For a short time the other day, the official homepage of the Maine Tea Party declared Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik their “Man Of The Year”.
Nice.
Tag right-wing violence
Imagine A Boot Stomping On A Human Face FOREVER
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.” — George Orwell
So I guess the Tea Party really IS the future of America.
Thanks to the current flood of posts and arguments about the Tea Party over at MetaFilter, last week I learned about a political movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s called Poujadisme. The movement is named after the man who created it, Pierre Poujade, and was a right-wing countermovement that sought to undo many post-war economic reforms in France. A lot of the rhetoric and ideology behind Poujade’s party, the UDCA (Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans), sounds very much like the complaints of the Tea Party, as this PoliticsUSA article explains. Robert Zaresky, a professor of French history, also explains the rise of the Poujadistes in this NYT op-ed from February.
In the face of incidents like the one in Kentucky this week and the illegal handcuffing and intimidation of a journalist at a Joe Miller campaign event in Alaska, there is the inevitable comparison being made between the Tea Party and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. I have even made this observation myself here, and I continue to believe that the parallels exist. However, I also now see that perhaps the parallel to the rise of the Nazis is merely one possible path, and the parallel to the Poujadistes another. The fulcrum that tips the balance one way or another is likely to be not the short-term outcome of next week’s election, but the longer-term outcome of what actually happens in government once the Tea Party candidates are installed in office. In the case of France and the Poujadistes, the advent of DeGaulle as president co-opted much of the nationalist and center-right elements back into mainstream politics, even as such individuals as Jean-Marie LePen were able to use the UDCA to launch their own more extreme parties. In the case of Germany, the much more radicalized political environment was poorly manipulated by the powers-that-be and in short order the Nazis had completely usurped them.
Even though I’m more than a little disquieted by the willingness of the current campaigns to flirt with violence, I am a bit relieved to learn that there is a way in which a group as unfocused as the Tea Party can be defanged a bit, even if it means having to put up with a much more explicitly right-wing government to mollify them. But I also remain convinced that the Tea Party harkens the specter of something far more sinister that could become an unstoppable force if they ever coalesce around a credible charismatic leader, which, luckily, they still have not done.
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Maybe We Don’t Need Them After All
Earlier in the week, there was a blog post by a guy who calls himself American Dad posting at Talking Points Memo called “An Open Letter To Conservatives”. In it, he offers a vast laundry list of all the appalling behavior, thuggish tactics, and outright terrorist acts that have been committed by elected Republican officials, right-wing “political action” groups, straight-up right-wing wackos, and that gaggle of morons known as “The Tea Party”. It’s a pretty damning list of lies, hypocrisies, petulant behavior, and serious acts of violence, and yet he says “we need you” to them, arguing that somewhere, somehow there is something beneficial about trying to reason with these people and bring them back into the fold of normal, civil, rational political debate.
And that sounds all nice and fuzzy and conciliatory and such, but I am here to tell you that it’s totally wrong-headed. We don’t need any of that bullshit, and to pretend that just sitting down over a cup of coffee with these people will turn them back into rational, thoughtful people who just differ a little bit in opinion is not only foolish, it is quite likely dangerous.
Since the passage of the health care legislation Sunday night, right-wing groups have begun shattering windows, tried to blow up the house of a Democratic member of Congress (except they got the wrong house and almost killed the guy’s brother and his family), and have instigated so many death threats against members of Congress that no fewer than 10 of them have had to be given round-the-clock police protection. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the looming threat of widespread right-wing violence and it’s beginning to look like the passage of the health care bill was exactly the match needed to set off their tinder.
So what can anyone expect to gain from trying to reason with people who have concluded that the best course of action is to threaten, intimidate, and kill? That’s not “meaningful political dialogue”, it’s terrorism plain and simple. “Conservatism” is a meaningless term in the present context, because there’s nothing conservative about the actions and agendas of these groups. Mollycoddling them with the notion that they might have something positive to offer is like hand-feeding steak to a starving grizzly bear.
The time has come to take a tougher stance in response to these people and instead of offering them a seat at the table, pushing them back under the rock they crawled out from.
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The Madness Of The Right
Getting a lot of attention this morning is a very disquieting piece in Mother Jones about the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia group that is attracting scores of ex-military and (even more disturbingly) law enforcement personnel in their efforts to prepare for “the coming tyranny”. We on the left have all had our jollies making fun of the pathetic Teabaggers, with their misspelled signs and their wacky conspiracies, but these people transcend the nonsense of political foolsmanship because they represent an actual danger to the public. Armed to the teeth, trained for military action, and blinded by ideology, they are the shock troops that would bring ordinary citizens to their knees in seconds if they ever decided to take things into their own hands.
Not getting much attention nationally, there was an arrest in tony Manchester-by-the-Sea here in Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago, where a guy was arrested because he had amassed a frickin’ arsenal in the basement of his house, preparing, he told his wife, for the imminent outbreak of hostilities. His wife actually called the cops and turned him in because she was concerned he was getting ready to start using the guns. Meanwhile, the daughter of the guy who flew his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas, called him a hero on national television (though she subsequently recanted that), and there is serious debate over whether or not the guy committed an act of terrorism, despite his actions meeting every single standard definition of the word, simply because he was a white guy and not an eeeeevil Muslim.
And all of this in the shadow of a pair of political conventions that legitimize and even overtly praise the behaviors and attitudes of these people, with a seemingly unending parade of politicians openly siding with them as they align themselves for the next couple of election cycles.
We can’t keep brushing these people off, dear readers. They are dangerous, they possess a disproportional amount of influence at a time of enormous instability in our political institutions, they have outright control of “the most trusted news source” in the country and have bent the rest of the media to bias in favor of them, and I genuinely believe that all it would take is for one leader figure who was remotely credible to emerge from the pack of idiots like Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Cheney, et.al. to ignite the entire thing like a match in a lake of gasoline. We are living on borrowed time, I believe, before this person appears.
The parallels to the situation in Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler are too strong not to mention, even though the mere invocation of Hitler’s name draws instant opprobrium. Hitler was shrugged off by “serious people” in Germany right up to the point that he suddenly won national office and could name his own terms with the struggling leadership. The economic conditions in this country may not have reached the desperate stages of hyperinflation, but 1 out of every 5 people of working age in this country are unemployed or underemployed, and there is little hope for any change in that condition for the foreseeable future. We are ripe for a right-wing demagogue, who can instantly bring to bear armed assistance of supporters numbering in the tens of thousands, and who would likely enjoy the popular approval of at least a full third of the population. Meanwhile, the erosion of checks and balances in our government, and the unchecked expansion of executive powers that began under the last administration and has found little-to-no recision in the present one would present an enormous opportunity to that individual to sweep away everything you and I might think is unshakable about American democracy.
It’s time to stop joking about these people, time to stop dismissing them as the lunatic fringe, and recognize that a clear and present danger exists. My own opinion is that we have gone too far down the road to be able to easily prevent a political upheaval, but it may still be possible to mitigate it, particularly as long as no charismatic leader arises to galvanize the situation. That day will come, however, as it inevitably does, as it always has throughout human history. Don’t close your eyes now, because the danger is right in front of you.
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Terror From Within
This post also appears today as a guest article at The Daily Clarity.
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. The mainstream media already have their retrospectives, their “where are they now” pieces, and their terribly thoughtful commentaries all put together and ready to bombard us with. Meanwhile, over the past month and a half a string of mass killings and murder-suicide incidents has taken more than twice as many lives as were lost in Littleton, Colorado that April day. Fourteen people diedjust as a result of the mass killing in Binghampton, NY two weeks ago and the latest incident over the weekend involved a Maryland man killing his wife and three young children before taking his own life. News coverage of such incidents has become so commonplace that the Maryland story barely registers in the collective consciousness of the media. Also in the last several weeks, the Department of Homeland Security released a report finding a significant rise in the activity of right-wing extremist groups. Despite receiving criticism for being “inflammatory”, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano justified the need to release the report before it could be bowdlerized to avoid such criticism because of the urgency of the issue — the growing likelihood that what is random violence on the part of disturbed individuals could snowball into organized violence on the part of disaffected groups united by their self-feeding paranoia and realized by hair-trigger situations.
Our cultural obsession with the potential for terror caused by the mysterious “other” — al Quaeda, Iran, Somali pirates — has rendered us nearly blind to the reality of the terror that we instill from within. The threats from outside remain nebulous at least and utterly imaginary at most, while the possibilities of violence against innocent people from disturbed individuals and groups within our own communities realize themselves with increasing frequency and horrifying regularity. Pundits and historians alike now commonly point to September 11, 2001 as the demarcation point for a new era in American society, yet few would choose April 20, 1999 or it’s almost-exactly corresponding predecessor, April 19, 1995 (the date of the Oklahoma City bombing), for the same milestone, despite the vastly more significant occurrence of violence against ourselves.
In a sense, our projection of the source of terror and violence onto whatever handy villain our leaders can provide is little more than an ages-old mechanism for focusing public attention to a political agenda; Americans have obediently changed the locus of their hatred and fear over almost a century from Germans to Japanese to Russians to Muslims as political expedience dictated. Indeed, the transition has been so seamless most of the time, that when the first President Bush needed a new villain, the effort of trying to pick one between Manuel Noriega, Muammar Gaddafi and then ultimately Saddam Hussein was almost comic. But the buffoonish machinations of governments and politicians obscure a much more complicated problem. Our projection of terror onto “the other” is a significant denial of the growing manifestation of terror and violence as commonplace elements of our own society.
For the time being, it is possible to ease the visceral response to events like Columbine or the Binghampton shooting as the acts of people with psychological problems. The regularity of such events, though, speaks to a growing acceptance of the conditions that create those psychological disturbances and even an amplification of them to the point that they result in violent outbursts. Now, we are also told by the very agency created in response to the singular events of 9/11 that we are crossing a threshold from individuals acting out in fear, despair, and paranoia to the organization of groups who share many of the same characteristics. The metamorphosis of terroristic violence from lone gunman to motivated group may only require a very small push, and it is clear that there are people actively hoping to put themselves in the forefront of those groups. It is too easy to look back over the last ten years and see the individual incidents as they have become part of our national life. Ten years hence, how likely will it be that we will be able to begin the retrospective of the list of homegrown terrorist attacks that will form yet a new element of our society.
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A Whole New Spin On The Phrase “Bully Pulpit”
There’s been some concern that the election of Barack Obama would send the right-wing fundie wack-job crowd (a.k.a. Sarah Palin voters) over the edge and trigger off a wave of violence. Indeed, right here in Massachusetts, on the day after the election, a black church in Springfield was deliberately set on fire and local officials have termed it a likely hate crime. Many news outlets are reporting a huge surge in the sale of automatic weapons, especially in “red” communities. The Secret Service has reported a marked increase in threats against Barack Obama’s life and says they may be attributable to the effect of those Sarah Palin campaign rallies. And earlier this week there was a story from the college town of Rexburg, Idaho, where a bus-load of school children were seen and heard chanting for the assassination of Barack Obama.
But who would have expected that among those spreading the hate would be Catholic priests?
One priest, Father Jay Scott Newman of Greenville, SC has told his parishioners that they’d better not stand up to receive Holy Communion in his church if they voted for Obama. He even posted this in an open letter to his parish on the church’s website.
Another priest, Father Sebastian Mayer of Fairfield, CA, publicly humiliated one of his parishioners in front of the assembled congregation at Mass for having Obama campaign signs on her vehicle, which was parked in the church parking lot. Then, on Wednesday morning, when contacted by a newspaper reporter about the story, the priest became verbally and physically abusive with the reporter.
Niiiiiiiiiice.
Oh, wait, I just remembered who would be all for this kind of bullying behavior from his minions…
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Slimier
Yeah, still not a political post, but I bet you can see where I’m going with today’s theme.
This post is actually a linkapalooza post of some assorted links, all of which revolve around the slimy things that ordinary people do…
We’ll start with one of the slimiest forms of humanity — the CEO. In this case, it’s the CEO of Washington Mutual, which went belly-up over the weekend. His name is Alan H. Fishman, and he became CEO and a member of WaMu’s Board of Directors on September 8 of this year. On September 25, a mere 17 days later, WaMu failed and was swallowed whole by JP Morgan Chase. Now, Mr. Fishman certainly can’t be pinned with any substantial blame for WaMu’s failure, having barely had time to find his was to the Executive Washroom yet, but he certainly didn’t suffer the loss too badly: for his 17 days on the job, Fishman collected a total of $19.1 MILLION between his severance package and his signing bonus. That’s 1.12 million dollars a day simply for being the guy who turned the lights out. If this man had a decent bone in his body, he would refuse the money or donate it to the bailout plan or something, but do not hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
The Consumerist spends a lot of time documenting the slimy practice of what they call “the grocery shrink ray” — that clever marketing technique that puts LESS product in the same old package and charges you the same old price. So, maybe the friendly local folks who run Gorton’s, which is still based in Gloucester, MA, thought they were being good guys when they opted NOT to put fewer fish sticks in each bag, but yesterday the Consumerist had an e-mail from someone who was asked to participate in a marketing study which offered these two different packages for fish sticks. As you can see, thanks to the helpful red arrow, the new packaging informs us that their fish sticks only contain 40% actual fish! Which, needless to say, should cause everyone to wonder what the hell the other 60% is made of. Now, obviously the bread-like coating makes up a significant portion of the rest, but is it really 60%? And if it is, shouldn’t the label call them “frozen bread sticks with fish” or some other more appropriate name? I guess I’m glad that the Gorton’s people are willing to be honest, but now maybe it’s time for them to go back and revisit their approach to food labelling in general.
Okay, no snarking for a moment. Via Daily Kos comes a disturbing story from Dayton, OH: someone sprayed some sort of gas or chemical into the day care area of the local mosque (pictured above). They sprayed it directly into the face of the young girl who was babysitting children while their parents attended Ramandan services. The girl told police it made her face feel like it was burning, and apparently some of the small children and an adult who was present also complained of symptoms. The Daily Kos poster and members of the Dayton mosque have speculated that the incident is related to a DVD that was distributed with the local Sunday newspaper this past weekend. The DVD was entitled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”.
The police say they don’t think it’s a “hate crime”, but how else do you explain this? “Haw, haw, just some kids getting out their jollies” does not cut it when something like this happens. For my money, this is nothing less than terrorism. It may not be blowing up a bus or flying a plane into a skyscraper, but it was done with the intent to frighten and discourage a specific group of people for no other reason than a political or racist agenda, and it has succeeded in chasing away innocent people from their community center by physical intimidation. A couple of years ago there was a big brouhaha in my hometown because somebody thought it would be a good idea to throw a pig head into the local mosque there — that’s a hate crime, and there have been a number of other incidents there, both serious and minor. many of which might be said to skirt the same threshold. Spreading the actual terror of the threat of being gassed, however, steps things up to a whole new level, and if the persons responsible are found, it wouls be a travesty of justice if they were not tried as terrorists.
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And So It Begins…
Looks like the first plot to assassinate Barack Obama got short-circuited by the Denver Police yesterday. At least, it’s the first plot that got far enough along to warrant arrests and generate any news coverage. The national news media aren’t paying much attention, though I did hear Chris Matthews mention it briefly last night while waiting for Ted Kennedy’s speech. From the looks of the mug shots and the video from the local Denver station with one of the suspects, it seems more like a bunch of redneck knuckle-draggers than any Karl Rove/Manchurian Candidate sort of plot, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy to put a gun in a guy’s hand.
The assassination factor has been deliberately underplayed by the Obama campaign, though it has occasionally bubbled up in the media (including Hillary’s unfortunate comment about RFK). I’m sure it has a good deal more frequency among those compassionate Christian gun-totin’ all-American red-staters who haven’t taken kindly to a nigra running for office. After all, Saint Rush himself has put out the word that it’s okay to admit that you’re scared of black people, and spends plenty of time every day making sure his listeners know that it’s a black man trying to take them over. Race-baiting is Item Number One in the Republican Playbook this year. By mid-October, I expect that Rush will spend his entire show shouting “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” into the microphone every single day until the election. He’s almost at that point now.
Assuming he’s elected (which I assume he will be), Obama will have to endure this threat with a full degree more of sincere concern than his predecessors. The threat of assassination has always been real, if quite remote, for presidents, but the barely-concealed racism in our society is so likely to lose its cloak of invisibility with a black president. Quite frankly, it surprises me that we’ve gotten all the way to the conventions with only one plot getting to this point. I have to imagine that other people have shot their mouths off (pun intended) about killing him, so these guys must have been doing more than thumping their chests at the local bar.
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I Wonder Where He Got THAT Idea…
This is the guy who shot up that Unitarian church in Tennessee over the weekend.
Via Alternet, here’s a blog post from a member of a political action site called “Brave New Films” that calls out the right-wing media for legitimizing Adkisson’s actions. There is absolutely no doubt that the shooter is suffering from psychological issues as a result of his personal situation, and might well have decided to start shooting at people anyway, but in his statement to the police he explicitly blamed the Democratic party, the media, and the “liberal movement”.
The police found copies of books by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage in Adkisson’s home. Here are just a few of the choice quotes from those gentlemen and some of their cohorts, as listed in the Brave New Films post:
“I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo — every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” — Sean Hannity
“To fight only the al-Qaeda scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders… Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that’s who.” — Michael Savage
“Liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces.” — Rush Limbaugh
“It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan.” — Bill O’Reilly
“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could.” — Glenn Beck
“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.” — Ann Coulter
“I don’t see any difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis.” — Bill O’Reilly
“The Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Oba — Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points.” — Rush Limbaugh
“There are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ‘em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t become the [House] speaker.” — Sean Hannity
Lots of people in this country are facing the same intense financial pressures that weighed so heavily on Adkisson’s mind, and there’s a pretty substantial number of people who listen to these despicable gasbags spew their hate and eat it up with a big ol’ spoon. Given the tendency for people to commit copy-cat crimes whenever some situation like this catches national media attention, I have to seriously wonder when the next right-wing nutjob is going to go postal and shoot up another church or college campus or fast-food restaurant because it’s too liberal for these assholes.