The Right Blogosphere is in a feeding frenzy after someone discovered that White House “green jobs” consultant Van Jones signed a “truther” statement in 2004. As I pointed out in the last post, the “truther” statement in question is not as insane as most truther statements are, so I’m not too concerned about it.

But now rightie blogger Gateway Pundit believes he found damning evidence that Van Jones was part of the Truther movement in its infancy. This is in the form of a document at Rense.com dated September 2, 2002, that announces a march in San Fransisco calling for a congressional inquiry into September 11. You know, like the 9/11 Commission that victims’ widows like Kristen Breitweiser had to fight the White House tooth and nail to get started.

People forget that in those days there were moderate elements of what came to be called the “truther” movement. These were not the hard core who insist 9/11 was an “inside job” and the WTC towers came down by controlled detonation. Rather, these were people who felt that what media had written about 9/11 didn’t add up, and believed the Bush White House was at least guilty of gross negligence for ignoring warnings about a terrorist attack.

In 2001 and 2002 the moderate truthers and the 9/11 families calling for a congressional commission were working together loosely and dragging around the same or a similar set of questions they wanted answered. Some of these questions eventually were passed on to and addressed by the 9/11 Commission.

If pushing for a 9/11 Commission makes someone a Truther, then I argue 9/11 Commission Chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton must be Super Truthers.

If it turns out that Jones really does believe 9/11 was an “inside job,” then I’d be among the first to question his judgment. But so far I’m not seeing that.

Update: Although there was talk of an “inside job” on 9/11 almost immediately after the attacks, if I can believe my own archives, the Truther “inside jobers” didn’t completely swamp the “truth commission” movement until 2006. I had thought it was earlier than that, but maybe not.

Update: Chris Good reports, “This morning, ABC’s Jake Tapper reported that Jones was on the “organizing committee” of a 2002 march in San Francisco demanding a congressional inquiry into 9/11.” Wow, a congressional inquiry into 9/11. How shocking. Not. Am I the only one who remembers how people had to fight to get the White House to agree to the 9/11 Commission?

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.

A Famous Pundit said:

Have you noticed that we’ve moved from the age of the culture wars to the age of the presidency wars? Have you noticed that the furious arguments we used to have about cultural and social issues have been displaced by furious arguments about the current occupant of the Oval Office?

It’s obvious that, for the Right, the health care debate is not about the health care debate. It is about the eternal Zoroastrian struggle between Good and Evil.

The Right’s new pop culture hero is William Rice, who yesterday lost part of a finger to the Cause. The takeaway line from an interview with Neil Cavuto was “freedom is not free.”

And there is no free lunch, all roads lead to Rome, and the the first rule of Fight Club is–you do not talk about Fight Club. These are all equally rational explanations of why Rice was compelled to throw two punches at another man who allegedly called him an “idiot.”

Rice continued, “I think health care is how we are being diverted while the government grabs what’s left of our freedom away from us.” This was a few hours after Rice relied on Medicare for treatment of his injured hand because, he admits, he had no other options.

Meanwhile, the President of the United States announces he will give America’s schoolchildren a back-to-school pep talk about the importance of doing well in school, and the Right goes bat-bleeping postal and screams about “indoctrination.” School districts in six states are refusing to show the message. Joan Walsh reports, “Crazy Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin are raging against ‘indoctrination’ while Townhall’s Meredith Jessup is calling it ‘a massive abuse of government power.'”

Presidents have made similar addresses to schoolchildren in the past, notably Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Walsh also reminds us that in one of his speeches George W. Bush called on the nation’s children to help him win the war on terror, and no one complained about that. But when President Obama wants to tell children to do well in school, it’s “indoctrination” and “a massive abuse of government power.”

And you have to ask, in what universe would that be true? And the answer is, a universe in which the POTUS was not legitimately elected, but instead was installed in the White House by means of a coup d’état backed by evil foreign powers. Thus, William Rice actually fancies himself to be some kind of freedom fighter for trying to block health care reform.

And, yes, racism is a component in this, but I don’t think it’s the only component. A President Hillary Clinton would be getting equally hysterical pushback every time she so much as brushed her teeth. A white male Democratic president would be getting the Bill Clinton treatment. In this case, however, the President’s race makes the manipulators’ job a bit easier.

Famous Pundit continues,

The fundamental argument in the presidency wars is not that the president is wrong, or is driven by a misguided ideology. … The fundamental argument now is that he is illegitimate. He is so ruthless, dishonest and corrupt, he undermines the very rules of civilized society.

To the warrior, politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It’s not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently. …

The warriors have one other feature: ignorance. They have as much firsthand knowledge of their enemies as members of the K.K.K. had of the N.A.A.C.P. In fact, most people in the last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it’s the haters themselves.

Famous Pundit, btw, is our old friend David Brooks, from 2003. He was reacting to a piece by Jonathan Chait in the New Republic called “The Case For Bush Hatred: Mad About You.” Here is the rhetoric Brooks singled out as the “core threat to democracy”:

“I hate President George W. Bush,” Jonathan Chait writes in a candid piece in The New Republic. “He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school ? the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks. . . . I hate the way he talks. . . . I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.”

If you read Chait’s piece, it’s actually a fairly balanced acknowledgment that some on the Left were allowing hatred of Bush to override their judgment. But he went on to express, candidly and reasonably accurately, what Bush and the Bush Administration represented to us lefties in 2003.

However, at no point did Chait call for taking action to make the Bush Administration fail. Merely expressing hatred of Dear Leader was a “core threat to democracy.”

Frankly, I don’t give a bleep if William Rice or Neil Cavuto or Michelle Malkin or anyone else hates Barack Obama, for whatever reason. If that’s how they feel, that’s how they feel. And I don’t mind if they write nationally published columns saying how much they hate Barack Obama. It’s called “free speech.” Democracy has taken bigger blows and survived.

However, today a large number of media and political elites are sending big, honking signals to the William Rice’s of America that the President of the United States is an enemy of the nation who must be stopped by any means necessary. This is a real core threat to democracy.

Yes, we’ve always had paranoid whackjobs in America. Joe McCarthy made his name in history for shamelessly fanning the flames of paranoia and then exploiting them to further his political career. And for a time part of the Republican Party, including people who must have realized he was seriously unglued, supported McCarthy.

During the 1952 presidential campaign McCarthy issued a blistering attack on Gen. George Marshall, saying Marshall was “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man.” McCarthy’s power was such that Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign managers compelled him to strike a paragraph from a speech that defended Marshall, because standing up to McCarthy might cost Eisenhower the election. Eisenhower genuinely hated McCarthy and regretted the deletion of the paragraph for the rest of his life.

But McCarthy’s reign of terror was short-lived, and in the decades after, McCarthyism came to be seen as a moment of insanity from which the nation recovered.

But today the entire leadership of the Right — congresspersons and senators, spokespeople, the Republican Party, media personalities — have become an army of Joe McCarthys. And no one stands up to them.

Joan Walsh continues,

And lest you dismiss these rantings as confined to the lunatic fringe and ratings-crazed talk-show hosts, the backlash has had an effect. First, after school administrators in mostly red states expressed concerns about exposing kids to the speech without knowing what’s in it, the president’s office said he’d make it available on Monday so they can read it in advance. OK, that’s nice of the president, but is anybody else a little rattled that some right-wing bullies appointed the nation’s unelected school administrators to vet our president’s speech?

We should be rattled, yes. The extend to which the nation accepts this bullying as normal is a core threat to democracy.

See also:

Max Blumenthal, “Ike’s Other Warning.”
Glenn Greenwald, “Deleting the Bush Personality Cult from history“

Everyone agrees that a man’s finger was bitten off during a health care reform rally. But U.S. politics being what they are, the facts of who bit whom and who is at fault are hotly contested.

So far, mainstream media and liberal bloggers agree that a pro-reform rallyer was moving through or near a group of anti-reform rallyers to get to the pro-reform group when he was savagely attacked by an anti-reform rallyer, and that in the scuffle the pro-reform guy bit off the finger of the anti-reform guy. Chris Good at the Atlantic quotes from eyewitness accounts, one from the blog DrumsnWhistles (which is a bit slow to open, probably because it’s being slammed with hits):

The man in the orange shirt hit the pro-reform guy (I’m going to call him PR Guy just to keep the players straight). Hard. … He punched him in the face, knocked him to the ground and into that thruway. As you can see from the photo, cars drive straight through that without stopping. The pro-reform guy could have been run over. He got up, tried to get back up on the curb, but Orange Shirt guy was in his face. Finger in his face, PR Guy standing, steps up to the curb, and there’s a scuffle. Orange shirt seemed to have PR Guy in a hold, but again, I was across the street, so won’t state that as absolute fact. Next thing I see is PR Guy’s hat being tossed into the street, both yelling at one another, then Orange shirt walks away, PR Guy picks up hat and crosses to our side.

When he gets to our side, he tells a story in one sentence: “He punched me hard, straight in the face, so I bit his finger off.”

Honestly, I thought he was exaggerating. I guess he wasn’t.

This is the only photo I could find, which apparently is a shot of the anti-reform group taken from across the street by someone with the pro-reform group. The guy in the orange shirt is either the victim or the perpetrator, depending on who you believe. The pro-reform rally was sponsored by Moveon, which has issued a statement deploring violence.

Right-wing commentators are already in full-scale whiny victim mode, as if the pro-reform guy suddenly and without provocation leaped across the street and bit a finger off an innocent and peacefully protesting anti-reform guy. This from the alleged advocates of “personal responsibility.”

However, one rightie site is going with the story that it was the Moveon member who crossed the street and attacked a peaceful, minding-his-own-business anti-reform protester, and that it was the Moveon member who lost his finger. “Police reports concur that the Obama supporter moved across the street into the group of protesters,” says Politics Daily. However, the link anchored to the word “concur” went to a news story that said nothing of the sort.

Anyway, the Politics Daily headline is “Protester Bites off Finger of Obama Supporter at Health Care Rally,” which is the opposite of what the sources the article links to say happened. But some rightie bloggers are dutifully picking up the Politics Daily version of who bit whom and are complaining how everyone else is getting the facts wrong.

And have I saved a screen grab of the Politics Daily page for posterity? You betcha.

KTLA News of Los Angeles assures us the 65-year-old who lost his finger is being treated via Medicare.

I do not approve of biting people’s fingers off except in self-defense. However, I hope I live long enough to see the day when a right-winger actually takes responsibility for his own actions. I know; when pigs fly.

Update:

By tomorrow morning, if not already, there will be more separate and conflicting eyewitness reports of the incident than there were people present at the incident. However, I wanted to repeat this bit from an interview with the man who was bitten, who admits he threw the first punch. He said the PR guy (who was from Code Pink) had called him an idiot:

Although he did not plan to protest Wednesday, Rice said, he’s opposed to government involvement in general, except for mail service and the military.

“It doesn’t have any business in anybody’s healthcare,” he said.

Rice acknowledged he used the Medicare he gets as a senior when he went to the hospital Wednesday. He said it was the first time he used the program, to which he remains adamantly opposed.

“If I had any other options, I would not have used it, even though I pay for it,” he said.

And someone called him an idiot. Imagine.

Former Bush speechwriter and neocon apologist Michael Gerson writes,

It is extraordinary — just extraordinary — that George Will should write a column urging American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan without mentioning the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It is as though Walter Lippmann urged his readers, in confronting the Japanese threat of the early 1940s, to forget Pearl Harbor.

It should be more difficult to forget 9/11 than it apparently is — the goodbye calls, the leaps from fire toward death, the continental economic consequences. The Afghan war was undertaken because the Taliban government, under Mullah Omar, sheltered a dozen al-Qaeda terrorist training camps that produced 10,000 to 20,000 fighters, some of whom were human weapons aimed at American citizens.

Well, yes, Gerson, that was why the Afghan war was undertaken. But that was eight years ago.

My understanding is that Bush Administration initiated the strike in 2001 using military plans left over from the Clinton Administration, drawn up after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Whether the plans were the optimum ones for conditions that existed in the fall of 2001 is a point I’m sure historians will debate.

The original military action in Afghanistan was limited to U.S., British and other special forces troops working with the Northern Alliance. This action had the appearance of a great and relatively easy success. It liberated (temporarily) a great many people from the reign of terror of the Taliban, who are really, really bad. It damaged the operational capabilities of the al Qaeda organization as it existed at that time.

But Afghanistan had been a political and economic wreck for many years, and putting it through the motions of being a democratic republic didn’t make it so. One reason the initial military action seemed successful is that the Taliban, for the most part, didn’t put up a fight but simply disassembled itself and re-blended into the general population. The Bushies also put way too much trust and invested way too much responsibility in the government of Pakistan, which contained large factions of Taliban supporters. So the Taliban were not so much defeated as they were temporarily inconvenienced.

And al Qaeda itself (the real one, not the “al Qaeda in Iraq” that didn’t exist as such before the U.S. invasion and which is only very, very loosely, if at all, connected to the al Qaeda that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks) still exists and is now operating out of Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

It is possible that no occupational force could have prevented a Taliban comeback, because political and economic conditions that had allowed the Taliban to take control in the first place didn’t substantially change after 2001. However, the U.S. and British forces that lingered in Afghanistan after 2001 had no coherent political or military strategy that, even theoretically, would have allowed us to leave Afghanistan eventually with the Taliban contained. So … FAIL.

U.S. neocons, who collectively can make a bag of hammers seem precocious, checked Afghanistan off their “to do” list and moved on to their long-time priority, Iraq. For most of the past several years, while most attention has been focused on Iraq, occasional news articles warned that the Taliban were re-taking Afghanistan. But righties stuck their fingers in their ears and went la la la I can’t hear you whenever one attempted to point that out to them.

Last year, the Obama campaign said many times that the Bushies were wrong to take their focus off Afghanistan to invade Iraq. Well, yes. Duh. However, we cannot turn back the clock to October 2001 and get a cosmic do-over. The initial reasons, right or wrong, for initiating a military action in Afghanistan are now matters of history. What needs to be clarified are the purposes our military are serving in Afghanistan now and if there is an alternative — other than just quitting — to years of bloody and fruitless occupation. (I’d prefer the just quitting, frankly.)

I appreciate that there are real global security benefits to rendering Afghanistan into a reasonably stable and not-terrorist-ridden country. Maybe that end could have been achieved had strong and smart policies been executed in 2001 and 2002. However, they were not, and I question whether any military or nation-building effort will succeed going forward from here.

Further, even if there were such a policy, the Bush Administration’s eight years of mismanagement and profligacy has left us with diminished capacity for military and nation-building efforts.

The Obama Administration announced its Afghanistan policy last March. The President said then that failure in the region would be a threat to nations around the world, and he may be right. But I question if there is much the United States can do about it. Maybe I’m wrong. But I really would like to see a Plan B that doesn’t involve military occupation, or unmanned killer drones, for that matter.

Catch this guy:

I watched part of this rant on Rachel Maddow’s show last night. It would have been so perfect if the crowd had burned a flag and then all their Social Security and Medicare cards.

Oh, and for the record, Sam Houston opposed secession.

Gregory Rodriguez writes in the Los Angeles Times about a new book by Sam Tanenhaus. In it, he discusses William F. Buckley’s response to the end of Lyndon Johnson’s political career:

The columnist in 1968 was, of course, William F. Buckley Jr., and on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race, he was nothing if not circumspect. Why? Because as a classic conservative, Buckley understood the importance of stability and found the “burn, baby, burn” drumbeat from the left, which had forced Johnson’s decision, deeply unsettling.

In his column that week, Buckley opined that “instant guidance by the people of the government means instability, and instability is subversive of freedom.” In other words, Johnson’s withdrawal was too responsive. For Buckley, maintaining social order was of paramount importance, even if it meant helping to preserve the welfare state he deplored.

“Movement conservatism” began in part as a reaction to what the classic conservatives saw as anarchy from the Left. The DFHs of he 1960s were angry, and they burned flags and smarted off to cops. At the time, conservatives and the “Silent Majority” (who weren’t all that silent, truth be told) were more upset about the loss of social order and supposed lack of patriotism the “hippies” represented than they were about the DFH’s call to end the war in Vietnam. The war was never wildly popular.

So 40 years later the backlash to anarchy has come full circle and is becoming anarchy, and the extreme fringes of it are admitting to America-hating. I think if (dare we hope?) a reasonably good health care bill with the public option intact is passed, we’re going to see at least a couple of years of spreading secessionist fervor among the tea-partiers.

Back to Rodriguez:

Just listen to the ruckus over healthcare. Are there problems with the Democrats’ proposals? Absolutely. But the tenor of criticism from so many on the right suggests they’re more interested in destruction than resolution. As Tanenhaus puts it, the contemporary right defines itself “less by what it yearns to conserve than by what it longs to destroy.” They call themselves conservatives, but the “I hope Obama fails” rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh is more reminiscent of the tantrum-throwing far left of the late 1960s than of classic conservatism.

The analogy between the DFHs of the 1960s and today’s anarchist mobs is not perfect, for reasons Rodriguez explains here;

Hofstadter points to the fundamental rootlessness and heterogeneity of U.S. society, and the “peculiar scramble for status and [the] peculiar search for secure identity” that those qualities inspire. Without, say, a traditional class system — a “recognizable system of status,” in Hofstadter’s words — Americans suffer from “status anxiety.” During times of great social flux, these fears play out in politics as people seek out enemies (which helps them reaffirm their own standing) and, at the same time, damn a social order they feel they can’t dominate.

The DFHs of the 1960s were not a monolithic group. The genuine freaks — “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” — generally (there were exceptions) were not the same people who took over Dean’s offices in universities. Although there were some vocal anti-capitalists, the majority of people who showed up at protests weren’t planning to overturn the capitalist status quo (which was pretty sweet at the time, at least for middle-class whites). Although many sympathized with Abbie Hoffman, for most the counterculture was a last hoorah before they put on their gray flannel suits and melded into corporate America. The bulk of the angry Left of the 1960s were not suffering from status anxiety, I don’t believe.

No; status anxiety expresses itself in a brainless, right-wing reactionism. That’s what we’re seeing now. I fully agree that the people who show up to scream about socialized medicine are acting out inchoate anxieties that have nothing to do with any particular policy. They care more about having an enemy to hate and blame than they care about the facts of the health care issue.

Another difference between 1960s hippies is that, conservative fantasies to the contrary, the antiwar movement really wasn’t being orchestrated by the International Communist Conspiracy. The most radical of its leaders were more like free-floating pot-stirrers than anybody’s fellow-traveler. However, the rage and energy on the Right today is definitely being stoked and manipulated by special interest elites.

This gets us into the topic of yesterday’s Krugman column, titled “Missing Richard Nixon.” Krugman makes some of the same points as Rodriguez:

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

I had to think about the “America is a better country today” line, but we have come a long way in regard to racial and gender discrimination. And we could debate whether Nixon was worse than the recently retired Bush.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

Basically, capitalism is eating itself, and the peasants are revolting. I’m thinking maybe I should keep a bag packed for my escape to Canada so I can get in before they close the borders.

Update: Nice article at The Nation by Patricia Williams, “Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare.”

If you are watching the healthcare town-hall ruckuses with only common dictionary meanings in your head, you will be struck by the protesters’ general incoherence and outright nonsense, bearing no rational connection to the actual draft of the healthcare bill. As Representative Barney Frank demanded of one constituent who likened the bill to Nazism, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal… then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

So reversal is key to understanding what’s going on. It’s not just “lies”; it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down. It’s not factually accurate, but this is how they feel. Obama is Hitler! Health insurance for all means euthanasia for me! “My” country is suddenly “their” country.

However, if special interest elites had not fed these fears, encouraged the hysteria, and even taught people what to say, I think most of these people would be uneasy but not raging bat-bleeping crazy.

My only criticism is that I wish the ads would explain clearly that the option is an option. The word “option” is not registering with some people. There seems to be a widespread believe that the option will be mandatory.

I want to say a few words about libertarian logic that says only government can ration; therefore, there is no rationing in a private, for-profit health care system; therefore, in a private system people who aren’t getting the care they need have only themselves to blame.

There’s an article about addressing famine by Frederick Kaufman in the June issue of Harper’s. In “Let Them Eat Cash,” Kaufman explains that ideas about how to address famine have changed from the old CARE package days. But this is the bit that most interested me:

The stories varied in focus and emphasis but employed the same basic plot points: biofuel production, caterpillar plagues, commodity speculation, crop disease, drought, dwindling stockpiles, fear, flood, hoarding, war, and an increasing world appetite for meat and dairy had bubbled into a nasty poison. Every day, another 25,000 people starved to death or died from hunger-related disease: every four seconds, another corpse. Rising prices for corn, cooking oil, rice, soybeans, and wheat had sparked riots in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, and nineteen other countries. Not to mention Milwaukee, where a food voucher line of nearly 3,000 people descended into chaos. (“They just went crazy down there,” said one witness. “Just totally crazy.”)

Oddly enough, almost none of the food riots had emerged from a lack of food. There was plenty of food. The riots had been generated by the lack of money to buy food, and therein lay what may have distinguished today’s hunger from the hunger of years past.

Kaufman goes on to describe the cast of characters (and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word) who are more or less in charge of getting food to the starving, and how the director of the World Food Program actually bubbled about how starvaion presented a wonderful opportunity. It’s a fascinating read.

But the larger point is — if you’re starving to death, how much does it matter if you lack food because of scarcity or prices?

These various food shortages are caused by myriad factors, but for the most part food is being produced by private agricultural industries, and for the most part private market forces are setting prices. And people starve.

Once again, let’s remember the Famine. In th 1840s most Irish did farm work on land owned by others, and in exchange for farm work the workers were given little huts to live in and little plots of land on which to grow their own food, mostly potatoes. Potatoes are nutrient-rich and keep for a long time, and the Irish depended on them for food, especially in the winter. But then a disease wiped out the potato crop several years in a row. The agricultural workers of Ireland were growing plenty of food for the landowners, but the landowners shipped the food to markets in Britain. The Irish peasants had no money to buy it, so more than a million Irish starved. No government food rationing was involved; that was strictly the work of the privately owned farming industry of Ireland.

And in Parliament, some PMs actually argued that the Famine was a great opportunity, because starvation might force the Irish to start businesses. That the Irish Catholic peasantry were barely educated and had no access to capital did not register.

The fact is, people have been deprived of essential resources all kinds of ways. I’m betting that if you looked at all of history, more people have been deprived of resources by private interests than by governments.

Here’s another little bit from the Kaufman article you might enjoy:

Even the most well-intentioned, well-fed capitalist may fail to recognize that his own actions are causing the very problems he most sincerely wants to solve. After all, it is rational to invest in a commodity when its price rises, even if corn costs do happen to push up feed prices. Chickens eat chicken feed made from that corn, so the price of a dozen organic eggs hits $6.39. “All indications are that soaring feed costs are going to force livestock and poultry producers to raise prices,” said Joel Brandenberger, president of the National Turkey Federation, “or risk going out of business.” Bill Roenigk, chief economist of the National Chicken Council, predicted that “food inflation is poised to begin and continue for many, many months.” All of which impelled Iowa Senator Charles Grassley to wax rabid and liken the American grocery lobby to the Nazi Party. “They have to have an excuse for increasing the price of their food,” said Grassley. “It’s another Adolf Hitler lie.”

Fascinating.

Update: Something I forgot to say before I pushed the “publish” button — the situation in the U.S. regarding health care may be unprecedented. At least, I can’t think of any other time in history when so many people vulnerable to or actually suffering deprivation of resources are passionately supporting the status quo and fighting the very reforms meant to help them. I hope the social psychologists are taking good notes.

Can’t we just give these people an island and let them move away?