manipulative nonsense seriously, as well as the horrific results.

We can thank the courageous and timely police response for averting a massacre. But there’s no doubt that we can also thank Democrat Party leaders and their media enablers for the attempt. James Hodgkinson has, at least, done us the favor of making that much clear.