Speaking of the ghost of Joe McCarthy (see previous post), Joe Klein writes,
I was at a Blanche Lincoln town hall meeting in Russellville, Arkansas, yesterday–and the number of people who believe that the President has larded the government with communists (!) was astonishing. One woman said there were four known communists in the government and that she’d researched it on the internet. When I asked her afterwards, she said environmental adviser Van Jones, legal advisor Cass Sunstein (who was last spotted being excoriated by the left for supporting the FISA revisions), someone named Lloyd and she didn’t remember the fourth. And wasn’t it suspicious that Obama had all these czars working for him–that was a Russkie commie term, wasn’t it? When I asked, the woman admitted that, among other things, she occasionally listened to William Bennett’s conservative radio show. I pointed out that Bennett had once been the Drug Czar, appointed by Ronald Reagan. Life sure can be complicated sometimes.
I love the czar story.
Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary…and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal–rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below.
Considering that for the past few years Klein willingly helped dismantle the brakes — thanks for starting to catch on, Joe.
Also, right now the righties are going ballistic because White House green jobs adviser Van Jones signed a “truther” statement in 2004. You know I have no patience for truthers, but the statement being linked to that Jones signed is not as full-out crazy as truthers usually get.
It does not say that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the World Trade Center towers collapsed from a secret planned demolition, or that the airplanes that struck the towers were holograms timed to cover up the detonation of explosives planted in the towers, or that the New York Fire Department was in on the conspiracy to destroy Tower 7. No; this is how it starts out —
An alliance of 100 prominent Americans and 40 family members of those killed on 9/11 today announced the release of the 911 Truth Statement, a call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. The Statement supports an August 31st Zogby poll that found nearly 50% of New Yorkers believe the government had foreknowledge and “consciously failed to act,” with 66% wanting a new 9/11 investigation.
Read the whole thing; it’s “out there” but not utterly lunatic.
We know that before 9/11 there were all manner of warnings of an impending terrorist attack hurled at the Bushies by foreign governments and by our own intelligence operatives. It is a plain fact that the government DID have some foreknowledge of the attacks and “consciously failed to act.”
Now, I do not believe they had specific, detailed knowledge of what was planned. Bush was too obviously caught flat-footed by the attacks; if he’d been prepared, he would have had a fake bravado act ready on Day One. As it was, it took him at least three days to pull one together. But there were warnings up the wazoo that a terrorist attack was impending, and it was understood by some in U.S. intelligence that such an attack could involve hijacked airplanes. This, again, is plain fact. Another president — a competent one — would have been busting chops, as they say in New York, and telling NORAD and the FAA and everybody else to step up and stay alert.
But the Bushies did nothing. I personally think they failed to act because the entire White House national security team, plus the President and Vice President, had their heads shoved up their asses. Subsequent behavior by the Bushie team (e.g., the response to Katrina) revealed the lot of them to be world class heads-up-ass shovers. So it could be debated they did not consciously fail to act; but rather failed to act because they were largely unconscious to anything not on their political agenda to-do list.
However, although I think it’s unlikely, I have never ruled out the possibility that the Bushies acted out of a deliberate calculation that a terrorist attack would be politically useful. (Again, what might be called the Bushies’ second-wave response to Katrina was a political calculation to make Louisiana Govenor Blanco look bad. And this political calculation probably cost some people their lives.) If this was the case with 9/11 we’ll never know, but if it was, I doubt they imagined the attack would be anywhere near as massive as it was.
So I don’t find the 2004 truther statement particularly shocking. There was a time I might have signed it myself, and I genuinely dislike truthers.
However, how come it’s OK for Republicans to throw a screaming fit because someone questioned Dear Leader Bush, but it’s OK for the Right to step up to the line of inciting violence against President Obama every time the man so much as blows his nose?
Update: Steve Benen writes,
It’s possible that Arkansas is just uniquely strange right now.
The entire Ozark Mountain region is uniquely strange, and always has been. I have first-hand knowledge of this.
The crazies have a political party, a cable news network, and a loud, activist base. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take their medications anymore.
Today’s quote, I’d say.
On and on and on the discussion goes, illuminating how the Republican party intentionally incites their fringe. Surely, most can see what they’ve become. Do they believe that this can be a winning hand for them?
I’m sure hoping that they fall short in numbers when it comes election time. If these tactics really do stem their decline in Congress then it is they and the extremists they enable who will have the last laugh.
Pew cited declining poll numbers for Obama but that is hardly due to defections to the Republicans but rather defections from Obama’s base to…uh, nowhere? …anywhere but the right. Olbermann suggests that he might face solid primary opposition in 2012.
..sure hope he knocks it out of the park with his address to joint session of congress.
There were conspiracy theories about everything from the sinking of the Maine, to Pearl Harbor, to JFK’s, MLK’s and RFK’s assassinations, and to 9/11. People want tragic events that cost lives to have some simple cause – a conspiracy. There should be a cause and effect, not some random happening.
All of the above conspiracy theories are the logical, or illogical, consequence of reaction to an event that happened.
Now, to our NEW conpiracy theory. And this is something new. One that WILL take place soon: That in next weeks speach to the nations school children, President Obama will try to indoctrinate America’s youth to socialism, and try to enlist them in an Obama Youth, or Obama Corps.
Uhm, aren’t we putting the conspiracy cart before the conspiracy horse?
I’d ask just how stupid, ignorant, or insane one would have to be to believe such a thing, but I’ve lived in this country too long to underestimate “The Crazy” and peoples willingness to swallow it – even without a teaspoon of sugar to help it all go down.
Most of this bullshit is being driven by FAUX news, more specifically Glenn BecKKK. Van Jones used to front the group color of change (of which I donated some $$$, does that make me an evil facist), the group that has organized BecKKK’s ad boycotts. This whole Obama indoctrinating the children bullshit was a product BecKKK’s and little Lulu’s over-active imaginations. Why is the mainstream news cycle being influenced if not directed by these wing-nut blow hards?
I have watched a video over at Google, “9/11 Press for Truth.” This documents the coming together of several widows of husbands that died that day, and their efforts in organizing to ask for loose ends and gaps in the record to be filled in, especially gaps left by the 9/11 Commission.
Now I think Popular Mechanics website did a credible attempt to gather data about the claims and crazy of the Truthers, and like you Barbara, secret demolitions are not my thing. But once I watched this video I agreed there were gaps and loose ends, and I was quite curious. I could feel the pull to the paranoia and the ut-ohhh that wanted to come roaring up. I dig where the Truthers get their mojo flowing although its misplaced and indulgent.
As to the Obama school thingee: out here in West Texas we gots us sum Pate-tree-ots, and by God, they have stampeded the school board in this here little town and we won’t be having no communist, mind controlling child corruption in our schools, no sir, been banned!
And it not the speech mind you, its the cur-rick-lum and that idee of wot our children can do for this socialist commie Pres-dent, and thinking he is gonna do this without asking the parents per-miss-shun, NO SIR, not while the sun still shines on free men.
DoubleCinco — one of the several reasons the hard-core truthers infuriated me is that there were and still are some matters of what happened on 9/11 that are not clear and for which no one has answered. I think the 9/11 Commission barely scratched the surface, and there are a few details of the original report that I think need to be re-examined. But the truther insanity has so poisoned the well that you can’t bring up even sensible questions about 9/11 without being called a truther, which is what I had feared.
One woman said there were four known communists in the government and that she’d researched it on the internet.
What the piece doesn’t say is that the woman first fell asleep to the radio, awoke to an old Bing Crosby tune, and believed herself to have gone back in time to 1949. Not surprising, really. It also happened to Homer Simpson once; it’s a common hazard among cartoon characters. It’s not clear how she accessed the Internet in 1949; but then, everything’s elastic in cartoons.
They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take their medications anymore.
This should be on T-shirts. I’d buy a dozen.
I know folks here have read Dr. Bob Altemeyer’s free online book, The Authoritarians, but even without the added new material in the Intro this excellent work would be worth a re-read. As DR. Bob so clearly illustrates: If authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant.
Sometimes, just for our own mental health, we need to be reminded of the fact that these people march to a different reality–on an alien planet.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
I think the Bushies ignored the bin Laden warnings because they were convinced that only nation states (like Saddam’s Iraq) could represent a threat. They simply didn’t believe that an independent terrorist group could damage the US, and their minds were totally closed on the issue, even though there were plenty of experts (not to mention the Clinton team during the transition) desperately telling them that bin Laden was a real threat. A lot of people paid a huge price for their unwillingness to listen to other opinions.
The word “czar” is a media fabrication which means exactly nothing. It originally was applied to people who were appointed to coordinate various segments of the bureaucracy in relation to a particular issue of set of issues (drugs, energy). Now the label seems to be stuck on to anybody recruited for a specific task, without regard to any coordination function. Naturally there are more “czars” than before because the use of the word has broadened.
Also, the word implies some kind of autocratic power when nothing could be further from the truth. Most people in “czar”-like jobs have become very frustrated in their inability to move the bureaucracy.
Of course the right latches onto any buzz word they can milk for fear power.
Truthers?
I’ve always been of the opinion that even if Bu$hco had nothing to do with 9-11 (if) they sure took full political advantage of it and used it to enrich themselves (haliburton) and their buddies (blackwater). So whats the difference?
The word “czar†is a media fabrication which means exactly nothing.
Oh no Virginia.. It means the recipient of that title has landed themselves a political plum appointment where their only obligation is to collect a big fat paycheck and strut around like they know what they're doing, or that they could possibly achieve an impossibility.
When I look back at Gen, Barry McCaffrey and his appointment as Drug Czar, and the totality of his accomplishments in the capacity as Czar I realized that although a Czar is nothing …it still remains something, and hence my description thereof.
If you saw ‘Mississippi Burning’, there’s a line:
“If you aint better than a nigger, who are you better than?” Gene Hackman plays an FBI agent who is talking about his daddy who decades before poisoned the mule of a colored farmer who was getting ahead. The FBI agent is trying to try to explain the drives behind racism to his Yankee boss.
Of course, full-blown KKK racism is out of fashion, but the mental mechanics of identifying your ‘place’ in society can be just as warped now as it was in the 60’s. It’s just a little more subtle. If you measure your rung on the social ladder by reference to the bottom rung of the ladder, then if all the people on the bottom rung move up, you feel like you just fell. This is an illusion – you still have the same job, the same house, the same health insurance. For those who grew up in a culture of looking down on some other ‘tribe’, the feeling of falling is quite real and frightening. The reaction is natural and normal – you can’t let the location of the bottom rung rise. Not ever.
Those of us on the left, for the most part, identify our ‘place’ in a variety of ways. Where we started compared to where we are, or guaging our progress against our goals. But generally, we on the left don’t see ourselves as part of a tribe competing against other tribes. The measure of my success is not computed by the misery index of the tribe I hate.
Death is the great equalizer – it’s where we will all end this lap around the track. But if you are of the ‘tribe’ who has wealth &/or comprehensive medical insurance, you can avoid some pain, when those of the tribe you hate will suffer. Sometimes you can cheat death this time, when those of the other tribe in the same circumstances as you are – will die.You have proven by their pain that you are better. And this negro president would allow those unworthy, unwashed heathen acess to YOUR doctor, to YOUR hospital. Like HELL he will!
There’s an insidious, invisible caste system in this society. Conservatives love the metaphor of the “Great Melting Pot”. People from different cultures come to this land and are immersed in the pot of democracy and come out Americans. Of course what they mean is – you come out thinking and sounding and acting like a WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Liberals introduced the concepts of ‘Multi-culturalism’ and ‘Diversity’ which suggest you can maintain your ethnicity and still be American.
The WASP peasants sense that their advantaged status is threatened. Estimates are that in 2050 the WASP culture will not be a majority. To quantify their reation of ultra-conservatives in scientific terms, they’re freakin’ out. It’s going to get a lot more crazy – we are seeing the tip of a dangerous iceberg. The less control these people sense they have, the more frantic and irrational they will become.
I wish I could close this with something encouraging. IMO, the only thing that might mitigate the hysteria is a solemn promise that the perceived status of WASP dominance is not threatened – But it aint so. Get ready for the crazy years – it’s just beginning, and it won’t look like anything we’ve ever experienced before.
Doug,
From what I recall of my Roman history, it was much the same there towards the end of the empire. People from all over the territories that Rome had conquered had settled in the capitol and other major cities, and the “true” Romans became outnumbered. This caused problems in society and in the military.
Covering that is WAY too long for a post, and there are many differences, yet some parallels are striking. I may read up a bit on it when I have some time, in the spirit of “those who do not learn from history…”
Not that it means a great deal in the larger stupidity of the story, but the Czars were booted by the Rooski Commies.