MICHAEL WALSH: “A specter is haunting America — the specter of violence that challenges the notion of civil discourse and threatens our democracy. Embodied by the Occupy Wall Street rabble and its imitators, and shamefully abetted by far too many Democratic elected officials, what once masqueraded as ‘dissent’ is now unmasked as partisan thuggery.”

Dissent is okay when it’s really just factional infighting among the elite. It’s only when it becomes actual dissent — see, e.g., the Tea Party movement — that elites worry about civility.