In the last 24 hours, there have been three incidents in three different states involving the deliberate targeting of police officers.  In Misouri and Georgia, the attacks were described as "ambushes."  The attack in Tennessee occured before the Dallas shootings, but the motive, according to police, was the same as the cop-killer's reason for the shootings in Dallas.

Fox 2:

The attack in Tennessee occurred hours before the killing of five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night during a protest. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says the attacker told authorities that he was frustrated by the recent killings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Police have not disclosed a motive in Friday's attacks in Georgia and Missouri, which have been described as ambushes.

In a fourth attack early Friday, a motorist fired at a police car as the officer drove by. In all, four officers were wounded. The officer wounded outside St. Louis is in critical but stable condition. The wounded officers are expected to survive.

A suburban St. Louis police chief says a motorist shot an officer three times as the officer walked back to his car during a traffic stop.

Ballwin Police Chief Kevin Scott said at a news conference Friday that the attack happened around 11 a.m. and was captured on video.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar says the suspect, who is in his 30s, "ambushed" the officer, who is in critical but stable condition. His identity wasn't released.

The shooting comes amid heightened tension following an attack in Dallas in which five police officers were killed and seven others and two civilians were wounded.

Are these just isolated but troubling incidents, or will this be a new normal for our nation's law enforcement officers?  I fear the latter.  The day after the Dallas shootings, the Black Lives Matter group was in the streets across America, screaming anti-police rhetoric and playing up its contention that the recent killings of black suspects by police was racially motivated.  BLM's unprovable and despicable claims that the killings were "attacks" on all black people have ginned up outrage in the black community against the police.  Their calls are being echoed by prominent liberal politicians, many of whom are now piously saying we should all "come together" to combat violence.

They would say that, after their white-hot charges of racism and targeting no doubt contributed to the Dallas shooter's motivation for killing white officers.  For years, the left has been quick to blame the right for incendiary rhetoric leading directly to the deaths of victims.  I don't recall them pleading for unity in the aftermath of the attack on Rep. Giffords.  I do remember them blaming the right for a bullseye picture that was superimposed over Giffords's face [correction: district on a map]. 

Any protestations of innocence by Black Lives Matter or other inciters of violence toward police should be called out for the hypocrisy that it is.

Deputy Editor Drew Belsky adds: The correction above – the bullseye graphic was superimposed on Gabrielle Giffords's congressional district among several others – really is worth noting vis-à-vis the yawning gulf between the right and the left on violent rhetoric.  If the bullseye had truly been on Gabrielle Giffords's face, leftists might have had a bit more justification in their caterwauling in 2011.  Today's story would be a "both sides have sinned" issue – both the left and the right say incendiary things sometimes, so we all need to engage in some self-reflection (or whatever).

But this is explicitly not a "both sides have sinned" issue.  Mainstream right-wing figures like Sarah Palin restrict themselves to general and generally accepted "election as battle" metaphors, whereas Black Lives Matter, now a mainstay group of the left, officially calls for the murder of police officers.  It's night and day.