Old and Busted: Longtime former publisher Marty Peretz kept liberal house organ The New Republic (relatively) sane, brought in plenty of new journalists, who after leaving TNR for greener pastures, attacked their former boss on the JournoList as not just a racist, but “a crazy-ass racist.”

Tired of the headaches, Peretz sells TNR last year to Facebook founder Chris Hughes. Hughes issues the very first call ever for a political magazine offering up a distinct worldview and ideology to pretend to remain “free of party ideology or partisan bias:”

With this issue, we relaunch The New Republic. Our goals may be somewhat different from those of the magazine’s founding fathers, but we share their unabashed idealism. We believe that our new hyper-information age is thrilling, but not entirely satisfying. We believe that there must remain space for journalism that takes time to produce and demands a longer attention span-writing that is at once nourishing and entertaining. We aim to tell the most important, timely stories about politics, culture, and big ideas that matter to you. The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias, although it will showcase passionate writing and will continue to wrestle with the primary questions about our society.

So, how’s that working out?

New Hotness: TNR’s house Twitter account fantasizes of tank strikes on the GOP today. As Jim Geraghty tweets, “The New Republic: Your first choice for violent, authoritarian, eliminationist rhetoric!”

Much more from Twitchy, which notes:

When Russia faced a constitutional crisis in 1993, President Boris Yeltsin did what any good dictator would do — he had the military surround the White House and had tanks shell the upper floors as a demonstration of force, announcing to the press that “Fascist-communist armed rebellion in Moscow shall be suppressed within the shortest period.” It’s an efficient way to show who’s boss, and the folks at The New Republic seem like they’re warming up to the idea.

And how. Leftists convinced themselves in January of 2011 that clip art of targets and bullet points could kill — as long as it wasn’t their own. If that’s your benchmark, imagine what imagery such as this can do:

As they say at David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, ”Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” and TNR certainly dropped the mask today. But let’s step back a bit for some perspective:

Liberals were rightly pressed in the 1960s to condemn violence on the left…In honor of Giffords, the effort to drain the rhetorical swamps should be as nonpartisan as she was in her interview. It is wrong, at any point on the spectrum, she said, to “incite people and inflame emotions.” There are, she said, “polarized parts of our parties that really get excited and that’s where, again, community leaders, not just, you know, the political leaders, all of us have to come together and say, ‘OK, there’s a fine line here.’ “

— E.J. Dionne, Jr., “Gabrielle Giffords and the Danger of Violent Political Rhetoric,” The New Republic, January 9th, 2011.

Update: “Bolsheviks, she cried.”