What’s the difference between Faux Nooz and a prostitute? I’d say prostitutes are more honest.
Category Archives: conservatism
Malkin et al. Admit That “Conservatives” Are Right-Wing Extremists and Potential Terrorists
Timothy McVeigh
Alex Koppelman writes at Salon that the Department of Homeland Security has issued a report to federal, state and local law enforcement regarding the threat of terrorism from right-wing extremists groups.
In Koppelman’s words, the report says “the political and economic climate today is similar to the one that fueled the militia movement — and, eventually, the Oklahoma City bombing — during the 1990s.” The DHS has no specific information of plans being made by rightwing groups. However, the DHS says it has reason to believe there is a wave of right-wing recruitment going on.
Naturally this has elicited no end of victimized, hysterical shrieking from wingnuts. For example, Malkin: Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real.
Bombed Abortion Clinic
According to Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake of the Washington Times, the DHS defines “‘rightwing extremism in the United States’ as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”
Therefore, according to Malkin (who assumes “right-wing” is a synonym for “conservative”), conservatives are racist haters who reject federal authority. What many of us have been saying all along, in other words. It was big of Little Lulu to admit it.
Lulu argues that “conservatives” are being “targeted” as part of an Obama campaign to smear the “tea parties,” even though the report has been in the works for a year. The DHS has also issued reports about potential left-wing terrorism, but Malkin says it’s not the same thing, because these reports were about specific groups. That may be; I don’t have a catalog of DHS warnings at hand. The Pentagon was keeping track of Quakers for a while, but you know Quakers. Sneaky sorts.
You can read the document under discussion here. It’s mostly saying that we’re facing conditions that historically have fomented right-wing extremism, so the DHS “will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization.”
In other words, the DHS is saying it has good reason to think right-wing radicalism will be an increasing problem in the foreseeable future, so law enforcement agencies need to stay on their toes to ascertain where a specific threat might be taking shape. As long as we’re not talking about violating individual rights — warrantless wiretaps, say — this just seems prudent and sensible.
Where Matthew Shepard Died
But I also think right-wing extremism in the U.S. is less confined to specific, easily delineated groups. It’s more likely to be a handful of guys who stockpile guns and fertilizer in their basements than an organized group with a name in the form of an acronym that has a website and sends out newsletters. But according to the Right, we’re not supposed to notice the guys who stockpile guns and fertilizer in their basements until they actually blow up a federal building. On the other hand, unarmed Muslims going about their lawful business are suspect, 24/7.
This goes along with the tendency of U.S. “conservatives” to take no responsibility for their own words and actions. Everything is always someone else’s fault.
Update: Great minds thinking alike — Dave Neiwert writes, “Conservatives indict themselves with shrieking over DHS report on right-wing terrorism.”
Malkin’s headline wails:
“The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real”
So, I have a question for Malkin: Are you saying that mainstream conservatives are now right-wing extremists?
Because, you know, the report — which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle — couldn’t be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is “rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language.
Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.
Because, you know, we always thought there was a difference between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives too. My new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, does explain that the distance between them has in fact shrunk considerably, thanks to the help of people like Malkin.
Update: More links —
Tbogg, It’s all fun and games until they start looking at the white man
Tim F., The Point (You’re Never Gonna Get It)
Glenn Greenwald, The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition
Believe It, or Not
A couple of days ago I lambasted this guy for being an idiot, but I realize now I was mistaken. He is a satirist. He is a brilliant satirist. A brilliant liberal satirist. It’s the only possible explanation for this.
Once you recover from reading the piece linked above (take your time), check out the Politico story that goes with this headline:
“Obama boosts anti-abortion efforts“
WTF, you say. Well, if you read the article, you find out that Obama has not betrayed his pro-reproduction rights campaign positions. Rather, he is “boosting” anti-abortion efforts by being pro-choice.
In that case, boost away, Mr. President.
The Big Tea(se)
Andrew Sullivan points out that the astroturf “tea parties” being organized and promoted mostly on Faux Nooz don’t seem to have a coherent purpose. They’re tea tantrums, not parties, he says.
What are they protesting? Tax hikes? Most of the people who will show up for the parties have just had their taxes cut. So scratch that. The big budget spending proposals and bank bailouts? Dudes, none of us likes running up the deficit and bailing out banks. It’s painful. It’s going to be hard to pay off that debt. But what are your workable alternative proposals to stimulating the economy and preventing the collapse of the banking system?
Cue: cricket chirps.
Finally, illegal immigration. A serious issue, but what did the Boston Tea Party have to do with that?
The Right Blogosphere responded to Sully mostly by calling him names (you guessed it; he’s not a “real conservative”) and throwing more tantrums. The most substantive response I could find still did not address much of what Sully wrote.
The Right expects a world-record tea party turnout on April 15, but just in case the parties fizzle, they’ve got an excuse ready — sabotage by ACORN infiltrators. I swear, ACORN is the new bogeyman.
The best part about all the attention the tea parties will get the next couple of days is that it will all be on film. The usual suspects are already trying to do damage control, pretending that they will have been infiltrated by no-gooders (who else- Soros funded ACRON!), but that is pure nonsense, and the country is going to get a good look at some pure, undiluted, right-wing crazy.
Pass the popcorn.
Red Alerts
Yesterday I described the partisans of the Right as being in a big potato sack race, hopping to crazyland. Well, this guy got there. He’s making a Big Bleeping Conspiracy Deal out of the fact that newspapers use press releases. I’m sure the same newspapers who are “complicit” in pushing the “radical” agenda of Families USA have also in the past published stories based on press releases from the “totally off the sanity charts” Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
(Do these people live in caves? They’re so … innocent of how the world actually works, one wonders.)
Another news story that’s got rightie panties in a twist is from Rasmussen: “Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism.” Younger people actually are evenly divided on the capitalism v. socialism question. The older the demographic, the higher the approval of capitalism over socialism. No big surprise.
I have words of comfort for those predicting the End of America — I doubt that most of the respondents know what “socialism” is any more than you do. I suspect only a very small portion of the respondents would say yes to the end of private ownership of property, for example.
But since the meatheads on the Right keep erroneously defining President Obama’s policy proposals as “socialism,” I can see how “socialism” might look good to a lot of people right now. It’s just that “socialism” isn’t really socialism. This country is no more going to embrace real, undiluted socialism than it’s going to fold itself up and fly to Jupiter. So chill.
Update: See also Chris Good and Melissa McEwan.
Hopping to Crazyland
Call it Clash of the Titan Wingnuts. Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged is accusing Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs of being an infiltrator, a neo-nazi, a fellow traveler of jihadists. Macranger calls CJ a “closet liberal” (ouch!).
Johnson actually said something sensible, which of course is beyond the pale for a wingnut. Commenting on a Politico piece called “Extremist rhetoric won’t rebuild GOP,” Johnson said,
This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP—unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.
Based on blog reaction to Johnson, we needn’t be concerned that the Right will take Johnson’s advice.
I want to shift gears for a moment and look at some numbers — Nate Silver shows us that the GOP has lost considerable popularity in recent years. “[T]hose persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened — and very conservative — lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten,” says Nate.
If you go to Pollingreport.com you can find a page with “Dem versus GOP” approval ratings going back several years. There have been more Dems than Republicans all along, but since the 1970s the Dems took a big dive in party dominance. However, in very recent years they’ve been coming back.
A question asked sporadically by the ABC News/Washington Post poll, “Overall, which party — the Democrats or the Republicans — do you trust to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?” shows the Dems consistently ahead going back to 1992, except for the years 2002 and 2003, when the GOP came way out on top. But by 2004 the Dems had the advantage again.
A Gallup question, “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” had the two parties evenly split, 42 to 42 percent, in 2002. But in 2007 the Dems were up, 54 to 34 percent.
So this movement in public opinion away from the GOP and toward the Dems isn’t something that just started this year. It appears it started in 2004. It just took awhile to become obvious even in mass news media.
At The New Republic, Chris Orr has an intriguing analysis of what’s happening on the Right. Essentially, the Right is already so marginalized its members have nothing else to do but compete with each other for position within the movement. And to do that they’re all trying to out-flank each other on the Right. So conservative politicians and media personalities are in a big potato sack race, hopping to Crazyland.
See also No More Mister Nice Blog.
Insanity Unleashed
Kevin Drum writes that the crazy Right is getting crazier.
A sense of besiegement has been the right’s stock in trade for as long as I’ve been alive.
But there is something different about their tone these days, and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there’s an inchoate quality to their fears that’s new.
See also “Scenes from the Real America” at the Washington Independent.
I don’t know that the wingnuts are any more “inchoate” than they’ve ever been. I don’t know that their problem is that they don’t have an enemy. I mean, who was their enemy in the 1990s? Bill Clinton, black helicopters, and the phantom liberal elite. Now they’ve got Barack Obama, Muslims, and the phantom liberal elite. What’s the diff?
Are they less sensible now than in their glory days when they stampeded us into Iraq or went after Dan Rather like a pack of rabid wolves? Yet there is a difference, as Gary Kamiya says.
With the collapse of the GOP into the party of Rush Limbaugh, and as Limbaugh and his ilk grow ever more reckless in their attacks on Obama, the boundaries between “respectable” right-wing paranoid hatred and “extreme” right-wing paranoid hatred are getting more blurred. Right-wing fanatic du jour Glenn Beck teased his recent Fox show with images of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin and said that he was wrong to say that Obama was leading America to socialism — because Obama is actually a fascist. “They’re marching us towards 1984,” Beck intoned. “Big Brother, he’s watching.”
I think the real difference is that, deep down, they know they’ve lost. They can’t admit it to themselves. They are still blustering as if they represent mainstream America. They still pretend to themselves the majority of Americans give a bleep what they think.
© Figrolls | Dreamstime.com
President Obama is popular. Legislation gets passed without conservative votes. The nation is not in shock and awe of, or even paying attention to, their “tea parties.”
Remember back in January, when the stimulus bill passed in the House with no Republicans votes? For a time House Republicans seemed actually proud of themselves for standing together. Then they noticed nobody but them cared how they voted.
They threaten to “go Galt.” America says fine; go right ahead. Don’t let the door hit your butt on your way out.
This is the real danger. They still have the sense of besiegement, but before 2006 they felt they had power, and that they represented the mainstream. Now about all they have is paranoia and guns.
Watch your back.
O noez!! Scandal!
So the headline on Ben Smith’s blog at The Politico says the FBI has raided the office of an Obama appointee. Two people were arrested on bribery charges. Rightie response: Christmas just came early.
But, wait … the office was not the Obama appointee’s office, but his former office.
The office was that of the chief technology officer for Washington, DC. An Obama appointee, Vivek Kundra, served in that position until February 4. After February 4, I assume, he vacated the office. Or, according to other stories, Kundra resigned just last week, after he was hired by the Obama Administration to be the Federal Chief Information Officer. I assume eventually the time discrepancy will be straightened out.
Today, FBI agents raided the Washington technology office, hereafter called the WTO, and arrested one employee and one private contractor. The employee, Yusuf Acar, is an information systems security officer in the D.C. government.
As far as anyone knows at this time, Vivek Kundra is not part of the investigation. We may learn otherwise in the future. Or, we may learn that Kundra was a whistle blower who led the FBI to the criminals. Or that he didn’t know anything about it. Whatever. In right-wing lore, Kundra will forevermore be a corrupt bribe-taker.
Health Care Scare
Ezra Klein talks about “zombie lies that will not die.” He links to a ridiculous Bloomberg article by Amity Shlaes, who raises the dreadful specter of “government-run health care,” which I assume is a system in which heartless government bureaucrats decide what medical treatments you will receive. This would be a huge departure from our current system, in which heartless insurance company employees decide what medical treatments you will receive.
Shlaes writes,
The administration seems almost to relish the sinister aspect of government-run health care. Otherwise it wouldn’t have created a position called “National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.†That’s a title worthy of Rhineheart, Neo’s boss, who tells him, “This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole.â€
Ezra writes,
This idea that the stimulus bill “created a position” called “National Coordinator of Health Information Technology” got its start in another Bloomberg column written by Betsy McCaughey. She called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology a “new bureaucracy.”
But this just isn’t true. It’s not sort of true or arguably true or caught in arguments about the nature of truth. George W. Bush created the position of National Coordinator of Health Information Technology in 2004. Five years ago. The current director of the office is a Bush appointee by the name of Robert Kolodner. He has served there since 2006. He exists. If you prick him, he will bleed. If you touch him, he will recoil, because he is subject to our laws of space and time and as such was not somehow created by President Obama back when George W. Bush occupied the Oval Office.
What passes for “opinion” in wingnut world comes from the Pan’s Labyrinth dreamworld they live in. Don’t even try to make sense of it.
Elsewhere in Bloomberg News, John F. Wasik writes a nice piece about single-payer.
In a “Medicare-for-all†program, care would be publicly financed and privately delivered. You would keep your own health- care providers and hospital. The government wouldn’t dictate who your doctor is or choose your hospital. It would be acting more like a huge purchaser bargaining for the best treatment and drugs at the lowest price. …
…There would be a national market and regulation for health policies and no one could be denied affordable coverage. No more “cherry-picking†of only the healthiest people and rejection of the sickest or those with chronic conditions.
Wow, think of that.
Of course, even if their ideas are absurd, the fact that the Right is proposing changes means that we’ve progressed from the position they held as recently as the 1990s, and probably into the 2000s, which was that the health care system we have is just fine the way it is, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe George H.W. Bush used those very words in his re-election campaign against Bill Clinton.
With wingnuts, things have to get this bad before they acknowledge there’s a problem. On the other hand, they are grand at making up phantom problems (e.g., Saddam Hussein is going to nuke us) and flogging them ceaselessly. But real problems are uninteresting to them.
In other words, they get worked up over imaginary monsters under the bed and don’t notice the roof is coming off the house.
That’s why Tom Friedman shouldn’t be surprised. He writes today about the financial crisis:
Friends, this is not a test. Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. …
… Yet I read that we’re actually holding up dozens of key appointments at the Treasury Department because we are worried whether someone paid Social Security taxes on a nanny hired 20 years ago at $5 an hour. That’s insane. It’s as if our financial house is burning down but we won’t let the Fire Department open the hydrant until it assures us that there isn’t too much chlorine in the water. Hello?
See also Paul Krugman, “Can America Be Saved?”
Crazy Day
I’m sorry to leave this site hanging. I’m having a crazy day, with things getting published and unpublished. I may have more to say later.
I will only comment briefly on Steve Benen’s post on the Right’s outraged surprise at President Obama’s stem cell decision. The Right is acting as if Obama had promised not to mess with Bush’s stem cell policy, but as Steve says, Obama clearly said during the campaign that he would change it just as he did change it.
I don’t think they are really surprised. I think it’s just part of their feigned outrage shtick. Utterly phony.
Update: I’ve written in the past about why I think embryonic stem cell research is moral and stopping it out of some rigid absolutist position is immoral. But if you want to see what is self-evidently wrong with it, see “Vetoing Henry” by Laurie Strongin in the July 23, 2006 Washington Post.
“The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.” — Robert Aitken Roshi, The Mind of Clover
B.