If you harbor any doubt about the power of words, just take a look at Greg Walden. Last week the eight-term Republican congressman from Oregon went on CNN and accused Barack Obama of “trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors”—a reference to the president’s proposed cuts to Social Security. Walden—who recently became chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, meaning he will oversee the GOP’s effort to hold on to the House in 2014—was effectively attacking Obama from the left. And soon enough, conservatives were attacking him.

The Club for Growth, which punishes any Republicans who stray from its small-government orthodoxy, threatened a primary challenge. “We always knew Greg Walden had a liberal record, but he really cemented it with his public opposition to even modest entitlement reform,” said the group’s president, Chris Chocola. Asked about the rogue congressman at a press conference, House Speaker John Boehner replied, “I’ve made it clear that I disagree with what Chairman Walden said”—and added for good measure, “We’ll leave it at that.”

The sudden infamy was a big change for Walden, who prior to last week was not a household name in Washington. The congressman hails from the sprawling flatlands east of Portland, where he routinely garners wins by margins of 30 points or more—something Oregonians attribute to his relentless travel around the eastern part of the state. “People in that part of the world, they want you to take your time to talk with them, and Greg will travel to these small towns and stay until he has heard from everyone,” says Greg Leo, executive director of the Oregon GOP, adding that Walden is one of the most gifted public speakers in state politics. Leo says he doubts local conservatives were much concerned with Walden’s supposed apostasy. “Greg read it in a uniquely accurate way. That is an Oregon quality—we call ’em as we see ’em, no matter what the party line.”

There are lots of lessons we will, in time, draw from the Boston Marathon tragedy, but one is already clear: don’t denigrate government workers. Along with some heroic civilians, it was government workers who ran toward the blast zone. And they were unionized government workers.

If there’s a bogeyman on the right these days, it is a unionized government worker. Mitt Romney, who got rich in part through laying off private-sector workers, made his feelings about government employment clear in the 2012 campaign. “During the president’s term so far, he has added 140,000 more government workers,” he told supporters in San Diego. “Not only do we have to pay for them, but they have to do something every day. So, they look at things they can do, alright? Places they can interfere.”

Things they can do. Places they can interfere. Alright? How about in your former hometown, Mitt? Just over a mile from your former office, government workers found things they can do, places they can interfere. What they did was save lives. What they interfered with was terror. (Oh, and by the way, the progressive wonks at ThinkProgress estimated the number of government workers actually fell in President Obama’s first term by half a million.)

Liberals and civil libertarians shouldn’t yet be saying that there’s utterly no way that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be declared an “enemy combatant.” The post-9/11 law, whatever one’s opinion of it, does say that an American citizen affiliated with al Qaeda, the Taliban, “or associated forces” engaged in hostility with the United States can be declared an enemy combatant. It doesn’t seem like he’s that, but who knows, he may shock everyone when he comes to by saying that he and his brother were precisely that.

But it isn’t liberals who are jumping the gun here. As usual, conservatives are rushing to judgment, shredding the Constitution, using the bombing as an pretext for derailing immigration reform, and generally seeking any excuse to reimpose their paranoid and authoritarian worldview, which needs fear like a vampire needs blood, on the rest of us.

The cry, which I’m sure will pick up steam this week, was led over the weekend by the usual suspects—John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, and Peter King. On the basis of what evidence? On the basis of no evidence at all. They know nothing! We’re starting to piece together a portrait of these guys, although it’s more of Tamerlan than of his younger brother. It’s a grim portrait. He evidently did become a radicalized Islamist. But if he and his brother were acting alone, even if the bombing was 100 percent politically motivated, they can’t be called enemy combatants. Period.

Jon Huntsman's 2012 presidential campaign was plagued by internecine feuding between advisers, debilitating disorganization and a late start by a mostly green candidate. But most damaging to the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China was the perception that he was out of step with his party's base—too moderate, mushy, and effete for the moment.

“Timing is important,” Huntsman replied when I asked him recently the most significant lesson he took from the failed run he abandoned 15 months ago.

But as the Republican mainstream gravitates towards his worldview on issues like gay marriage, immigration, and even the war in Afghanistan, the 53-year-old Huntsman appears to be gauging whether he was a candidate ahead of his time—and if there’s space in the GOP for a Huntsman 2.0.

From the moment the first suspect in the Boston bombing was killed in a shootout, I was counting the minutes until the Beltway types started trying to score political points.

I didn’t have to wait long.

The bogus cry of this-raises-serious-concerns was soon heard throughout the land.

Arkansas: Gunless Boston Liberals

Nate Bell, a Republican Arkansas State representative, sent out a tweet on Friday that soon went viral as Boston residents remained in lockdown in their homes. The tweet, sent from Bell’s official account @NateBell4AR, read: “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A.” It didn’t take long for the Internet to erupt, prompting an apology from Bell. “In hindsight, given the ongoing tragedy that is still unfolding, I regret the poor choice of timing,” Bell wrote on his Facebook page.

New Hampshire: ‘Children and Vaginas’

State Republican Representative Peter Hansen got the “shock value” he initially sought with his comments, when he was forced to apologize after calling women “vaginas.” Rep. Hansen, who once restrained an intruder who broke into his own home using a gun, was discussing the idea of retreating in an email when he uttered the phrase that got him in trouble. A day later a number of local groups called on him to apologize and resign but Hansen refused, saying his comments were blown out of proportion. But with pressure continuing to mount from both sides of the aisle, a day later Hansen caved for his "blatantly offensive, insensitive, and frankly, stupid language."

The rap against Barack Obama, at least on the left, has long been that he’s too cautious, too calculating, too conciliatory. Not a guy willing to take risks.

We can apologize now.

What Obama did in the four months between December’s Newtown shooting and this Wednesday’s Senate capitulation was one of the great displays of presidential guts in American history. On gun control, the Democratic Party had been in the fetal position for years. By 2008, the party whose 1972 platform had proposed banning handguns was reduced to declaring: “We recognize that the right to bear arms is an important part of the American tradition, and we will preserve Americans’ Second Amendment right to own and use firearms. We believe that the right to own firearms is subject to reasonable regulation, but we know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne.” In 2009, when Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley tried to revive gun control legislation, House Democratic leaders refused even to hold a hearing. In 2010, Obama signed legislation lifting restrictions on carrying guns in federal parks. Last July, after a gunman killed 12 and injured 58 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told the press: “There are things that we can do, short of legislation and short of gun laws, as the president said, that can reduce violence in our society. We do need to take a broader look at what we can do to reduce violence in America. And that’s not just legislative, and it’s not just about gun laws.”

As I type this, thousands of police officers and millions of citizens in Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown, Massachusetts, are on high alert, as authorities hone in on the second suspect in Monday’s horrible bombing. I hope by the time you read this article or soon after, justice will have the upper hand, and that the people of Boston will finally have some relief.

In West, Texas, a town still smolders after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant claimed multiple precious lives, including of brave first responders who rushed in to help.

And here in Washington, D.C., we are a city on edge, with ricin-laced letters in our mailboxes, covering even the simplest tasks—riding the subway, going into work—with a thin layer of anxiety.

Fear is at our national doorstep. We’re huddled inside as it knocks. The question becomes, how will we respond? No one knows for sure, but we would do well to look to history for a few instructions.

As the extraordinary manhunt for a suspected terrorist played out in Boston, officials on the scene were focused on the unfolding operation. But back in Washington some officials were already warily turning their attention to the second-guessing and finger-pointing that inevitably follows a terrorist incident.

Throughout the intelligence community, officials were scouring terrorist watch lists and monitoring intercepted conversations to learn anything they could about the origins of the attack and whether any threat remained. But one intel professional conceded that they were simultaneously looking out for any evidence that the government could have missed any advanced warnings or failed to connect the dots in the days or weeks before the Boston attacks. “At this point it’s just part of the ritual,” the source told The Daily Beast. “It goes with the territory.”

So far, nothing has emerged publicly to suggest there has been an intelligence failure of any sort. The administration—and especially the FBI—has gotten high marks for its handling of the Boston bombings. President Obama had been widely praised for his firm but restrained public response.

If you ever need a refresher course in just how disconnected Barack Obama is from America’s mainstream culture of guns, consider this scathing indictment:

“You know, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right ... I disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in this country ‘cling to guns’ ... People of all walks of life hunt—and they enjoy doing so because it’s an important part of their life, not because they are bitter.”

Is that Wayne LaPierre unloading on the president? Nope. It’s Hillary Clinton back in 2008 after then-senator Barack Obama’s famous reference to small-town Americans “clinging to guns and religion.” And just in case anyone missed her larger point about Obama, she went on to call the remarks “elitist and divisive.”

On the weekend after Nevada Sen. Dean Heller joined 15 fellow Republicans to kill a GOP-led filibuster of gun-control legislation, he returned to his hometown of Carson City and ate with his family at an IHOP restaurant—the same one where a gunman went on a rampage in 2011, killing four people and injuring more than a dozen others before killing himself. In the process, the gunman unloaded a 30-round magazine clip and rocked the sense of safety in the small Nevada community.

Heller’s return to the IHOP before the Senate took up a series of gun-control measures was no coincidence. “He wanted to reflect on the upcoming votes,” a staffer explains.

Those votes would put Heller in the middle of an emotional tug-of-war, as senators from both parties called the Nevada Republican throughout the week, seeking his support. President Obama also reached out to him to personally ask him to vote with Democrats to tighten gun restrictions.

In the ongoing argument over how the Republican Party can move forward after losing last year's elections, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has had a clear, coherent perspective. The GOP doesn't need to change its policies—it just needs to reach out to key voters, like Latinos, and bring them into the tent. To do that, Republicans need to appeal to the immigrant identity, and present the Democratic Party as a throwback to "the countries that your parents and grandparents came here to get away from."

But there's a roadblock. As he put it during a January address to the conservative Hispanic Leadership Network, "It’s a difficult message to get to because the gateway issue of immigration stands in the minds of so many people who we live next to and love."

In other words, the party's stance on immigration keeps it from building common cause with voters who, as Rubio has described them, have a native social conservatism and enthusiasm for entrepreneurship.

Four months and three days after the Newtown massacre, the bipartisan Toomey-Manchin bill that would have expanded background checks online and at gun shows was rejected in the Senate by a vote of 54-46.

And bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were defeated easily just an hour later, making Wednesday a devastating day for gun-control advocates, who are just beginning to exert influence after decades of trying and failing to mobilize voters around any significant reform. But leaders of major gun-control groups say they have made headway in competing with the previously unquestioned influence of the NRA in a way that might have been unimaginable even a few months ago.

“It’s been a zero-sum game for the last 20 or 30 years,” says Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), Bloomberg’s well-funded gun control super PAC. “Most politicians have made the easy decision to care about something else.”

It began with the sound of the helicopters buzzing across the skies over my D.C. neighborhood. That sinking feeling that all is not right with the world.

Lying in bed Monday night, hours after the Boston bombings, my mind flashed back to the tense period after 9/11, when fighter jets roared endlessly through the night sky and greeted me at 4 the next morning after I’d covered the hijacked plane that decimated the Pentagon.

And here we are again. A terror attack. Poisoned letters sent to our leaders. And a nagging sense that life is not as safe as the day before.

Every strong political movement, besotted with the fragrance of its own power, hits the point of overreach, and the pro-gun movement hit that point yesterday in the morally repulsive Senate vote on the background-checks bill. We all know the old cliché that the National Rifle Association has power because its members vote on the guns issue, while gun-control people aren’t zealots. Well, Wayne LaPierre and 46 craven senators, that “majority” of the Senate, have just created millions of zealots, and as furious as I am, I’m also strangely at peace, because I’m more confident than ever that the NRA will never, ever be stronger in Washington than it was yesterday.

Historians will see this recent debate, culminating in yesterday’s vote, as the time when the gun-control lobby grew and coalesced. The gun issue, since the 1970s a blunt instrument used mainly to bully rural-state Democrats, is going to start turning into the opposite: pressure on blue- and purple-state Republicans to vote at least for modest measures. And make no mistake, what the Senate voted on yesterday was modest; far too modest, in that we can’t even discuss banning the online sale of limitless amounts of ammunition. The NRA won this one, but as President Obama said in some of the most passionate remarks of his public life yesterday evening, this is just “round one.” More rounds are coming, and the balance of power is going to change.

You cannot oppose the will of 90 percent of the public and expect no consequences. You can’t have people saying what Rand Paul said, that monstrous comment of his about Newtown parents being “props,” and think that you haven’t offended and infuriated millions of people. You can’t introduce amendments that encourage more interstate transfer of weapons and give it the way-beyond-Orwellian name “safe communities” act and think that karma will never come back around on you. And you can’t sneer at the parents of dead 6-year-olds and expect that God isn’t watching and taking notes.