Beldar (link below) and Junkyardblog offer defenses to one degree or another of Cornyn. I’m not persuaded — much. they seem to boil down to the fact that Cornyn’s speech was otherwise good except for that paragraph in question. Okay, so the speech was good except for the part in question. Fine. But that’s why we’re talking about the part in question and not the rest of the speech. I do think Josh Marshall and others could at least avoid dowdifying the quote for maximum impact. Marshall leaves out the bolded part in his version:

Finally, I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country — certainly nothing new; we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that has been on the news. I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence, certainly without any justification, but that is a concern I have that I wanted to share.

Now I don’t think the bolded part exonerates Cornyn from criticism but why not at least be clear that he’s not saying violence against judges is justified?

I am moving increasingly to the camp that this was a dumb statement — i.e. very ill thought-out and insupportable on the facts — on Cornyn’s part rather than sinister. It’s certainly not a talking-point I’ve heard anywhere else which suggests to some extent it wasn’t a political strategy.