Will ex-military 'Patriots' form a more dangerous kind of militias?

[H/t Sara for the video.]

-- by Dave

One of the more disturbing trends we've been observing is the return of far-right "Patriot" rhetoric about government oppression with the election of President Obama. Fueled in no small part by mainstream right-wing talkers proclaiming we're headed into "socialism" -- not to mention a "radical communist" who must be "stopped" or else America will "cease to exist" -- the overheated rhetoric has been gradually getting higher in volume, intensity, and frequency with each passing week.

The initial concern that this raises is the possibility of a new wave of citizen militias, particularly when you have mainstream pundits like Glenn Beck out there helping to promote the concept. As Glenn Greenwald observed, the "Patriots" are back with a vengeance.

At least for the time being, however, there isn't any evidence of new militias forming, though we may see numbers growing within the coming months within existing units, particularly as Fox News and radio pundits start fueling right-wing anxieties.

However, we are starting to see a trend that's even more disturbing: Military veterans voicing Patriot-movement beliefs, including threats of violent resistance to the Obama administration.

One of them made the news recently:

A federal grand jury indicted a former Camp Lejeune Marine on Wednesday on charges that he threatened the life of Barack Obama, the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed today.

Kody Brittingham, 20, formerly a lance corporal with 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, was accused of making threats against Obama while he was president-elect, said Robin Zier, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the eastern district of North Carolina.

Brittingham was arrested by the Jacksonville Police Department on breaking and entering charges in mid-December 2008.

Naval investigators discovered a journal allegedly written by Brittingham in his barracks after his arrest by civilian authorities in December. The journal contained plans on how to kill the president, as well as white supremacist material, a federal law enforcement official said.

This is an example of why I've called the Iraq War "the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School": Inevitably, there are going to be competent killers either joining the far right from our military ranks -- especially if they've been recruited into those beliefs either before or during their service -- or enacting far-right "lone wolf scenarios," and they are going to have the ability to wreak a great deal of havoc.

Another vivid example is the above video, in which an anonymous "Marine" not only urges that citizen militias form to resist any new gun laws and possibly taxation, but also promises them that "there is a resistance" within the military as well.

Note also that the video opens with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Of course, this was the inscription on the T-shirt worn by Timothy McVeigh (picture here) at the time of his arrest for the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Remember, too, that there have already been concerns raised about the infiltration of neo-Nazis into the ranks of the military. If Patriot-movement beliefs -- which are only a few degrees removed from neo-Nazi beliefs anyway -- have become somewhat common in the ranks of the military, then the concerns raised then by the FBI hold true in this situation as well:

Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement. FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color.

... The prestige which the extremist movement bestows upon members with military experience grants them the potential for influence beyond their numbers. Most extremist groups have some members with military experience, and those with military experience often hold positions of authority within the groups to which they belong.

... Military experience—often regardless of its length or type—distinguishes one within the extremist movement. While those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, FBI investigations indicate they frequently have higher profiles within the movement, including recruitment and leadership roles.

Reading the comments to the above Marine's video, you can see that he's not an isolated case:

This Marine is right on. Those now in power in Washington are hell-bent on destroying America and The Constitution. The Marine is right, America is a Republic, NOT a democracy, and what he says about laws that infringe on the 2nd Amendment is right. Any law that 'infringes' on the right to keep and bear arms is unconstitutional. This Marine is a patriot. Those that disagree with him, you know where the border is.

You only wish that's what he was. Everything he said int hat video is true. And if you weren't so blind to what is going on right now, ie. the government wanting to nationalize the banking systems, wanting to increase gun laws...not that there aren't over 20k already on the books, I could continue. The American people aren't free anymore, they just have a false sense of freedom, given to them to keep them complacent and happy as they go about their daily lives...but soon that will end.

I believe there is a mountain of truth to this video. Everyone I know is stocking up on guns/ammo/food. I was in the military and I think most servicemembers feel the same as him. They took the oath to protect and defend the constituion against all enemies foreign and domestic. Most military members are very patriotic and attuned to what is going on. When I was in, most everyone hated Clinton. I can only imagine what they feel toward Obama and the Congress.

The context in which this is bubbling up is perhaps the most troubling. We're seeing an increase in hate-group activity nationally. Much of the animus is directed at President Obama (see, for instance the "Birthers" -- led by Alan Keyes and his compatriots), and much of it is more generically directed at liberals and immigrants.

In any event, it isn't long after right-wingers name their "enemies" that we start seeing violence directed their way. And the most dangerous potential for this lies with the young men we've just spent years training how to kill.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

What motivated a Florida gunman to open fire on Latino exchange students?

-- by Dave

It's fairly astonishing, really, how little coverage the horrendous shooting rampage in Florida earlier this week has gotten in the American press: Someone walks up to a townhouse meeting room full of Chilean college students and opens fire on them -- after having warned neighbors earlier not to have any immigrants in her home, and asking one of them if they wanted to join him in his "revolution."

Two kids (including Racine Balbontin, 22, left) dead, five hospitalized. This is just a mundane story? Well, it's a major, front-page news story in Chile, at least, and in much of the rest of Latin America.

Northwest Florida Daily News reports:

Cooperative Radio reporter Stephanie Hunt spoke to the Daily News via phone from Santiago, Chile, Friday morning. She said Chilean Government Minister Francisco Vidal called the crime "macabre" and "brutal."

Hunt said Chile's Deputy Consul General is working to get family members to the United States so they can be with the injured students and bring back the bodies of those who didn't survive. Families traveled from all over Chile Thursday to Santiago to meet with officials in an attempt to expedite the process of getting passports and visas.

Although the case is sensitive because it involves foreign nationals and 14 victims total, The Walton County Sheriff's Office released some new information.

"It was a tremendously horrific scene," said Sheriff Mike Adkinson. "Even the survivors are victims."

Adkinson said the shooting happened about 1:45 a.m. when Dannie Baker, 60, approached Unit 12 in the Summer Lakes townhome complex and opened fire through a window. When he was done, Adkinson said, he went back to his home at Unit 25.

We're gradually learning more about the shooter, Dannie Baker -- but a heap of questions remain unanswered. It appears that he used to campaign for Republicans, but they dropped him when he sent some e-mails in 2007 that apparently frightened them.

According to one news story:

Not much is known about Baker or his lifestyle yet, according to the Sheriff's Office.

He was a volunteer at the Walton County Republican Headquarters during the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2004.

"He volunteered the same time I did," said Pat Magee, a member of the Walton County Republican Executive Committee. "I was shocked. The person I knew would have never done anything bad to anyone."

Magee said Baker answered phones and did general office work during the campaign. Although she didn't remember much about his personal life, she said he had mentioned he was from Alabama and had attended Auburn University.

Jim Anders, another member of the Republican Executive Committee, said Baker was very active during the 2004 election but added that he was very eccentric. He said Baker traveled to Atlanta once a year to assist in some sort of music ministry there.

Baker did not volunteer during last year's election, but local Republicans said they began to receive disturbing e-mails from him about national political issues, said Anders.

"Dannie had some emotional problems, it seemed," said Anders, who added that that many e-mails were "radical" and "inappropriate."

The e-mails were so disturbing they were reported to the Sheriff's Office, the Republican volunteers said.

The Sheriff's Office said the e-mails did not target any individuals, but would not reveal any more details about them.

A followup profile sheds some more light:

Meanwhile, Baker remains a mystery to those who have met him locally.

He has a registered nonprofit organization in Florida called Perfect Heart Ministry. The mission statement in the articles of incorporation filed in 2000 say the corporation is "organized for church ministry of promoting the Gospel through Christian music in the State of Florida."

Baker is listed as the incorporator. Two others, Trina and Jason Myers, formerly of Freeport, are listed as being on the board of directors. Calls to more recent phone numbers for the couple have gone unreturned.

Attorney Bart Fleet said he didn't realize he'd met Baker until the Daily News called him recently to ask about the corporation. Fleet's office is listed as the registered agent for the ministry and had helped Baker file documents with the state.

Fleet said he hasn't spoken to Baker since the fall of 2001.

"I'm probably a registered agent for thousands of corporations that we have set up over the past years," Fleet explained. "I don't remember anything about him other than this. We basically set up his corporation and filed his paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service."

When Baker volunteered with the local Republican Party headquarters during the 2004 election campaign, other volunteers remembered that he traveled to Atlanta once a year to help with the Atlanta Fest Christian music festival. But festival organizers said there are so many volunteers that no one remembered Baker specifically.

One person who met Baker on several occasions said she didn't know much about his past, but that he made her feel "cautious and uneasy."

Cheryl Rhoads cleans the town home directly across from where Baker lived at Summer Lake in Miramar Beach.

"He must have been sitting at his window, looking out all the time," Rhoads said.

She said it didn't matter if it was 6 a.m. or 2:30 p.m., Baker would ring the doorbell after she arrived at her job.

"He wouldn't wait to be invited in," Rhoads said. "He would just come in when you opened the door."

Rhoads said sometimes Baker would ask her how much she would charge to clean his home and sometimes he only wanted to talk about religion. He even gave her a copy of his book "Man's Perfection before God."

A Miami Herald writer also profiled the case. A local blogger, the Keyboard Detective dug up plenty more on Baker, including some input from someone who claims to have known him:

In general, Dannie has been a mentally ill person for a long time (it's not important for how long). His health has been deteriorating dramatically since 2003 I would say. While in 2003 he was still quite OK although I have seen dramatic mood swings and outbursts of agression mainly against weaker persons, usually girls in his house who were also WAT students.

It's also apparent his attorneys fully intend to explore the mental-illness component of the shootings.

However, it's a cop-out to simply ascribe this to his illness and let it go at that. Because there is a pattern of "isolated incidents" in which mentally ill people select their victims based on eliminationist scapegoating rhetoric from right-wing ideologues.

I've written about this previously:

Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.

But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed the rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.

The clearest illustration of this is a case that occurred here in Seattle in the mid-1980s:

People who study the far right have known many of these people over the years: Gordon Kahl. Robert Matthews. Tim McVeigh.

One of the most memorable of these, for me, was a man named David Lewis Rice.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

The problem is that this has happened more than "on occasion" -- rather, there is a history of this kind of violence, and there's a consistent pattern to it. What's most noteworthy is that the violence expands with the increasing use of eliminationist rhetoric. When people look at Dannie Baker's rampage and ask "Why?" -- as so many are -- that history and that pattern are a good place to start looking.

Anyone want to wager that Dannie Baker is not a Lou Dobbs fan?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ann Coulter soft-pedals white supremacists in her new book

-- by Dave

Most of the discussion of Ann Coulter's most recent wretched contribution to the national discourse -- her book Guilty -- has focused on her attacks on single motherhood.

But Mark Potok at the SPLC noticed that there were some other problems with it -- namely, her vociferous defense of the Council of Conservative Citizens:

In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

Contrary to Coulter's assertion, there is more than abundant evidence beyond their origins that the CofCC is a profoundly racist organization dedicated to white supremacy. For example:

The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

One day, the CCC ran photos on its home page of accused Beltway snipers John Muhammad and John Malvo, 9/11 conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui and accused shoe-bomber Richard Reed. “Notice a Pattern Here?” asked a caption underneath the four photos. “Is the face of death black after all?” On another occasion, its website featured a photo of Daniel Pearl, the “Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter” who had just been decapitated by Islamic terrorists. In the photo, Pearl was shown with his “mixed-race wife, Marianne.” The headline above the couple’s picture was stunning even for the CCC: “Death by Multiculturalism?” The CCC Arkansas chapter ran an essay waxing nostalgic for the days “when racial separation was the norm.”

But to Ann Coulter, there is “no evidence” on its website that the CCC “supports segregation.” Mostly, she says, the group — which was formed from the debris of the White Citizens Councils that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once called “the uptown Klan” — is about “a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an ‘America First’ trade policy.” Indeed, she says, The New York Times and other critics of the CCC are simply liberals “who have no principles.”

Of course, Ann Coulter has lots of principles. They're just not principles any decent human being would adopt.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Finally! House Judiciary Committee calls for investigation into Sheriff Joe

-- by Dave

When he isn't hosting Brazil-esque "reality" shows and having his deputies arrest people for applauding at county council meetings, Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been making Maricopa County's law enforcement a national disgrace.

Now, finally, the House Judiciary Committee is calling for the Justice and Homeland departments to investigate Arpaio's activities:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) called on Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate allegations of misconduct by Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Sheriff Arpaio has repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the rights of Hispanics in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Under the guise of immigration enforcement, his staff has conducted raids in residential neighborhoods in a manner condemned by the community as racial profiling. On February 4, 2009, Arpaio invited the media to view the transfer of immigrant detainees to a segregated area of his "tent city" jail, subjecting the detainees to public display and "ritual humiliation." Persistent actions such as these have resulted in numerous lawsuits; while Arpaio spends time and energy on publicity and his reality television show, "Smile… You’re Under Arrest!", Maricopa County has paid millions of dollars in settlements involving dead or injured inmates.

"Racial profiling and segregation are simply not acceptable." said Conyers. "Media stunts and braggadocio are no substitute for fair and effective law enforcement."

As Frank Sharry observes:

The Judiciary Committee also asks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to review the agreement that DHS has signed with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which Joe has so roundly abused. Report after report has shown that Sheriff Arpaio regularly engages in racial profiling in Latino neighborhoods. It's part of the reason he has 2,700 lawsuits filed against him.

For his latest publicity stunt, Arpaio paraded immigrant detainees through the streets of Phoenix in order to segregate and relocate them to a "Tent City" surrounded by electric fencing. The 287 (g) agreement gives the Sheriff authority to enforce federal immigration laws, but it does not provide permission to use racial profiling or other tactics that violate an individual's constitutional rights.

It does not give one the right to create mini-Gitmos.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

We can see why Bernie Goldberg's book was an inspiration to the Knoxville church gunman

-- by Dave

The other day on Fox, Bernard Goldberg came to the defense of his buddy Bill O'Reilly -- who's nice enough to keep having him on at Fox without asking him any mean questions about his dumb book's multiple dumb mistakes -- over BillO's indefensible remarks about Helen Thomas. In so doing, he offered up this contribution to the national discourse:

But it's interesting to me that these left-wingers who didn't say a word when their fellow left-wingers called George Bush a moron, when they called Dick Cheney a fascist, when they called Sarah Palin a racist, and when they threw Oreo cookies at Michael Steele because he had the nerve to be a conservative black man -- they didn't say a word about all of that.*

So here's my conservative analysis, and feel free to bleep this: Screw them. Screw them. They are unimportant people, they are unimportant people who shouldn't be taken seriously.

When you made a good-natured joke, I very seriously said that Helen Thomas' 15 minutes were up in the Lincoln administration. And you know what? If they want to take shots at me, and if they want to take shots at you, they need to know one thing: They're throwing spitballs at battleships.

The Go-Cheney-Yourself approach to discourse is no doubt what wins Bernie Goldberg so many fans on the right who snap up his books and hang on his every misbegotten word.

Including, it's quite clear, that fellow who last July walked into that Unitarian church in Knoxville and started shooting: Jim David Adkisson.

The manifesto he composed before his murderous rampage was just released; you can read the whole thing here [pdf file], and it's worth reading in its entirety for a number of reasons. But I especially took note of Part III:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

That seems to sum up Adkisson's thinking: He wanted to be the spark in a wave of similar fed-up-niks taking their anger out on liberals.

It's also worth looking at the kind of reasoning that led him there:

In a parallel train of thought; It saddens me to think back on all the bad things that Liberalism has done to this country. The worst problem America faces today is Liberalism. They have dumbed down education, they have defined deviancy down. Liberals have attack'd every major institution that made America great. From the Boy Scouts to the military; from education to Religion. The Major News outlets have become the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. Liberals are evil, they embrace the tenets of Karl Marx, they're Marxist, socialist, communists.

This paragraph seems like an almost crystalline amalgam of the kind of eliminatist rhetoric that is spewed every day over the nation's media by the likes of O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and their swarms of ignoble imitators -- including Bernie Goldberg.

And indeed, as previously noted, books and materials from these right-wing hate talkers were exactly what investigators found when they went through Adkisson's belongings. Obviously, he was an avid consumer of their broadcast offerings as well.

And this is where it led:

If decent patriotic Americans could vote 3 times in every election we couldn't stem this tide of liberalism that's destroying America. Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.

I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just Kill yourself, do something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

But merely pointing out the obvious, common-sense connection between O'Reilly's reckless rhetoric and Jim David Adkisson's murderous political-terror spree is enough to bring down O'Reilly's wrath. For instance, a Newsday writer pointed it out, and O'Reilly sent out the attack squads:



Note how O'Reilly frames the story: Nowhere does he mention that Adkisson not only read O'Reilly's book and watched O'Reilly's shows, but he was openly acting on the scapegoating of liberals contained therein.

Look, if it turned out that Caylee Anthony's killer were an O'Reilly fan too, it would indeed be unfair to connect anything O'Reilly might've written to that murder.

But in Adkisson's case, he left us this manifesto, which lays bare his motivations and his thinking. And as we can see from the organized nature of the piece, he was no more "insane" than Ted Kaczynski.

No one is blaming O'Reilly or Goldberg directly for the killings that resulted. But there is at least some level of culpability here that they need to face responsibly.

That means dealing with the matter forthrightly: Reporting the whole facts of the matter (particularly that Adkisson was clearly inspired by their own incessant scapegoating of liberals, often with violent language along the lines of "Screw them") and making clear that in no way did they ever intend these words to be taken as a call to violent action.

Not that they ever will, of course. These guys are big battleships, dontcha know. Why be bothered with such little spitballs as basic decency and integrity?

___

*For what it's worth, this is a farrago of strawmen: No major Democratic or liberal figures called either Bush or Cheney morons or fascists, nor Palin a racist; these characterizations could be found among some rank and file liberals (and their views were certainly not groundless), but no major spokesman of the 'Left', particularly not of a stature comparable to O'Reilly's on the Right, ever said such a thing. The story about Steele being pelted with Oreos, meanwhile, has since been pretty thoroughly debunked.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

"Know This If Nothing Else: This Was A Hate Crime"

-- by Sara

Photo by J. Miles Cary of the Knoxville News

Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, TN last July.

Many of us intuited at the time that Adkisson's rampage was exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bullshit, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy. That suspicion that was verified in the days that followed, when police searched Adkisson's apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.

But yesterday, Adkisson told us himself -- in his own words -- just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced yesterday, he released a four-page handwritten "manifesto" -- which he'd intended to be his suicide note -- to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals -- and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.

Some choice excerpts:

"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

"I thought I'd do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

No doubt this manifesto is being blogged, mailed, twittered, and otherwise littered across the far-right infosphere today, and Adkisson will likely emerge from this as a new hero of the extreme right wing. (He's obviously articulate and literate, which means we may expect more of these bilious rants coming out of his cell in the years ahead.) It also seems likely that, probably sooner rather than later, other victims of our curdled economy will accept his charge, pick up their guns, and attempt to follow him into battle.

Nicely done, Messrs. Hannity, Goldberg, Limbaugh, Savage and O'Reilly -- and all your lesser brethren who keep the hate speech spewing 24/7/365 across every field and into every shop in the country. There is no more debate to be had, no more doubt about it: What you did in the name of "entertainment," and for the sake of the almighty ratings, raised and animated a monster like Jim Adkisson, gave him a list of targets ("the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book"), and was directly responsible for the deaths of two brave and decent people. Adkisson was clearly angry and crazy -- but his "manifesto" draws the clearest, brightest line possible between the media he consumed and his actions that terrible Sunday morning.

Progressives should take three lessons away from Knoxville:

One: we are no longer safe, not even in our own houses of worship. It's ironic that progressives -- the subgroup of Americans who were most determined not to abandon reason and succumb to overblown fears of Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9/11 -- now have good, serious reasons to fear real domestic terrorism against themselves.

Two: A significant part of this country's media infrastructure is thoroughly devoted to inciting people to commit horrific acts of violence against us -- and now, we know for a fact that people are acting on those incitements. It's time to start taking this far more seriously. What goes out across our airwaves these days isn't all that different from what went out over Radio Rwanda a decade ago, spurring that country to genocide. At this point, it's only a difference of degree.

Three: The right wing has, as usual, grossly underestimated our courage and our commitment. The members of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist quickly and effectively disarmed and captured this man within seconds after he opened fire. Adkisson expected fear; what we got was determined resistance. It's why he's still alive today, and why more UUs aren't dead by his hand. The TVUUA congregation should be our enduring example of liberal grace under fire.

Adkisson's "manifesto" should end any doubts we ever had about how virulent and dangerous hate talk is, or whether or not that talk will eventually translate into action.

Update: My friend Ogre pointed out something that gave me a "D'oh!" moment. Among Adkisson's ranting was a clear statement: "This was an act of political protest." Which means that it was, by definition and his own admission, an act of domestic terrorism.

Our radio hate talkers incited a man to commit an act of terrorism. Just sit a minute and take that in. And the next time you hear them foaming on about how liberals are "soft on terrorism," reflect on the fact that they'd better hope to hell we don't get any more serious about it -- because if we do, their asses are going to be the first ones in the dockets.

Al Gore is creating another Hitler Youth, Glenn Beck feverishly warns

-- by Dave

[media=7275 showimage]

Sometimes I think Glenn Beck is saying the crazy things he does just to get attention from liberals for being so crazy. It's the Ann Coulter model of right-wing punditry: the more outrageous the better for your ratings.

But Beck isn't as smart as Coulter. He's also more of a Bircherite populist, and he's convinced himself that the more mawkish the better he'll appeal to that sensibility. Unfortunately for Beck, he is also handicapped by not having a very firm grip on reality in the first place (not that this ever stopped other right-wing millionaire pundits). It shows up in his great fondness for right-wing populist conspiracy theories.

So after resorting to the good old Bircher standby -- "Commie! Obama's a Commie!" -- the night before, on his show last night he veered completely to the other side of the road and accused liberals of incipient Nazism:

Last night, I told you that we were on the road to socialism. Some comedy, you know, coming your way. Well, tonight -- oh dear, this may not go well -- when I finish this story, some may believe we're on the way to the Hitler Youth.

What inspired this analysis? It was a snippet of a quote from Al Gore, given to a crowd of schoolkids:

Al Gore: There are some things about our world that you know that older people don't know.

What, exactly, is wrong with this innocuous and fairly common-sense observation about the nature of generational change? It's an attack, apparently, on the sovereignty of parenthood:

Now you've got the former vice-president of the United States and a Nobel Prize winner looking your kid in the eye and telling them, 'You know what? You know things that your mom and dad don't.'

... The government and its friends are indoctrinating our children for the control of their minds, your freedom, and our choice and our future. It must STOP! Because history -- when properly taught -- has already shown us where it leads. This is what Nazi leader Josef Goebbels said about the Hitler Youth:

If such an art of active mass influence through propaganda is joined with the long-term systematic education of a nation, and if both are conducted in a unified and precise way, the relationship between the leadership and the nation will always remain close.

Well, what's next? If Mom and Dad decide to keep the temperature above 72, should our 'Gore Youth' report Mom and Dad? Should they also report groundings and spankings every time Daddy comes home to watch that evil Fox News?

Yyyyyeah, Glenn. Lotsa people out there talking about doing just that, big guy. Now excuse me while I take the next elevator.

So, in case you missed that, today's broadcast from Planet Beckazarro: Al Gore raising environmental awareness is the exact same thing as the state-sponsored Hitler Youth.

Or is it Communism? Agh! We're so confused! Where's Jonah Goldberg?

A little later, while interviewing the teenager who recorded it and her poor dissed Dad, Beck gives us a fuller context of the quote previously snippeted:

Gore: When I was your age and the Civil Rights Revolution was unfolding, and we kids asked our parents and their generation, 'Explain to me again why it's okay for the law to discriminate against people for the color of their skin color? And when our parents' generation couldn't answer that question, that's when the law started to change. There are some things about our world that you know that older people don't know.

Why would that be? Well, in a time of rapid change, the old assumptions sometimes just don't work anymore because they're out of date.

Sounds eminently sensible to me, but hey, I'm just a raging left-wing radical to guys like Glenn Beck.

Eventually, Beck wrapped up the episode by ranting with the ever-willing Bernie Goldberg, who has found a nice safe home at Fox, where he gets to be on display while Beck runs shots of Nazis around him. Nice gig, Bernie.

Meanwhile, here are some other quotes from Nazi leaders about propaganda and its value for Glenn Beck's consideration:

Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Ernst Rohm, chief of the SA: "The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive."

Dunno about you, but Glenn "The Apocalypse Is Coming" Beck sooner comes to mind when I read these quotes than Al Gore. And he has a hell of a lot bigger audience than a bunch of schoolkids.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

White supremacism lies at the root of the 'respectable' nativist right

We've known for some time -- ever since the Southern Poverty Law Center first reported it back in 2002 -- that there was a web of interests and backgrounds that connected some of the most prominent conservative anti-immigration "think tanks" to white-supremacist organizations, all revolving the activities of an environmentalist-turned-nativist named John Tanton.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, though, that this was the case, these groups -- particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA -- have continued to enjoy mainstream respectability, in large part because they have continued to deny the connections to Tanton and to each other.

Now, the SPLC has definitively established the connections, thanks in large part to reporter Heidi Beirich's intrepid investigative work digging through Tanton's own papers and examining the groups' leaders records. One can only hope the report will finally persuade genuine conservatives and thoughtful Republicans that they would want nothing to do with either these organizations or their largely fabricated disinformation, which disguises a hateful, white-supremacist agenda.

Together with the immigration-reform group America's Voice, the SPLC held a press conference yesterday in Washington to discuss the report and its ramifications -- particularly for Americans interested in advancing a rational debate about immigration, free of racist scapegoating.

The result of the activities of groups like these has been profound -- a grotesque distortion of the immigration debate in America. As AV's Frank Sharry said at the conference, most people on the side of immigration reform in the past decade went in believing they were going to be engaged in a rational policy discussion, but instead found that for these groups on the right, the only interest was in finding more bodies to throw on the culture-war bonfires.

It's played a huge role in providing fuel for right-wing talkers like Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and their hosts of imitators.

Here's the PDF file of the report, titled "The Nativist Lobby."

Some of the reporting will already be familiar, but the sections on the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA are full of new information. Of special note was what it uncovered about the CIS and
Mark Krikorian, who some of you may recognize from his work at NRO's The Corner:

Last October, as America was being roiled by the subprime mortgage meltdown that led to the current financial crisis, the executive director of one of the most influential immigration think tanks in the nation was in a joking mood.

Shortly after the failure of Washington Mutual Bank, Mark Krikorian found a press release issued months earlier by the bank that celebrated its inclusion on a list of “Business Diversity Elites” compiled by Hispanic Business magazine. Krikorian posted the release at the conservative National Review Online, where he writes from time to time, along with his own sneering headline: “Cause and Effect?” Krikorian no doubt thought of his posting as a simple joke.

But to many, the attempt by the leader of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) to suggest a link between Washington Mutual’s commitment to opening its ranks to Latinos and its demise spoke volumes about the nature of CIS and its prolific research. Although the think tank bills itself as an “independent” organization with a “pro-immigrant” if “low-immigration” vision, the reality is that CIS has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked.

Be sure to check out America's Voice's page devoted to the report, especially the sidebar that lets you vote on who the worst "immigration wolf" identified in the report is.

Image 2050 has more.

O'Reilly declares war on New York Times after it calls him out on immigration

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly is outraged, outraged we tell you, over Sunday's superb New York Times editorial calling out Republicans -- and particularly movement conservatives who have thoroughly embraced the nativist wing of the party -- for the ugly racism they've indulged in recent years, driving what should be a rational debate over immigration into the fetid wastelands of hysterical fearmongering, bigotry, and scapegoating.

So last night on "The O'Reilly Factor" he declared "war" on the Times:

O'Reilly: In the Impact Segment tonight, more lies from the New York Times over illegal immigration. As you may know, the Times and other far-left entities favor amnesty for illegal aliens, primarily as a way to gain political power. As you may also know, most Americans reject blanket amnesty, as was demonstrated when the immigration bill of 2007 crashed and burned in Congress.

So yesterday, this man, editorial page director Andrew Rosenthal, printed a vicious piece of propaganda called "The Nativists Are Restless." In this smear, the Times implies that I and others racists because we oppose amnesty. The editorial says:

It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.

It is all around us. ... Google the words “Bill O’Reilly” and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The Times) as racially traitorous.

Of course, you can post anything on YouTube, any lie you want, any distortion, and Google can highlight the smear in the blink of an eye -- there are no rules. For example, I could post that Andrew Rosenthal completely distorted Bill O'Reilly's view on illegal immigration, because Rosenthal is a dishonest far-left zealot who uses hateful tactics, like implying people with whom he disagrees are racist. I could post that, and then you could Google "Rosenthal" and "illegal immigration" and it would be there -- uncensored. Now if Rosenthal doesn't know that, he's stupid. If he does know it, then he's dishonest and intentionally misleading Times readers.

Well, besides O'Reilly's point being the most meaningless of nonsequiturs, it's also worth remembering exactly what does come up when you Google those terms: actual video from this site showing Bill O'Reilly, in full context, saying the following:

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.

O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

Mind you, this was not an aberration for O'Reilly.

O'Reilly, in fact, is one of the major media figures responsible for whitewashing the reality that Patrick Buchanan's recent work has finally tipped the scales into outright white supremacist extremism. O'Reilly, in fact, had previously hosted Buchanan in 2005, an interview in which they discussed Buchanan's "Decline of the West" thesis.

Indeed, as Media Matters has observed, the decline of white male dominance is a frequent concern of O'Reilly's:

-- On the May 16, 2006, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly claimed that The New York Times and "many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed." O'Reilly continued: "According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will." O'Reilly's comments came during a discussion of opposition by the Times and others to deploying the National Guard to help secure the border.

-- On the May 1, 2006, edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, O'Reilly alleged that the "organizers" of nationwide pro-immigrant protests had a "hardcore militant agenda of 'You stole our land, you bad gringos,' " and that the protest organizers were seeking to "take it back by massive, massive migration into the Southwest.' "

-- On the April 12, 2006, broadcast of his radio show, O'Reilly claimed that on the April 11 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, guest Charles Barron, a New York City councilman, had revealed the "hidden agenda" behind the current immigration debate. O'Reilly told his listeners: "[T]he bottom line is Charles Barron said last night is there is a movement in this country to wipe out 'white privilege' and to have the browning of America." O'Reilly suggested that this "hidden agenda" included plans to let "people who live in the Caribbean, people who live in Africa and Asia ... walk in and become citizens immediately."

From the May 17 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Reluctantly, and I mean reluctantly, "Talking Points" is going to support this legislation. It's the best we can get and does improve the situation. But make no mistake, it's not fair. It drastically alters the United States of America. And there will be unintended consequences all over the place.

The new census report says America's now one-third minority. And in four states -- California, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawaii -- whites are the minority. So with the infusion of as many as 20 to 30 million new citizens in the next 10 years, the landscape of America will absolutely change.

Moreover, much as O'Reilly may mewl -- as he does through the rest of this interview, as well as in the subsequent segment in which he whined with other "victims" of the editorial about how mean the New York Times is and how awful it is that you can't talk about immigration without being accused of being a racist -- and claim that he's been a friend of illegal immigrants, the record is very much to the contrary:

For his part, Bill O'Reilly will often take a story of a specific crime and treat it as though it were a matter of national urgency. For example, he devoted segments on 13 separate programs to discussion of a case in Virginia Beach in which a drunken driver, who happened to be an undocumented immigrant, killed two young women in a traffic accident. As tragic as these deaths were, drunken drivers kill dozens of people every day; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 16,885 fatalities in alcohol-related auto crashes in 2005.16

O'Reilly was hardly on a crusade against drunken driving; his interest was in the fact that in this case, the driver was an undocumented immigrant.17 O'Reilly brushes aside arguments that such cases are unrepresentative -- and even makes attempts to link immigration to terrorism. "If the local authorities, and they should be part of homeland security, were to be more vigilant on criminal illegal aliens, notice the word criminal, and track them harder, the Fort Dix thing [a thwarted plot to kill U.S. soldiers] would have been caught sooner," he said in June. "The deaths of the Virginia Beach thing which we talked about. And all of these guys at 9-11 were stopped by local police."18 When O'Reilly is unavailable, his compatriots will pick up the slack. "The never-ending criminal alien revolving door," said guest host and conservative columnist Michelle Malkin last August. "Another heinous crime, another illegal alien suspect with a mile-long rap sheet, another bloody tragedy wrought by open borders."19 O'Reilly also uses the immigration issue to bash "the left": "The most extreme elements in this country want open borders, blanket amnesty, and entitlement for foreign nationals who have come here illegally, and generally want to change the demographics in the USA so political power can be assumed by the left," he said last October. "That is the end game."20

It's this kind of ugliness that the NYT editorial in question was specifically addressing:

Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that. When you add the unprecedented engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance. Unless you can find a way to get rid of all the Latinos.

What was perhaps more notable than the report itself was the team that delivered it. It included Bay Buchanan, former adviser to Representative Tom Tancredo and sister of Pat, who founded the American Cause and wrote “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” She was joined by James Pinkerton, an essayist and Fox News contributor who, as an aide to the first President Bush, took credit for the racist Willie Horton ads run against Michael Dukakis.

So far, so foul. But even more telling was the presence of Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes editor and founder of Vdare.com, an extremist anti-immigration Web site. It is named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the English colonies, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Note that Pinkerton and Buchanan both appear in the whinefest that follows the "Impact Segment":



It's also in this segment in which O'Reilly declares:

O'Reilly: Look, I'm gonna take this New York Times on. I mean it's war. Absolutely war. I've had enough.

Note that neither the guests nor O'Reilly bother to address the substance of the NYT's point: That these "mainstream" conservatives were lending their voices to an enterprise irrevocably tainted by the significant involvement of virulent racists. It's not guilt by association when the association is entirely relevant.

For instance, Brimelow, it turns out, is also taking part, as Eric Ward reports, in a "racial awareness" event this coming weekend with the overtly racist British National Party (essentially the English skinheads party) at airport hotel in Baltimore:

According to the “Preserving Western Civilization” website, one of the goals of the conference is to address white guilt for the “disappointing performance of blacks.” The event, being held at the Four Points Sheraton BWI Airport Hotel in Baltimore, MD, will also feature alleged “mainstream” anti-immigrant leader Peter Brimelow. Brimelow is a regular contributor to white nationalist John Tanton’s quarterly journal Social Contact Press.

The Times' own retort is both pointed and on the money:

The reaction in some quarters to our editorial has been furious. Some accused us of erecting a straw man. Some said we were “frothing at the mouth,” defaming those who don’t share our supposed traitorous devotion to “open borders” and instant citizenship for illegal immigrants. Bill O’Reilly, who presents himself as a defender of the “white, Christian male power structure,” called it “one of the nastiest pieces of propaganda from the New York Times we’ve seen in recent memory.”

For the record, The Times does not support open borders, and never has.

We support comprehensive immigration reform, a combination of stricter enforcement at the border and the workplace, a chance for those already here to earn legalization, and an improved system of future legal immigration.

What Bill O'Reilly, Bay Buchanan, James Pinkerton, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, and the whole crew of right-wing media transmitters who repackage old racist nonsense for mainstream consumption fail to understand is that merely talking about immigration isn't a sign of racism. It's talking about immigration like racists that is.

What usually raises questions of racism is how readily the discussion turns to how Latinos are polluting or diluting white culture, how they're bringing crime and disease, turning America into "a third world cesspool," how they're "invading" the country. In other words, it isn't talking about immigration that makes people hear racism; it's talking racist crap that does.

The favorite whine of O'Reilly, Dobbs, Malkin, and the right-wing nativist cohort is that "it's not fair that you can't discuss illegal immigration without being accused of being racist." But the problem isn't discussing illegal immigration. Indeed, I think everyone involved would love to have a discussion on immigration without racism rearing its ugly head.

But racism is rearing its ugly head when O'Reilly and Dobbs and Malkin and the whole pack of "immigration reformers" treat white-supremacist propaganda as reliable information and parrot talking points from those white supremacists as well.

Pointing out that they're doing it isn't the problem. Pretending that they're not is.

UPDATE: NewsHounds has more, including detail on the third segment of TORF, which featured even more mewling.

UPDATE II: Scott Lemieux remembers one of the better examples of O'Reilly's fetish about white male culture.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Conservatives' Profoundest Fear: What if Obama succeeds?

-- by Dave



Memo to Conservatives: You failed and are now irrelevant.

OK, I expect you'll ignore this memo like our previous ones. Nate Silver is right: Republicans are caught in a death spiral, and it's going to be awhile yet before they hit bottom.

Nowhere is it more self-evident than in the broad acknowledgment this week that the GOP is being led by a bilious radio talk-show host, and the ongoing fact that its most popular politician is a wingnutty, malinformed Alaska governor.

The unanimous refusal of House Republicans to vote in favor of Obama's stimulus plan may have given the Malkinites a stiffy, but all it really demonstrated was the utter impotence of Conservatives to have any say in how we proceed with fixing the economy.

And there's one real reason for that: They broke it. Their philosophy of governance, especially their feverish laissez-faire demolition of regulatory oversight, and their obscene enrich-the-rich approach to taxation, were the two overarching reasons for our current economic debacle. Of course they still want to blame minority lending for the plunge, but no one with serious money is bothering to listen any longer, because they know what the story is. And so do most Americans.

So Rush Limbaugh can pen all the worthless split-the-baby-in-two proposals for economic stimulus he likes, and House Republicans can toss out all the tax-cut-heavy alternatives they like. And no one will take them seriously, because we've heard these proposals before -- for the past eight years, in fact. They've been nothing but a recipe for failure and disaster. Why would anyone want to take that course now?

What's worse for Republicans is that not only have they not yet figured out how irrelevant they've become, they are even further from understanding the reasons for their irrelevance. They're in deep denial about the direct relationship between their philosophy and the current economic debacle, and even more so the extent to which the public is finding their pugnacious, vicious, attacking style of politics increasingly repellent.

So Neil Cavuto is right when he defends Limbaugh by saying that of course, ideologically speaking, conservatives will naturally as a matter of principle oppose Obama's policies. We understand that Limbaugh and other conservatives believes that Obama's policies will fail and will vote and speak accordingly.

But he completely overlooks the problem with Limbaugh when he openly hopes Obama will fail: It's one thing to believe a policy will fail and oppose it accordingly. It's quite another to openly hope for it.

Most liberals, by way of contrast, believed George W. Bush would fail, and many predicted it; but it's hard to find any of them, particularly leading Democrats, who were out there saying that they hoped he -- and by extension, the nation -- would fail after 9/11 because his policies were "fascist." They opposed these policies in principle. Anyone who openly hoped for our military failure in Iraq, for instance, was in a tiny minority; but there were millions of us who opposed the war because we believed it was not only wrongheaded but doomed to fail. And we were proved right.

In fact, all this shouting is just cover for Republicans' greatest and deepest fear: That Obama in fact will succeed. That progressive "socialism" (as they call it) actually will make people's lives better, heal the economy, and get the nation back on its feet. That the nation's working people will finally get a clear view of which side is on their side. That the public will finally see that not only is Conservatism an abject failure, it's a fraud.

In the end, they are such deeply invested ideologues that they would rather see the nation fail than see that reality reach fruition.

Glenn Beck wants to kick California out of the Union

-- by Dave

Ah, feel the eliminationism:

Glenn Beck told his Fox News audience today that he wants to remove California as one of the 50 American states.

Beck: OK, there's something driving me to the edge of insanity, makes blood shoot right out my eyes, and that is California.

California today, they voted against offshore drilling. Not on their land, or their shore, no. They also voted last week to raise emissions standards because it's too smoggy there and they care about the trees. Also, uh, in the stimulus, we found out today, it appears as though Hollywood can get a, um, bailout, from you and me, because nobody's going to see their movies. Hmmph! You'd think maybe they should just make better movies, and then we'd all go. But no no, let's bail them all out.

The Civil War taught us that, apparently, U.S. states can't secede from the Union. I'd like to test that one again maybe sometime. But what I'd like to know is if the Union has the right to kick out states. Because if so, I'd like to take a star right out of our flag, and California is it.

From eco-warriors running the state and ruining it to Hollywood projecting their family values and politics on the U.S., and illegal immigration driving them into bankruptcy, the Golden State drives me out of my mind, and I don't think I'm alone.

I'm sure his defenders will say he was just using hyperbole and it was all a joke. That's what all good eliminationists say.

That book of mine (due out in May) is looking more timely all the time.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Malkin-Beck freakout: Imminent Mexico collapse could doom America!

-- by Dave

Michelle Malkin was back on Glenn Beck's Fox show last night helping him paint a bleak apocalyptic portrait of America's future because they both believe Mexico is about to completely collapse economically and bring complete anarchistic chaos -- brown anarchistic chaos -- streaming over the border. And as usual, they presented falsehoods as facts to make their claims:

Beck: We are talking now about the possible collapse -- and it is something real, this isn't crazy talk -- that Mexico, because of the economy -- remittances are down, people aren't working here, illegal immigrants are going back home -- the Number Two engine of the Mexican economy is remittances! People here sending their money back to Mexico. That's dried up, tourism has dried up. And we're looking at the possible collapse of Mexico.

Now if I wargame this, Michelle, I think -- OK, that opens up Venezuela, that opens up Russia to go ahead and put -- fund people who are not friendly to the United States -- Communists, really bad revolutionaries down there. Plus you have the drug lords which we just armed and trained! Can you explain that?

Malkin: Sure, the Zetas in the 1990s were a paramilitary force that we helped train, and now of course it's coming to bite back Mexico in the backside because these are the very people who are threatening peaceful citizens and wreaking havoc and terrorism across the border and across the country there. It's really a toxic stew.

I think what you're getting at, Glenn, is exactly right, that you've got despair, discontent. And then on top of that, of course, the national security threat. At the end of last year, the Department of Homeland Security and our intelligence officers under the Bush administration warned that Mexico poses a huge national security threat to us, because of course these cartels will deal with anybody, and our intelligence officers have been saying since the Sept. 11 attacks that many of these gangs could be collaborating with groups like Al Qaeda and other jihadists to bring other dangerous people across the border to do God knows what!

First, a little factual common sense, please: remittances from Mexican citizens working in the United States account only for 2% of Mexico's economy. They are indeed in decline, and as the the Christian Science Monitor recently reported, it is having an impact in rural areas, mostly for a narrow economic bandwidth. Otherwise, the notion that Mexico is on the verge of complete economic collapse is sheer hysteria:

Mexico's economy is in much better shape than in previous global economic downturns. While GDP is expected to remain stagnant or shrink here this year, in the past, when the US was in a recession, the economy south of the border quickly followed.

Even though Mexico sends up to 80 percent of its exports to the US and Canada, it has been cushioned somewhat by having corrected macroeconomic imbalances, such a fiscal deficit, external deficit, and high inflation, says Alfredo Coutino, a senior economist for Latin America at Moody's Economy.com.

Meanwhile, if terrorists really want to sneak into the country, they'll likely do it the way they do traditionally: forge papers and come in through the front gate with visas. That's how the 9/11 terrorists came in, and it's fairly simple and easy for them -- unlike, say, paying large sums to drug lords to sneak you over in a highly dangerous illegal crossing in the remote backcountry, which is how nativists like Malkin seem to imagine the terrorists are sneaking in.

Moreover, if Malkin wants to worry about terrorists sneaking over our borders, she'd be better off keeping an eye on the Canadian border. After all, the only known case of a terrorist caught bringing materiel over the border -- the 1999 Ahmed Ressam incident -- happened in Washington state, on the ferryboat from Canada. A quantitative analysis of terrorist threats to the U.S. found that there was "no terrorist presence in Mexico and no terrorists who entered the U.S. from Mexico"; but there was in fact "a sizeable terrorist presence in Canada and a number of Canadian-based terrorists who have entered the U.S."

But hey, we understand. The facts (or the lack thereof) have never stopped Malkin from a round of shrieking and fearmongering and distorting in the past -- why would she start letting them now?

And Glenn Beck -- well, he just keeps looking around for reasons to fear one kind of looming apocalypse or another. He should just get himself a sandwich board and leave the rest of us in peace.
[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars].

Rush Rules! GOP Congressmen Grovel Before the Mighty Limbaugh

-- by Dave

MSNBC's David Shuster had a segment yesterday morning examining whether or Rush Limbaugh has become the de facto leader of the Republican Party. He and commentator Lawrence O'Donnell largely came to the conclusion that he had, despite the protests from such congressional Republicans as Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga.

Of course, Limbaugh has been the acknowledged leader of the Conservative movement for quite some time. And ever since Reagan, the GOP has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the same movement. So it seems like kind of a silly question, like asking whether Steve Jobs is the de facto leader of Apple.

Still, as O'Donnell adroitly observes, this is a huge gift for Democrats. Go, Rush, go!

If there were any lingering questions about this, only a little while later, Andrea Mitchell brought us the news that Gingrey had caved and even called up Limbaugh's show to abjectly apologize.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) apologized Wednesday to “my fellow conservatives” for comments critical of talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh – saying he sees “eye-to-eye” with Limbaugh and that his remarks defending House Republican leadership came across more harshly than intended.

He also took issue with a headline on a Politico story about his comments, saying he never told Limbaugh to “back off,” as the headline read.

“I regret and apologize for the fact that my comments have offended and upset my fellow conservatives—that was not my intent,” Gingrey said in a statement. “I am also sorry to see that my comments in defense of our Republican Leadership read much harsher than they actually were intended, but I recognize it is my responsibility to clarify my own comments.”

Gingrey said he issued the statement because of a high volume of calls and correspondence to his office after the Politico article and wanted to speak directly to “grassroots conservatives. Let me assure you, I am one of you. I believe I was sent to Washington to fight for and defend our traditional values of smaller government, lower taxes, a strong national defense, and the lives of the unborn.”

And if you want further evidence (as if it's needed) of how abjectly Republicans bow and scrape at Limbaugh's feet, watch Rep. Eric Cantor squirm and evade and refuse to answer Mitchell's questions about what he thinks of Limbaugh's remarks.

Wipe that toe jam off your lips, Congressman. You're already setting a fine example for the GOP troops as they march off into irrelevancy with Rush Limbaugh.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Why are Republicans obstructing the nomination of Hilda Solis?

-- by Dave

I remember when Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings were underway, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to decry the racism of those liberals who dared oppose him.

Now the shoe's on the other foot. Even though most of Barack Obama's nominations have sailed through confirmation hearings and votes with alacrity, there's one notable exception -- Hilda Solis, Obama's pick as Labor Secretary:

The confirmation of Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte, as President Barack Obama's Labor secretary has been delayed because of Republican objections.

Democrats have announced that a Republican senator is using a parliamentary procedure to delay Solis' confirmation, the Washington paper Congress Daily reported Friday.

But while it does seem peculiar that conservatives would block the nomination of one of Obama's few Latino candidates, no one is suggesting that racism is the motive here.

Actually, there's a very simple answer to the above question: The Employee Free Choice Act.

As the Star-News report notes:

The anonymous hold - as the tactic is known - was placed because of Solis' support for "card check" legislation aimed at facilitating union organization and another bill regarding pay-discrimination, and for non-responsive answers during her confirmation hearing, according to GOP aides, the paper reported.

During her nomination hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Solis deferred questions on the controversial card check bill to Obama, to the frustration of GOP committee members, who strongly oppose the legislation.

Mario Solis-Marich at Nuestra Voice observes:

The Department of Labor has long been a strange relic to economic conservatives. Where DC visitors to the DOL see an office building the GOP sees a wicked temple inhabited by evil wizards that actually count the unemployed and study statistics that often contradict core conservative economic superstitions. The questions to Solis were reminiscent of a witch dunking where there are no right answers. If Solis had drowned she would have been human and acceptable but her survival, due to her accurate and honest answers, indicated her pre-supposed guilt.

I reviewed the Solis hearing that seems to have befuddle the GOP inquisitors and found the Secretary Designate to be very even handed. Solis admitted that she sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act (apparently a type of anti-GOP spell) and that President Obama has endorsed it. However Solis also repeatedly indicated that she was not clear what her role would be in the coming debate surrounding the Act due to her potential new position and her inability to yet speak for the Administration. Solis gave the same nuanced answers to Senate Democrats that wanted assurances about a host of progressive labor agenda items that she gave to the GOP. The Secretary Designate was trying to express and open mindedness to a middle ground while respectfully deferring to the new President (who by the way was still President elect at the time of the hearing).

Republicans are sending a clear signal with this delay that they intend to fight the Free Choice Act with every fiber of their beings. Democrats has better be ready. Fortunately, Hilda Solis already will be.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck blames bad economy on existence of central banking system

-- by Dave

It's no wonder that Fox's newest conserva-star addition to its Angry White Men lineup, Glenn Beck, has such an emotional affinity for Sarah Palin. Because like Palin, Beck is not just a conservative; he's actually a good old-fashioned right-wing populist.

For those who follow such phenomena, Beck made it explicit Thursday on his Fox News show when he launched into a segment seemingly devoted to the thesis that the whole problem with the economy lies not with capitalism, but boils down to the fact that we rely on a central banking system:

Beck: I don't believe we're the infection here. Look around the world. I got together with the Heritage Foundation and looked at all of the -- where is this crisis hitting? It's hitting capitalist, socialist, communist, totalitarian governments, all of them, and everything in between.

At some point -- if you're the doctor again in the emergency room -- and you really want to get all these people healthy, you gotta rule out -- OK, well, it's not capitalism. OK, what is it? You need to stop to ask the question that a doctor would ask in that situation: 'OK, everybody, where did you eat? What have you had to eat?' All of these countries all have that in common. They've all eaten at the same restaurant -- the restaurant of Central Banking.

It is a system that no one is accountable to. No one. The brilliant geniuses that are supposed to be protecting us -- that's why central banks are around -- 'We'll stop it, we'll make sure there's no recession, there's no depression, we'll just keep these bubbles from happening.' They never at one point -- if we were Patient Zero -- at one point in no country did they say -- 'Hey, what -- what -- don't follow the United States. Don't do that.' Never? They've had their hands in all of the food and that's what's making us sick. Will anyone look at the Central Banking system?

Hmmm. It's kind of hard to decipher Beck's inchoate jumble, but we'll try. He seems to think people are blaming capitalism itself -- but what I think has taken far more of the blame has been laissez-faire capitalism, especially as practiced by movement conservatives, who never saw a deregulation scheme they didn't love. Rather than cope with the mountain of evidence supporting this reality, right-wingers like Beck flee to the comfort of reliable old conspiracist anomie.

For some reason, the fact that the global expansion of capitalism (not to mention the rise of the mass consumer class) was in fact enabled by the Central Banking system -- particularly its ability to create massive consumer credit and to regulate monetary supply -- seems not to have crossed Beck's radar. Yes, there are serious problems with the system, especially when it's being operated by Ayn Randian ideologues.

But Beck is like the conservatives who want to blame bad government on government itself -- and so their style of governance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of catastrophically bad government. And all along, anyone with simple common sense can see that the problem isn't government but a lack of good government. Likewise with the economy: the problem isn't with centralized banking itself, but with the central-bank system's failure to function well -- namely, by providing proper oversight and sufficient checks and balances. The reason it failed to do so was not the system itself, but the failure of the system to be operated properly by conservatives who insisted that the more laissez-faire the better.

We have a pretty good idea where Beck is getting this: Rep. Ron Paul, who was on Beck's show just a few days before spouting his right-wing monetary theories which are largely predicated on well-worn right-wing populist tropes.

Beck only dips his toe in these waters here, but it should be understood that theories blaming the Federal Reserve system for all of mankind's ills have a long, hoary history on the American far right, most of them conspiratorial in nature and often deeply anti-Semitic.

Edward Flaherty put together a thorough exploration of some of the myths around the Federal Reserve system, including a discussion of some of Becks apparent misconceptions about its role in creating economic policy and how it came to be.

Most of all, the view of the mere existence Central Bank as the root of all economic evil has a long history of conspiracist support, even in the face of the cold economic reality that the existence of elites does not mean a conspiracy is afoot:

No single power bloc, company, family, or individual in a complex modern society wields absolute control, even though there are always systems of control. Wall Street stock brokers are not outsiders deforming an otherwise happy system. As Holly Sklar argues, "the government is manipulated by various elites, often behind the scenes, but these elites are not a tiny secret cabal with omniscience and omnipotence." There is no secret team...the elites that exist are anything but secret. The government and the economy are not alien forces superimposed over an otherwise equitable and freedom loving society.

As Matthew N. Lyons points out, "Scapegoating is not only about who is targeted, but also about who is not targeted, and what systems and structures are not being challenged by focusing on the scapegoat." For example, the Federal Reserve is a powerful institution that has made many decisions that primarily benefit the wealthy and corporate interests. William Greider's book Secrets of the Temple describes the Federal Reserve as a significant institution of modern corporate capitalism with bipartisan support. He shows how the legislation traces back to demands by populists to smooth out boom and bust cycles and rapidly fluctuating credit rates that especially victimized farmers. Grieder also discusses the long history of the debate over the wisdom of a central banking system, and how the legislation creating the Federal Reserve was passed in 1913 after a lengthy public debate. There is no antisemitism or conspiracist scapegoating in the text of the Greider book.

Compare this sober analysis to the works of G. Edward Griffin, Martin Larson, Antony C. Sutton, or Eustace Mullins. They portray the Federal Reserve as the mechanism by which a tiny evil elite covertly manipulate the economy. They trace its creation to a cabal who met secretly on Georgia's Jekyll Island and then somehow snuck the legislation through Congress overnight. Anyone with a library card can disprove this malarkey simply by reading microfilmed newspaper accounts of the contentious public debate over the legislation.

Sutton and Larson overemphasize the role of bankers who are Jewish, revealing mild antisemitic stereotyping. Mullins is a strident bigot who actually has two bodies of work. In one set of texts Mullins avoids overt antisemitic language while discussing his conspiracist theory of the Federal Reserve and the alleged role of forces tied to the Rothschild banking family. These texts involve implicit antisemitic stereotyping that is easily missed (sadly) by an average reader unaware of the history of conspiracist antisemitism and its use of coded language and references. In another set of texts Mullins displays grotesque antisemitism. Mullins uses his critique of the Federal Reserve to lure people toward his other works where his economic analysis is revealed to be based on naked hatred of Jews.

All the authors in this conspiracist genre suggest alien forces use the Federal Reserve to impose their secret agenda on an unwitting population, an analysis that ignores systemic and institutional factors and personalizes the issue in the classic conspiracist paradigm.

Glenn Beck wants everyone to think he's just an independent thinker -- that's his schtick, after all -- but, like Sarah Palin, he's tra-la-la-ing down the yellow brick populist road that has been traveled so many times by so many others on the right in the past. And it always leads not to an Emerald City but the witch's fortress, where flying monkeys await.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]