Riverfront Times staff writer Chad Garrison is taking heat from conservatives after making the following remarks in a blog post about a man recently arrested for firebombing the campaign office of a Democratic U.S. Congressman:

No motive was given for the attack, though one could suspect that the perpetrator is not a fan of the congressman. Given what we know of him — 50, white, angry — he certainly fits the demographics of a Tea Party member.

After reports surfaced suggesting that the suspect may have been a disgruntled former campaign worker and contributor to the TPM Muckraker blog, conservative blogs pounced. The Daily Caller ran a piece headlined, ‘Newsweekly falsely speculates arson suspect is Tea Party activist’, and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism called the incident “completely typical of what MSM and leftist journalists do in St. Louis on a regular basis.”

The latter piece includes the helpful category tag: “Media Bias.”

Responding to the criticism, Garrison told The Daily Caller:

You’d have to be quite the literalist to believe I was actually accusing anyone of a crime. Then again, it’s becoming ever clearer that these are people who can’t take a joke and who have no emotion other than blind outrage and indignation.

In an email to AAN, he added, “I think its laughable that the same people who are defaming an entire religion over the ‘Mosque at Ground Zero!!!’ are claiming that they’ve been slandered by me.”