Conserving orcas, and humans too

One of the words you don't hear used a lot in the debate over global warming is conservationist. Most of the people raising the alarm about its effects are described as "environmentalists."

The two are related, but significantly different. Conservationism is about trying to keep the environmental resources we currently have intact; it's about ensuring that those resources are not being wasted in the short-term pursuit of the dollar. It is, in reality, conservative in the best sense of the word.

Environmentalism, in contrast, encompasses a whole panoply of beliefs aimed at improving the planet's environmental health, many of which take a much more idealistic approach to issues. Some of these -- including the so-called "deep ecology" movement -- are in fact profoundly inimical to the approach taken by conservationists. And many are, frankly, fairly radical in their belief systems.

This is partly why so many of the apologists for global warming are able to get away with pretending that their opponents are radicals with an anti-business agenda -- just call them "environmentalists" and you're halfway there to framing them negatively. It doesn't matter if you're actually talking about a mass consensus of trained scientists.

But the fight over global warming, when you get down to basics, is essentially conservationist -- it's about conserving the environment we currently have. It's about trying to prevent the catastrophic effects that radical climate change could have on all of us -- on our livelihoods, on our economies, on our survival itself. There's nothing the least bit radical about it. If anything, it is often criticized for being too accomodating, in its approach to using natural resources, to those who would exploit them.

Unfortunately, the American right -- in its knee-jerk defense of all things corporate, as well as its complete capture by religious fundamentalists -- is eager to obliterate the hard scientific realities presented on a number of political fronts, not merely global warming. So it keeps presenting a picture of scientists and their supporters as radical environmental wackos with an anti-business political agenda.

They also take a ridiculously short-term view, both economically and in the raw impact on human life (which always becomes an economic issue anyway), of the effects of their own agenda -- namely, unfettered exploitation of the environment -- on the rest of us. The results, in fact, are responsible for what is about to be a significant, and perhaps irrevocable, change in the natural world that supports us all.

When you contrast this with, say, a strictly conservationist outlook, it becomes fairly clear which party is the more genuinely radical of the two. Take your pick: the faction conducting a radical experiment on the global environment, or those warning that the change is a major disaster in the making -- and, moreover, that it can be at least ameliorated if not prevented altogether?

Yet somehow -- mostly by wrapping themselves in the mantle of "traditional" capitalist values -- the corporatists and their enablers manage to depict their opposition as the "radical" faction and themselves the "common sense" side.

This dynamic is starting to take root in the battle over the Puget Sound's endangered orcas. Lynda Mapes had a pretty solid feature on the difficult road to recovery ahead for orcas in the Sunday Seattle Times. It included this passage from the people who are filing suit to overturn the listing:

"I see catastrophic economic impacts," said Tim Harris, general counsel for the Olympia-based Building Industry Association of Washington, a plaintiff in the suit. "I see it slowing and crippling development, driving up housing costs and hurting jobs."

This is, of course, simply a short-term view of the matter. Because there will be other catastrophic impacts, of a much broader, more severe, and longer-lasting variety -- if the Puget Sound orcas are allowed to go extinct.

As Mapes' piece explains (and as I explored in depth in an earlier piece for Seattle Weekly), the orcas are an ideal indicator species of the overall health of the Puget Sound ecosystem, precisely because they are long-lived creatures who reside atop its food chain.

What we know is that when orcas start disappearing, the chief reason is that they're not getting enough to eat -- particularly the chinook salmon that constitute the large majority of their diet. There is, of course, the impact of the loss of tourism dollars drawn to see the killer whales here (estimated currently at well over a million dollars annually) would be only the first felt. If those salmon are disappearing, then whole other segments of the Puget Sound economy that make their living from it as a resource (particularly fishing) will begin to suffer. In other words, the traditional conservationists who use the Sound to make their living are going to be affected, disastrously, as well.

There is, moreover, the stark reality of the waters they inhabit:

Secondly, the recovery plan is expected to seek a reduction in pollution and chemical contamination in the orca's habitat. That would mean addressing industrial-waste disposal, agricultural and household use of chemicals. It also would mean dealing with discharge from wastewater and stormwater. And it would mean cleaning up contaminated sites and sediments.

Today, the orcas' home waters are a stew created by 17 pulp and paper mills in the Puget Sound and Georgia Basin region; 34 million gallons of raw sewage a day spewed by the city of Victoria, B.C., into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and thousands of discharge pipes from industries, sewers and storm drains. Contaminated areas dot the region, including 24 Superfund sites around Puget Sound still not cleaned up.

Southern residents have become the most contaminated marine mammals in the world. They carry loads of toxins high enough to suppress their reproduction and make them more susceptible to disease.

The story concludes with a quote from Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research:

"It's not a popular solution. But what's called for is looking at the big picture. We have an endangered whale eating a threatened fish. We have to change our ways. I hope this is part of the wake-up."

The problem is that the armies of the right are fully invested in keeping everyone asleep on issues where science, and hard common-sense reality, are not on their side. And they do this by constantly muddying the issues, presenting false choices as the only ones available, and grossly distorting both the science and the scientific debate.

A prime example of just how intentionally obtuse they can be was noted by Chris Mooney the other day, in the form of Peggy "Divine Dolphins" Noonan's recent ruminations on global warming:

During the past week's heat wave -- it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday -- I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warming is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

Well, as Mooney points out, many of these questions were in fact directly addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which put out a detailed report answering most of Noonans's questions back in Geneva in April 2005.

But the IPCC's answers weren't the ones that Noonan, and the Republican right generally, wanted to hear. So they keep asking the same questions, and when they get the same answers, they pretend that the politics that they say is "contaminating" the science renders any serious judgment impossible -- when in fact the only people injecting politics into the science are those on the right who are busily plugging their ears to the evidence.

But as weather maps like this become increasingly common -- as do the rolling blackouts caused by the demand for air conditioning as a result -- the evidence will keep getting harder to ignore. You can pretend, as the Bush administration has been doing, that we can all just "adjust" to the realities of global warming. But when those realities include a frying-pan America addicted to air conditioning and the energy it consumes, the economic equation begins to shift, heavily.

That, in the end, may be what finally awakens Americans to what has been happening to our national policies, especially those in which science plays a significant role. Playing semantic and partisan games with science in pursuit of short-term political and personal gain is bad for a lot of things: bad for the environment, bad for wild animals, bad for humans. But it's also bad for business.

The conservationist ethic, with its eye on preserving what we've got, always recognized this reality. It might be time to start breathing life back into it.

That right-wing logic

My dad is always sending me crappy e-mail jokes. You know the kind: dependent on stereotypes, often predicated on violent fantasies, and utterly devoid of wit or insight. I think everyone has someone in their family like this.

I love my dad, though, and am content to have him send me these things. It's kind of a way of staying in touch.

So last week he sends me this joke. It depends on the usual stereotypes (this time about rural hicks and professors), but ...

Two South Texas farmers, Jim and Bob, are sitting at their favorite bar, drinking beer. Jim turns to Bob and says, "You know, I'm tired of going through life without an education. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the community college, and sign up for some classes."

Bob thinks it's a good idea, and the two leave.

The next day, Jim goes down to the college and meets Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes: Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Jim says. "What's that?"

The dean says, "I'll show you. Do you own a weed eater?"

"Yeah."

"Then logically speaking, because you own a weedeater, I think that you would have a yard."

"That's true, I do have a yard."

"I'm not done," the dean says. "Because you have a yard, I think logically that you would have a house."

"Yes, I do have a house." "And because you have a house, I think that you might logically have a family."

"Yes, I have a family."

"I'm not done yet. Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife."

"And because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual."

"I am a heterosexual. That's amazing, you were able to find out all of that because I have a weed eater."

Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to go meet Bob at the bar.

He tells Bob about his classes, how he signed up for Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Bob says, "What's that?"

Jim says, "I'll show you. Do you have a weed eater?"

"No."

"Then you're a queer."

OK, so I laughed at this one. Because this is what passes for logic not just among rural hicks, but nearly the entire right wing in this country.

[FWIW: In strictly logical terms, the joke illustrates a false syllogism, or more precisely, a failed enthymeme. A simple Venn diagram would make clear how it fails.]

This is true not just when it comes to sexual politics and cultural assumptions. It's also true of nearly every other issue that the American right confronts these days:

-- Worried about global warming? You're the same as the Nazis!

-- Opposed to the war in Iraq? You're "objectively pro-Saddam". Even if it turns out later you were right.

-- So you object to nativist scapegoating in the immigration debate? You must be part of the "open borders crowd" willing to surrender our national sovereignty to the "Reconquistas"!

-- You think Joe Lieberman is an out-of-touch Democrat who needs to be replaced? You must be an angry liberal blogger!

-- Think President Bush overstepped his constitutional bounds by ignoring the law and ordering surveillance of American citizens? You must by a traitor who wants to harm national security!

The list, and the beat, goes on and on.

And you were wondering why so much of our modern discourse resembles Bizarro World? Wonder no more.

The Minuteman scam

The growing rift in the ranks of the Minutemen (first reported here) driven in part by the activities of the consulting firm responsible for Chris Simcox's remarkable makeover is now going public.

And you know that it's a serious rift when the report appears in The Washington Times, which has a long history of running article supportive of the Minutemen:

A growing number of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leaders and volunteers are questioning the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in donations collected in the past 15 months, challenging the organization's leadership over financial accountability.

Many of the group's most active members say they have no idea how much money has been collected as part of its effort to stop illegal entry -- primarily along the U.S.-Mexico border, what it has been spent on or why it has been funneled through a Virginia-based charity headed by conservative Alan Keyes.

Several of the group's top lieutenants have either quit or are threatening to do so, saying requests to Minuteman President Chris Simcox for a financial accounting have been ignored.

As so often happens when right-wing scamsters are caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they've continually promised to provide a full accounting and then, of course, never do:

Mr. Simcox, in an interview last week with The Washington Times, estimated that about $1.6 million in donations have been collected, all of it handled through the Herndon-based Declaration Alliance, founded and chaired by Mr. Keyes. He said the donations, solicited on the group's Web site and during cross-country appearances, included $1 million directly to MCDC and $600,000 for a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Mr. Simcox's numbers could not be independently verified, including claims in a 3,961-word statement issued after the interview that he spent $160,000 on "our last two monthlong border-watch operations."

The Minuteman organization has not made any financial statements or fundraising records public since its April 2005 creation. It also has sought and received extensions of its federal reporting requirements and has not given the Minuteman leadership, its volunteers or donors any official accounting. A financial statement promised to The Times by Mr. Simcox for May was never delivered.

And note how they dismiss their internal critics: Why, these folks are just the racists and bigots we've been trying to weed out!

Several other Minuteman members question why Mr. Keyes' organization is involved in collecting MCDC donations, saying donations to the movement should be handled by the Minuteman leadership, who could be directly responsible for it.

Mr. Keyes has financially endorsed and supported the Minuteman organization as programs of Declaration Alliance and the Declaration Foundation, another Virginia-based charitable organization that he heads. He accused internal MCDC critics of being "decidedly racist and anti-Semitic," saying they had been removed as members of the Minuteman organization.

"I personally applaud Chris Simcox for his diligent adherence to a rigorous standard that weeds out bigots from the upstanding, patriotic mainstream Americans who participate in the Minuteman citizens' border watch effort that I am proud to support," he said.

Mr. Keyes said that MCDC is in the process of applying to the IRS for nonprofit status and that those responsible are "adhering to all relevant federal regulations." He called concerns over finances and accountability "groundless," saying they were being "bandied about by members of anti-immigrant and racialist groups, and other unsavory fringe elements attempting to hijack the border security debate to further their individual agendas."

By smearing his critics without any supporting evidence, of course, Keyes is conveniently diverting attention from the substance of the questions. And well he should. After all, he is part of the same group of businessmen, headed by Philip Sheldon, that operates both Diener Consulting -- with whom Simcox has a contract -- and Response Unlimited, the mailing firm that, as I explained previously, was making use of Minutemen donors' contact information.

The Minutemen, it's clear, are becoming very profitable indeed, even if their fence projects don't go so well. For a few people, at least.

It's dehumanization time

The immigration debate -- already rife with all kinds of extremist rhetoric and appeals -- took another notch downward this week when Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa compared illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to cattle:

It was prop time on the House floor Tuesday night when Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), making the case for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, showed a miniature version of a border wall that he "designed."

He had mock sand representing the desert as well as fake construction panels as C-SPAN focused in on the unusual display.

But it got really interesting when King broke out the mock electrical wiring: "I also say we need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top."

He added, "We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time."

Of course, this is par for the course for King, who earlier published a hateful, disinformation-laden screed against illegal immigrants on his Web site. But it's worth noting how, in both cases, the rhetoric was all about dehumanizing border crossers.

The ugliness of the rhetoric in the immigration debate generally is being observed elsewhere. The recent debate in the Colorado Legislature over illegal immigrants raised all kinds of red flags among legislators regarding the thinly veiled racism that underscores so much of the right-wing response to illegal immigration.

This kind of rhetoric has all kinds of real-life consequences. In California, for instance, the total number of hate crimes declined 4.5 percent last year but hate crimes against Hispanics increased 6.5 percent.

Perhaps most ominously, the right-wing fervor over immigration continues to fuel white supremacists, who have recognized it for the opportunity that it presents to expand their base and broaden their appeal.

Recently, there were New Hampshire rallies by "White Pride" groups against illegal immigration, while the Aryan Anarchist Skins at their rally in Oregon, Ill., recently, also focused on immigration.

Of course, one can rest assured that folks like Rep. King have nothing -- no, nada, nuthin' -- to do with that.

The origins of 'eliminationism'

Well, since this blog is the first entry in a Google search of the term "eliminationism," I suppose I'm going to have to take some ownership of it. And I'll gladly do so, because its increasing appearance in right-wing rhetoric is indeed an important phenomenon.

But I will be the first to point out that I didn't invent the term. I first encountered it in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's text Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, where it appears extensively and plays a central role in his thesis that "eliminationist antisemitism" had a unique life in German culture and eventually was the driving force behind the Holocaust.

A word about Goldhagen: In the ensuing debate over his thesis, I found myself falling more in the Christopher Browning camp, which doubted that "eliminationist antisemitism" was quite as pervasive as Goldhagen portrayed it, and that, moreover, it was as unique to Germany as he described it. Having some background of familiarity with the history of American eliminationism (particularly the "lynching era" and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the "Yellow Peril" agitation and the subsequent internment of Japanese Americans during World War II), I agreed especially with the latter point.

That said, Hitler's Willing Executioners is an important and impressive piece of scholarship, particularly in the extent to which it catalogues the willing participation of the "ordinary" citizenry in so many murderous acts, as well as in the hatemongering that precipitated them. And his identification of "eliminationism" as a central impulse of the Nazi project was not only borne out in spades by the evidence, but was an important insight into the underlying psychology of fascism.

Reexamining the text, it's hard to find a single point at which Goldhagen explains precisely the meaning of "eliminationist," except that it is spelled out in nearly every page of the book's first hundred pages (Part I is titled "Understanding German Antisemitism: The Eliminationist Mind-set"). Probably the closest I can come to a distillation of the concept appears on p. 69:

The eliminationist mind-set that characterized virtually all who spoke out on the "Jewish Problem" from the end of the eighteenth century onward was another constant in Germans' thinking about Jews. For Germany to be properly ordered, regulated, and, for many, safeguarded, Jewishness had to be eliminated from German society. What "elimination" -- in the sense of successfully ridding Germany of Jewishness -- meant, and the manner in which this was to be done, was unclear and hazy to many, and found no consensus during the period of modern German antisemitism. But the necessity of the elimination of Jewishness was clear to all. It followed from the conception of the Jews as alien invaders of the German body social. If two people are conceived of as binary opposites, with the qualities of goodness inhering in one people, and those of evil in the other, then the exorcism of that evil from the shared social and temporal space, by whatever means, would be urgent, an imperative. "The German Volk," asserted one antisemite before the midpoint of the century, "needs only to topple the Jew" in order to become "united and free."

Of course, I'm struck in that passage by how easily one could replace "Jewishness" with "liberalism" and "liberals" in much of the current environment -- as well as a number of other targets for right-wing elimination, particularly illegal immigrants.'

I'm planning to write more on the subject soon, but I've noted previously that the eliminationist project is in many ways the signature of fascism, partly because it proceeds naturally from fascism's embrace of palingenesis, or Phoenix-like national rebirth, as its core myth. And I've also noted that eliminationist rhetoric has consistently preceded, and heralded, the eventual assumption of the eliminationist project.

This is the case not merely in Europe, but in America as well. Perhaps more germane in terms of our current milieu, eliminationism has a long and colorful -- and ultimately, shameful -- history in this country.

Halfwits and propagandists who assure us that it can't happen here are ignoring that, in fact, it has. It's buried in our hard-wiring. And the modern American right is doing its damnedest to bring it back to life.

Eliminationism? Whuzzat?

That most excellent of Morans, the one named Rick, has decided to try to tackle the growing use of the term "eliminationist" to describe right-wing rhetoric by suggesting, of all things, that it's just one of those words that means whatever we want it to mean.

As I responded in his comments:

Hilarious and pathetic.

Of course, nowhere in this post is an explanation of the actual meaning of the term "eliminationist," even though it has been given numerous times at my blog. (Nice spelling of my name, BTW. Guess it goes along with this.) So, by pretending that no such definition or explanation exists, you effectively create a nice little straw man that you conveniently set aflame. Impressive. Not.

Incidentally, go back to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work for more on eliminationism.

My understanding, for what it's worth, is that the concept of "eliminationism" was originated by scholars of fascism studying the Nazi phenomenon. However, it's clear that the impulse existed well before the 20th century.

I'll have more on this in the next few weeks.

The projection strategy

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, who has been dealing this week with the latest surge in eliminationist rhetoric -- and actual behavior -- from the right-wing blogosphere.

The main focus has been on the fake "controversy" over an obscure blogger named Deb Frisch who wrote a disgusting and evidently threatening comment at Jeff Goldstein's blog, which set all the right wing -- including Fox News -- abuzz with righteous indignation over the specter of an increasingly "unhinged" and violent left.

I especially noted the his initial roundup on the Frisch matter (including the antics of the Perfesser, whose ethics we've limned previously along similar lines):

With those brilliant and elevated responses assembled before him, Instapundit -- who endlessly parades himself around as a righteous advocate of civil discourse, and who was one of those who spent the weekend lamenting the terrible language directed at Jeff Goldstein -- also weighed in on my post. He did so by approvingly linking to the very high-level responses from Dan Riehl, Sister Toldjah, and Patterico, and then shared with us: "I'm no fan of Greenwald." (Incidentally, Instapundit, who claims with great self-satisfaction to be an adherent to the privacy-protecting "Online Integrity" concept, links to Riehl, who currently has posted on his blog satellite photographs of Punch Salzburger's home along with his home address).

So that's the level of discourse that comes from right-wing bloggers, every one of whom cited here -- each and every one -- doled out solemn lectures this weekend about how terrible it is for people to write mean personal insults on the Internet, only to respond to my post today with the above-excerpted tantrums. And all of that leaves to the side the fact that they were unable to comprehend the actual arguments that were made in the post -- most of them responded to the opposite of the argument that was actually made -- an embarrassing fact which QandO's Jon Henke had to explain to them here and here. But ultimately, their whiny, ad hominem tantrums seem more notable than the lack of comprehension.

As Greenwald went on to describe today, this derangement and open adoption of extremist ideas and appeals -- especially to the most thuggish elements of the right -- may be most prominently visible in Glenn Reynolds' case (though regular readers here are well aware that this has been his MO for some time) but is in fact widespread throughout the right blogosphere:

The extremist and increasingly deranged rhetoric and tactics found in the right-wing blogosphere -- not only among obscure bloggers but promoted and disseminated by its most-read and influential bloggers -- is, indeed, "a very common disease." When it becomes commonplace to hurl accusations of treason against domestic political opponents, or when calls for imprisonment and/or hanging of journalists and political leaders become the daily fare -- all of which is true for the pro-Bush blogosphere -- those are serious developments. And they merit discussion and examination by the media.

What we're witnessing on a massive scale, of course -- as the foofaraw over Deb Frisch so amply illustrates -- is projection: the classic right-wing propensity to see in its enemies its own dark side. I've described its appearance in recent years many times here, including discussions of its subtler aspects.

The classic description of projection comes from Richard Hofstadter in his examination of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics":

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

As I noted quite awhile back, projection from the right has become such a common phenomenon that it's now a very useful gauge in guessing where the right is taking us next:

Indeed, one of the lessons I've gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

Whether it's sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn't matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they're busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor of a hundred.

For a long time, I really believed that this was simply the right acting out on its own psychological predisposition. But as it's gathered volume and momentum -- especially as the right has avidly accused the left of the very thuggishness, both rhetorical and real, in which it is increasingly indulging -- a disturbing trend began to emerge:

What is particularly interesting about this kind of projection by conservatives is that it then (as the comments indicate) becomes a pretext for even further eliminationist rhetoric against liberals -- and eventually, for exactly the kind of "acting out" of rhetoric that Van Der Leun foresees from liberals.

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.

The signal event for this, I think, was Michelle Malkin's book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild which was a black-and-white-case of intentional projection. Indeed, as I noted further, it provided a pretext for a whole explosion of hateful, eliminationist rhetoric from the right:

Indeed, books like Unhinged actually serve a specific purpose: to provide epistemological cover for conservatives' own behavior. If those wackos on the left are wrecking America with their unhinged bombast, well, a little return fire is well earned, isn't it?

This is why, in the weeks after her book's release, we were subjected to so many instances of truly unhinged rhetoric from the right, Bill O'Reilly in particular. Within a week of Malkin's appearance on his show, O'Reilly was suggesting that San Francisco deserved to be attacked by terrorists, compared anti-Iraq war protesters to Hitler sympathizers, called all Europeans cowards, and promised to "bring horror" to his ephemeral foes in the "war on Christmas."

Did anyone on the right utter a peep? Well, no. Not even Michelle Malkin.

Of course not. That is, after all, her entire purpose in doing this. It's a strategy -- and so far, it's working like a charm.

Sunset at the Park

A family of barn swallows has built a nest in the peak of the roof at the front of the rangers' cabin at San Juan County Park. You can hear them chirping away when you sit on the bench there, taking in the view of Smallpox Bay. Every now and then one of the adults swoops out, gracefully, over the bay and back.

It's still early evening and the bay is glassy calm when Fiona and I come down from our campsite to use the phone. We talk to her mom (who is still back at home, getting ready to join us the next day) a little while, and then Fiona spots the baby swallow.

It is huddled on the ground in the space between the soda machine and the rangers' cabin, chirping, answering the calls from above but clearly unable to become airborne and return to its nest. Fiona wants to pick it up and pet it and comfort it, but I explain to her that if we do, it will smell like humans and its mother will reject it and it will die. If we can find a ranger, I tell her, maybe he can find a way to get it back up there without a human scent.

Just then the chief ranger, a kindly, middle-aged man named Joe Luma, comes down from the campsites and Fiona runs up to implore his help with all the urgency a five-year-old can muster. "Joe! Joe! Come quick and see the baby bird! It needs our help!" She leads him around to the soda machine and he bends down to examine it.

"Okay," he reassures her. "I'll get out the ladder and we'll see if we can't return it to its nest." He stands up and smiles, somewhat winsomely, because he has done this before and knows what the eventual outcome will almost certainly be, regardless.

He beckons his longtime assistant, Ron Abbott, and they go about fetching the ladder and a box to put the bird into on its return trip to the nest. Not far away, I see Ron's cat, a friendly black-and-white fellow named Vinny, playing in the rushes near the bay. Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds. But Vinny evidently hasn't clued in to the presence of the fallen swallow.

Fiona is happy now that Joe and Ron have gone to work on her behalf, and we go back to our campsite, where she regales her little troupe of friends with the tale of how we rescued a baby swallow. They are all appropriately impressed.

The next morning Fiona insists we go back to the ranger station to check on the baby swallow. We can hear the family chirping away in its nest, and the nestling is nowhere on the ground, so she is satisfied that it has been saved: "See?" she says. "It's back home in its nest now," pointing up at the chirping nest.

A little while later I see Joe and Ron inside the station and poke my head in. Joe smiles ruefully and checks to make sure Fiona is out of earshot, then tells me: "We put that bird back up in its nest, and it was back down on the ground in twenty minutes. It was still there when I went home." Of course, it was gone in the morning; whether it was Vinny or one of the wild animals that populates the park -- most notably a family of black foxes -- that finished the job, we'll never know.

But of course, we don't tell Fiona or the kids this. The nestling's fate is one of those adult realities: that in nature, beauty is intertwined with death, love with cruelty. Those charming black foxes survive by eating, among other things, fallen nestlings.

Children will learn this in their own good time; death and life and its cruel ways will intrude on their lives eventually, and so we do what we can to shield them from it when they are young and the world is still sweet and beautiful.

Death, however, is not always so kind to those of us doing the shielding.

****

Joe Luma and Ron Abbott are the kinds of fellows you like to have as park rangers, especially in a place that draws as many children as San Juan County Park. They're older men who like people, and they love the park and having people use it. Especially children, for whom its twelve acres on the western shore of San Juan Island are an open chest of nature's treasures.

I have been camping here every year for the past fifteen, sometimes on multiple visits over a summer, as I will be this year. Many of the rangers the county had hired in previous years had been young men who seemed not very interested in the people using the park, so I had never gotten to know many of them. I've only gotten to know Joe the past couple of years, though he has been here four, but camping here has become remarkably better in his tenure as park manager, and most of the credit belongs to him.

Some of it, though, also belongs to Ron Abbott, who I've gotten to know rather well over the six years he's been a ranger here. I first met him back in the spring of 2000 when I got a wild hair and decided to bike out to the island during one of our periodic "surprise" warm spells in April. The day I rode out was sunny and warm, and I was the only camper there that day. But that evening a wind kicked up across Haro Strait and right through my open campsite, and suddenly the view was too cold to take in. Rather than huddle in my tent, I wandered down to the ranger station to chat with the new ranger.

I don't remember what all we talked about, but I liked Abbott right away. He was in his early fifties, curly red hair and a beard, medium height, with square wire-rim glasses, straightforward countenance, and a ready smile. I never asked too much, but he seemed like someone who had been through his share of rough patches and was out here piecing his life back together. His job doesn't pay especially well, and it's isolated back here. But he always seemed happy.

Certainly, he worked hard. Every time I saw Ron he was cutting brush or fixing a piece of equipment or chopping wood, or just patrolling the grounds and checking to make sure everyone was fine. He saw himself as a real steward of the park, I think, and the park showed it.

Just this spring, Ron and Joe together built an eighty-foot staircase from the upper bench of the park down to its lower second beach, following a plan that Ron had devised. Previously, you had to shimmy down an increasingly slick set of rocks at one end of the beach to reach the pebbly beach, and doing so with children could be risky. Now, you can just walk your kid down a freshly built set of Trex stairs.

This is great news for us, because we brought a whole load of youngsters -- mostly five- and six-year-olds from my daughter's school, along with their parents and siblings -- to the park last week, just in time for one of those marvelous sunny weekends you dream about when you make plans in the spring. We use this second beach a lot, since it is ideal for beaching and storing kayaks, and heading out onto the water quickly, especially if killer whales should appear.

The park's main feature is a massive open grass field that faces out over Haro Strait, and it is visible from most of the campsites in the park. So parents can simply let their children go run and play and still keep an eye on them, though many of us are content to simply sit out on the edge of the field and watch kids play while we watch for whales too. At the open end of the field lays a giant fallen Madrona, trimmed and aging, transformed into a gigantic wooden jungle gym for kids of a broad range of ages.

[Movie trivia note: This park was the site of the exterior shots for the Nicole Kidman/Sandra Bullock popcorn chick flick Practical Magic. The ancient Madrona was still standing in those shots. Proceeds from the shoot paid for the park's brand-new bathroom.]

As far as many of the kids are concerned, though, the chief draw is out there in the water: the whales. The endangered southern resident population of orcas prowls these waters frequently in the summertime, and your chances of seeing them here are better than most places in the United States. Lime Kiln State Park, about a mile and a half south, is actually the best place to see them up-close from land, because they like to come in right next to the rocks there sometimes; when they come by County Park, they usually pass farther out, beyond the rocky little island that serves as a home to peeping oystercatchers about 200 yards offshore.

This all changes, of course, if you have kayaks, which we do, including a couple that are designed to accommodate children. Over the years I've learned how to spot the whales' approach from a ways off (on weekend, the activity of whale-watching boats is a dead giveaway), and so we often set out from the beach in time to watch them. We get close enough for a good look, but we try never to get too close or interfere with them.

On Saturday, they started showing up around noon, and they kept coming by periodically for much of the afternoon. We took most of the kids who wanted to go -- which was all of them -- out to sample the water and for some to see the whales.

At one point, we observed a behavior I'd only heard about previously: logging. A female named Slick -- designated J16 -- was lolling for long stretches at the surface, in some cases three minutes or longer; most of the time, orcas are constantly submerging themselves after they surface. Accompanying her was her fast-growing calf, a seven-year-old named Alki, or J36.



Alki (whose sex is still unknown) was playing with its mother, lolling upside down, its pectoral fins in the air; sometimes as it came up behind her it bumped its nose playfully into her side, at others it swam out ahead by a few feet and spyhopped, checking out its surroundings and spouting mist over the glassy surface of the water.

What they were doing was what we all like to do on hot summer days: lazing. There was a powerful northern current that the rest of the pods were taking, and these two were just enjoying the sun and letting the tide do the work.

Riding with them, we were more or less doing the same thing. The current pulled us steadily north, and the only time we dipped our paddles in the water was to pull back if it looked like we might come too close to our companions. Fiona's friend Felix was seated before me, and his father sat in the front; I had out my hydrophone, and the speaker sat in Felix's lap as we drifted along. The orcas were vocalizing a lot; it wasn't as chorale-like as my last listening, but it was magical nonetheless. The beatific, awestruck look on Felix's face said it all.

At last, after drifting for what seemed like a dream's worth of time, we found ourselves about a quarter-mile south of Smuggler's Cove, so I pulled us out of the current and close to shore. We promptly caught the backcurrent there, and it pulled us back south almost as eagerly as the main-channel current had taken us north. It made for an easy day's paddle, and while we didn't exactly drift back, we scooted back to camp with such ease that it still seemed like a dream as we pulled up to the beach.

Days like that, for me, make life worth living. There is something immensely rewarding about connecting kids with nature, letting them taste and smell and feel the real world, the one that they can never get from a video or computer program. When you do that, you pass on to them values that words cannot communicate. These values were passed on to me the same way, and I believe that some of these children will one day pass them on to theirs. So I am participating in something timeless, and that is inexpressibly satisfying.

This is how nature, the stuff of life in its raw form, so often appears to children. Beautiful, dreamlike, the source of so much awe. And for most of the day, I was swept up in it, drifting in it, soaking in it like Slick.

And then the evening came, and with it the other side of nature.

****

A couple of bicycling campers, who had initially set up their tents in the hiker-biker campsites, decided they didn't like the noise in the adjoining open field that evening and moved their tents and bikes down to a grassy knoll outside of the camping area near one of the overlook benches. Stuff like this rankles old-timers like myself, who know that the park's resources are carefully managed because they are used so much and can be easily run down.

More to the point, I knew that they really rankle Ron Abbott, who was relentless in keeping campers relegated to their designated sites. But he hadn't been around for awhile and I knew he would want to know about this development, so I moseyed down to the ranger station to give him a heads-up.

Ron's living quarters comprised the back half of the ranger station, and the door to them was to the right behind a gate next to the community woodpile. I could see there was a light on inside the home, and I leaned my head over the gate and called out his name.

"Ron?" No answer. I looked to the left of the gate and into the yard and froze.

Ron was lying there on his back. One arm was slightly raised in the air, and one leg was slightly askew. At his feet was a wheel with a crowbar jammed into a half-peeled tire. Vinny the cat sat next to him, his feet together, as if he were guarding him.

I said something -- "Oh shit!" or "Oh God!" or maybe both, I can't remember -- and ran into the yard and knelt next to him. The skin on his arms and legs was a pale gray, his face was purple, and his eyes stared blankly into space. I felt his wrist for a pulse, but there was none. Still, his body seemed warm.

I ran to the phone and dialed 911. After hearing me out, they said EMTs would be arriving shortly. It's about a 15-minute drive from Friday Harbor for even the fastest vehicle, though, and after I hung up I knew I had to do what I could for him.

I quickly checked on him again, tried some chest compressions, but I could see it was useless. I cursed the fact that I had never taken a CPR course, got up and ran out to get help.

I was lucky. I had barely made it across the parking lot before finding someone -- a middle-aged woman coming up to the group camp from the bay below. Her name was Anna Stern, and she was there with a group of 4-H kids. I told her, breathlessly I'm sure, what I had found, and asked if she could help.

"I'm a nurse," she said, and we took off running back to Ron's yard together. Her husband and son, having heard the story, took off to find more help.

Anna and I began working on Ron, repositioning his body, turning him on his side to drain the esophageal fluids, and then on his back so Anna could apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But she couldn't get a seal on his mouth, so I got a quick hands-on lesson in how to do it and began trying to breathe life back into my friend, while Anna went to work giving him chest compressions.

I think I gave him about ten breaths, and each wheezed back out effectlessly. Then two of Anna's friends, both nurses themselves, showed up, and the one who had been a nurse in Vietnam took over. I stood up and backed away, looking helplessly at those blank eyes.

It struck me then, as it often does at funerals, how little the body that is left behind actually looks like the person we knew. Life, the thing that animates us, gives our bodies, our faces, a character that vanishes when it does. I knew that Ron was dead because he was not there anymore; his spark had disappeared as tracelessly as a baby barn swallow.

I realized that my wife would be wondering where I had gotten off to, so I told Anna I'd be back as soon as possible and ran back to my campsite. I called Lisa over to me -- loudly, I'm sorry to say -- and then told her as quietly as I could what had happened, and to keep it quiet. I didn't want a word of it to reach the children.

The other parents heard it all as well, and quietly took over watching Fiona while Lisa and one of the other fathers, Adam Peck, ran back to the ranger station with me.

By the time we got there, the nurses had wrapped Ron in a blanket, and one was telling the EMTs on the radio that this was a coroner's case. The EMTs arrived soon afterward; Lisa went back to put Fiona to bed, and I stayed to write out my statement for the sheriff's deputy.

****

The EMTs told me later that evening that they figured Ron had been dead about an hour when I found him. This was small consolation, really; and I've since come to ponder how it is that EMTs get by emotionally when they lose someone they've been trying to save. No matter how one rationalizes it, there is still some guilt there, and it will haunt me. For how long, I don't know.

I do know it was a good thing I had gone down and found him. If I hadn't, he'd have laid there overnight, and no amount of guarding from Vinny could have kept all the various wild animals in the park away. As it was, his body was tucked safely away by the sheriff's deputies before nightfall.

They're not sure whether it was a heart attack or an aneurysm that laid him low. It seems likely that whatever it was hit him quickly. My friend Bob Leamer was felled a couple of years ago by an aneurysm that took him like a Mack truck. Sudden deaths like that are terrible because we don't get to say goodbye; but then, lingering deaths in which we can give our farewells are in reality much more likely to be source of enormous suffering. There are certain advantages to going out quickly like that.

Still, it is a tremendous jolt for those left behind. I'm not nearly as affected by it all as Joe Luma, and the rest of the county parks crew, who all knew and loved Ron far better than I. And I was equipped, perhaps, better than others to handle finding him, since I have years of experience covering death in all its grim countenances, including several far more horrible than this. Still, I've never been the first on the scene, and it's never involved a friend.

The children in our group, as far as I know, never caught wind that anything bad happened that weekend. If they had been older, perhaps we might have said something; but five-year-olds have enough on their plate without having to deal with something like death.

So the rest of the weekend went in similar fashion; balmy days, visits from whales, kids playing in the grass and on the beaches. I think everyone knew I was hurting, but burying myself in the innocent world of five-year-olds, in those circumstances, was a good recipe for sanity.

I'm told that Ron's family back East is having the body returned to their care. The American Legion post in Friday Harbor, where Ron liked to hang out, is planning a memorial service, though it hasn't been set yet.

I was down talking with Joe Luma, who was terribly shaken, the day afterward at the ranger station. He talked about how tough it was going to be running the park because he and Ron were almost a symbiotic team -- they fed off each other, and picked up where the other left off. Mostly, he missed his friend.

I suggested he lower the park's American flag to half-mast in honor of his friend. He looked at it and said: "I thought about that. But then I wondered if someone would object because it might not be exactly proper."

"Joe," I said, "there isn't a soul on Earth who would object. And if there were, he wouldn't be worth listening to."

So he did.

****

One of the peculiar ironies about the evening that Ron Abbott died was that, not only was it at the end of one of the most beautiful days of the year, it was capped by one of the most spectacular sunsets I've seen on the island this summer.

You have to understand: San Juan sunsets are a staple of travel magazines about the place, because they are so brilliant and gaudy. The photo atop this post was taken four years ago, but it is only one of many I have in my collection from this place.

The sunsets across Haro Strait, when the light and cloud conditions are right, are like grand performances from Mother Nature. They often begin with a golden glow spreading across bands of pink and blue, then deepen in intensity as the sun lowers itself on the horizon, creating intense bands of color and light that gradually phase downward into an intense array of beams as the sun drops behind Vancouver Island. A long-lasting glow then caresses the glassy seas for the next hour or so as a kind of denouement, finally subsiding in a soft azure as night descends and the stars come out.

So it was this night, and after sitting for a little while at our campfire, I wandered out to watch the final embers from the sun settle under the bands of clouds. I knew that Ron never lost his appreciation for these displays -- it was much of the reason why he did what he did -- and would have reveled in this one.

I am almost always overcome by a sense of peacefulness here, and that night, listening to the waves and watching the night descend, it washed over me like a soothing balm. There was an edge to it: I knew that even the soothing sea, like all of the natural world, could be as cruel as death when circumstances suited it. Here amid all this beauty there was death too. It was in everything as surely as there was life in it.

Life, and its beauty, are precious to us because they are so fragile and fleeting. We cherish living because we know that it can disappear in the wink of an eye. This is troubling to all of us -- but it strikes paralyzing fear into the heart of a parent. Because, unlike the innocents we protect, we know too well that death can come in a heartbeat, and it can come even for those innocents. Almost as deep is the fear of our own deaths -- not for our own sakes, but for our children's.

One of the mothers in our group is a former extreme climber and adventurist who has climbed spires around the world and participated in multiple high-risk deep-sea dives. But the last time she tried a free dive, she panicked -- because she began thinking about her children and what would become of them if she died. She hasn't gone back and no longer climbs, either.

A couple of months ago, this same mother had held her youngest son in her arms at a city park and breathed life back into him after he had suddenly, and mysteriously, stopped breathing. He runs about with my daughter now at this park and we all bask in the glow of life he exudes. Yes, we know just how fragile life can be. And still sometimes, the baby swallow makes it back to its mother's nest. Sometimes we are lucky, and sometimes we are not.

As the night settled in and the stars dotted the sky, I finally made my way back to our tent and got ready for bed. I went to my daughter's bed, where she lay curled under her Disney Princess sleeping bag, and caressed her face for a little while, feeling the strands of her hair and the smooth skin of her cheeks, the delicacy of her little fingers. Then I climbed into bed with my loving wife, and I held her close as she slept for the next few hours as the scenes from the day -- all of them, good and bad -- played through my head.

Finally, at about 4 in the morning, I dropped off to sleep.

Nazis and the military

Shawn Stuart is an Iraq War veteran from Montana who spent a fair amount of time last week before the podium at the pathetic National Socialist Movement rally in Olympia. He liked to especially rant about immigration issues and talk about how when he came back to America, he found that we had let the enemy in through the back door. How we had let the Jews open it. That sort of thing.

I have no idea what Stuart's story is. He may well have been attracted to the neo-Nazi cause, and joined the NSM, well after his return home. But what we do know is that today, the American military -- including our forces in Iraq -- are increasingly seeing people like Stuart filling their ranks. Right now.

According to a devastating Southern Poverty Law Center report (echoed in the New York Times), it's happening at an alarming rate. And it's happening because of the way the military is being handled at the very top:

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.

"Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture," Fain said. "We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes."

The problem, as the report explains, is the extreme pressure military recruiters are now under to fill their recruitment quotas:

Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.

"Last year, for the first time, they didn't make their recruiting goals. They don't want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. "Only two have been discharged," he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states -- Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," Barfield said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."

One of the noteworthy aspects of this phenomenon is the way this meshes with the increasingly military style of the far right in recent years, particularly the militias in the 1990s, who openly recruited veterans and current military members. The cultures have become increasingly enmeshed, as embodied by Steven Barry's recruitment plan for neo-Nazis considering a military career as a way to sharpen their "warrior" skills.

One of the real issues in attacking this problem is in recognizing, first of all, that it does not identify our people serving in the armed forces with white supremacists. Moreover, as Jo Fish observes, recruiters probably aren;t seeking out this element; rather, it is coming to them, and circumstances are forcing them to turn a blind eye to it.

And as Atrios notes, the SPLC raises immediate questions about the kind of men we're sending over to Iraq. To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn't hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.

The larger political question, however, is a matter of accountability -- the avoidance of which has proven to be the Bush administration's most remarkable skill. Yet at some point, both the public and the military are going to have to ask: What is this administration doing to our armed forces?

On core matters of respect for the law and basic norms of human decency, it has at every turn taken an ends-justify-the-means approach: whether we're talking about torture of military prisoners -- brought to flaming light by the Abu Ghraib abuses -- as well as the warping and twisting soldiers in the field by failing to provide them with adequate mental-health care and screening.

All of these things -- respecting the laws on torture and the Geneva conventions, providing soldiers with care, weeding out hard-core racists -- are aspects of military policy that have been instituted, after all, to protect and benefit the people serving in the armed forces. Degrading them harms people in uniform in material ways.

There was talk, after Haditha, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- on whose watch this has all occurred -- should finally be forced to resign; talk that has quieted down in the weeks since. The SPLC report, however, should revive it, since it lays bare just how harmful this administration's conduct of not just the war but the deployment and recruitment of our armed forces has been.

Finally, there is an aspect of all this that has largely gone unremarked, but is the real problem we all will eventually have to confront about this: Shawn Stuart is just the first of these faces to be returning home from the Iraq War. If the SPLC report is any indication, there will be many more.

Some will have joined the neo-Nazi cause in the military. Some will have developed attitudes sympathetic to theirs and join later. But we can certainly expect to see more Shawn Stuarts, and they won't all be up on podiums.

If we look five years down the road, a disturbing picture begins to take shape: After the war ends in general failure, as seems almost inevitable now, there will be a raft of angry returned veterans back in country. They will have been told, as they are being told now, that the cause of the failure is all those liberals and terrorist sympathizers roaming the landscape. That they were "stabbed in the back" by the "enemy at home."

Sound familiar?

Already, right-wingers are developing "Targets of Opportunity." Already, they're justifying Radio Rwanda tactics for anyone who dares dissent. Just how much better is it going to get in five years' time?

This, folks, is the very real threat of fascism I've been warning about for some time, rearing its truly monstrous head. You know it when you see it -- and seeing it, perhaps, some of my readers (who keep wondering when I'm going to declare the American right truly fascist) will understand why I'm insisting we're not there yet -- that what we are currently coping with is a kind of pseudo-fascism whose chief threat is that it will give birth to the real thing.

What pseudo-fascism is all about, really, is the end justifying the means. And when the end justifies the means, there are always a thousand untold consequences. We are beginning to glimpse them now.

Gone whaling

I'm off to the islands with a pack of 5-year-olds this weekend. I may actually have a breaking-news post this weekend, so look for it, though I can't promise anything. Otherwise, we'll be communing with the orcas.

The Lyons roars

Gene Lyons takes on the eliminationist wingnuts in his latest column [link not yet available; will publish it as soon as it is]. As Gene points out, the notion that the New York Times has a liberal bias runs directly counter to his own experience:

The New York Times arrogant? Goodness, yes. Condescending too. During the decade the newspaper devoted to its farcical coverage of the Whitewater hoax, feeding out of Kenneth Starr's soft little hand like a Shetland pony, I experienced that condescension first hand. Even confronted with dispositive documentary evidence its Whitewater stories were bunk, its basic response never varied: "We're the New York Times and you're not."

But left wing? Well, the Times, along with the Washington Post, led the 2000 "War on Gore" that basically gave Bush the presidency. Then-columnist, now executive editor Bill Keller actually quoted his 3 year-old daughter's opinion that the Democratic nominee was a stiff.

After 9/11, the Times, along with the rest of the newspaper consortium, buried its finding that had all the legal votes in Florida been counted in 2000, Al Gore would have been president.

Lest we forget, it was reporter Judith Miller's series of leaked, single-source "exclusives" touting Saddam Hussein's imaginary nuclear weapons, accompanied by TV appearances by Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney carefully coordinated with Times publication dates, that helped stampede the nation to war. Columnist Keller thought invading Iraq was a terrific idea.

Now the Times has its reward. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll thinks he knows why. "Many members of the president's base consider 'New York' to be a nifty code word for 'Jewish.' It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word 'Jew' and (b) without irritating the Israelis."

Actually, that's wishful thinking. Anti-Semitism, as such, is old hat among True Believers on the extreme right. For years, the idea's been percolating through the right's well-organized propaganda apparatus that Democrats aren't loyal Americans. Regarding Ann Coulter’s ludicrous book "Slander," I once wrote that "the 'liberal' sins [she] caricatures -- atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason -- are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them."

Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Limbaugh and others peddle the same sterilized American update of an ancient slur. Limbaugh recently called 80 percent of Times subscribers "jihadists."

Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. We're witnessing mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous "liberals" who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush.

Unless confronted, it's through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships.

Gene, as always, says it all.

A nice day for Nazis

The summer in Puget Sound -- clear skies, temperatures in the mid-80s, a light breeze -- was in full bloom yesterday in Olympia. As I walked away from the media area near the podium set up on the Capitol steps where a feeble clutch of neo-Nazis held forth to a crowd intent on mocking and ignoring them, I smiled at two of the 275 Washington State Patrol officers called out to duty that day.

It was clear that there was nothing much cooking that day except for sweating neo-Nazis standing on some granite steps in the hot sun in long sleeved-brownshirt outfits and black boots. The patrolmen, well away from the action, were in short sleeves and standing near a balcony where nothing was happening, chatting and relaxed.

"Nice day for overtime, eh?" I said with a grin. They grinned back.

The whole scene, really, was a bit of theater of the absurd: Here, on the Capitol steps, screaming racial invective into the public-address system, was a total of 12 neo-Nazis, ten of them decked out in crisp brownshirt outfits with neat little patches on the shoulders. Occasionally, as a speaker would wrap up his schtick, they'd all stand in line and do the "Sieg Heil" thing.


Meanwhile, fifty yards away -- separated by a fence and large open space -- was a crowd estimated at over 300 people, nearly all of them there to mock, deride, and toss insults at the Nazis.

The 275 officers -- a number of them in full riot gear -- were ostensibly there to keep the two sides separate. There were police planes flying overhead as well, and snipers on the rooftops. It was an overwhelming police presence, and a tremendous expenditure of public dollars.

And for what, exactly? For the sake of 12 social misfits who think that getting up on the Capitol steps and ranting about Jews and dirty immigrants is the way to spark a social revolution.

The neo-Nazis in question -- the Northwest chapter of the National Socialist Movement, whose activities regionally we've reported previously (you may also recall they were the group that designated me a "race traitor") -- were not exactly threatening. For that matter, they were completely unimpressive in nearly every regard: disorganized, lackluster speakers with nothing interesting to say, and physically unimposing. Even their new brownshirt outfits came off more like insipid geek fantasy role-playing.

The speakers -- like Nigel Fovargue, the Los Angeles Nazi whose image graces the top of the post, or Shawn Stewart, a skinny Iraq War veteran from Billings, Montana -- really had little to say, other than spewing racial invective: "There's a little cockroach that has crawled into every nation and they have been kicked out everywhere. Who am I talking about? The Jew. The Jew hates you all," Stewart said.

This meant they all ran out of steam after about ten minutes; by 2:30 p.m., a half-hour into the rally, they all began talking among themselves about who would speak next. After awhile the speakers began returning to the podium to rant a little longer.


The rally's chief organizer, "Jim Ramm" -- whose real name is Matthew Ramsey, a former Snohomish County militia promoter whose earlier activities I documented recently -- spent much of the rally walking about the steps, videotaping the speakers (as well as those of us in the press area) and checking the sound system. But he also took the podium on occasion, delivering his invective with a guttural snarl.

Ramm and his NSM crew had been predicting a large turnout of fellow neo-Nazis, but all they really demonstrated was just how pathetic a response their recruitment efforts have been over the past year. This can only be a good sign for folks in the Northwest, who have suffered the presence of neo-Nazis for many years now, because nationally speaking, in contrast, the NSM has become a significant presence on the far-right scene.

This is especially the case in light of the violence the NSM was responsible for inducing in Toledo, Ohio, last year, and attempted to spark earlier this year in Orlando, Florida.

In stark contrast, the crowd in Olympia was largely good-natured -- their main purpose was to mock and laugh at the Nazis. Following up on the previous day's community gathering that celebrated the city's diversity, the crowd of protesters that showed up was intent on making a positive response to the Nazi preesence.


Especially noteworthy was the troupe of protesters dressed as clowns -- Nazi clowns, who actually goosestepped together better than the inchoate cluster up on the Capitol steps. They pranced and laughed and danced in the front of the crowd, setting the light-hearted mocking tone that prevailed throughout the afternoon.

The idea for this was hatched by local organizers, including Rick at Olyblog, who approached me last January with the idea, and which sounded at the time like an excellent response I endorsed.

Mind you, this runs directly counter to the advice given by my friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, who consistently urge people to stay away and defang the Nazi rallies by denying them an audience.

Having covered Aryan Nations events in Coeur d'Alene, I can attest that this is generally good advice. Though community organizers in northern Idaho would often hold counter-rallies elsewhere as an alternative celebration (to good effect, I might add), nonetheless, the parade routes there would still be lined with counter-protesters who just turned ugly, spewing hate right back at the Nazis; this always seemed to me to be counter-productive, a matter of feeding the beast. The Nazis always took sustenance from it.

The response in Olympia, however, was one of the most effective I've seen yet. For one thing, by making mockery the theme of the day, it transformed the mood of the crowd from an angry one -- and who wouldn't get angry if they actually listened to what these Nazis were saying? -- into a celebratory one. They played music, they danced, and made so much noise having fun that, if you were in the crowd, you couldn't hear a word the Nazis were spewing.

Rick at Olyblog has more, as does the Olympian.

It also seemed to disorient and dishearten the Nazis. Of course, they recognized that their entire audience that day was constituted of people who opposed them -- and it was clear from their taunts ("The only reason we are able to be up here today is because you people don't have the guts to do what it takes to silence us," Gary Nemeth told the crowd) that they hoped to spark violence from them, a la Toledo. But after awhile it became clear that their audience was, for the most part, studiously ignoring anything they had to say, and was more intent on dancing and playing music than taking after their sorry asses. And this clearly deflated them.

Finally, it provided an opportunity for the various diversity-oriented interest groups drawn out by the Nazis to get together, network, and actually form working coalitions that likely will prove effective in organizing the Olympia community against the lapping waves of right-wing extremism. Those organizers deserve a hearty round of applause for how well they responded to Monday's event.

It's especially important because groups like the NSM flourish in environments where people try to ignore them in the hopes they'll just go away. As we've seen in the past couple of decades, they don't.

And, in an environment where rising mainstream eliminationism demonstrates the broad influence of far-right hate groups well beyond their pathetic membership numbers, and there is no shortage of mainstream right-wing transmitters duplicating their tactics, hate groups can no longer be simply ignored.

And the crowd in Olympia may have finally found exactly the right way to respond to them.

The drums of elimination

Documenting the mounting drumbeat of eliminationist rhetoric from the American right has long been a staple of this blog. But even I have to shake my head in wonder at the turn of events this past week -- most of it in the wake of the New York Times' publication of stories detailing the Bush administration's use of banking data in its search for terrorists.

The upshot has been a significant escalation in this rhetoric, coming not just from the usual rabid quarters but coming over the national airwaves from figures who supposedly represent mainstream conservatism -- and it is aimed not just at the usual "liberal" targets, but at the entire institution of the free press.

And perhaps most remarkably, the press itself -- continuing its chief trend so far this century -- has been remarkably timid about confronting it.

Fortunately, there have been a few voices that have not, including Paul Waldman at Media Matters:

The right has kept the media under constant assault for decades, and the response from the media has been to bend over backward to prove they aren't biased -- by being harder on Democrats. They should have learned long ago that the "liberal bias" charge has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the news. It is a political strategy, a way of "working the ref" and providing easy excuses for public rejection of the right's goals. But what we have seen this week is something qualitatively different.

Given the constant drumbeat of criticism directed at the media from conservatives, it might be easy to dismiss this latest expulsion of bile as just more of the same. But it's worth stepping back to take a look at exactly what has occurred over the past week. Members of Congress have suggested revoking the Capitol Hill credentials of journalists, so that only news organizations that do not displease the ruling party may be permitted to report from Congress. Other members have accused members of the media of "treason" and advocated their prosecution. A conservative television and radio personality suggested that the government establish an Office of Censorship to screen the news. Another said, "I would have no problem with [New York Times editor Bill Keller] being sent to the gas chamber." The House of Representatives passed a resolution saying it "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations."

In short, the right assembled a posse this week -- vigilantes stalking television studios, radio airwaves, print, and the Internet, their apparent goal to revoke the First Amendment.

That, as it turns out, was only the beginning. Glenn Greenwald this weekend examined the lunacy that arose in the right-wing blogosphere, particularly from the Michelle Malkin and David Horowitz quarters, where they claimed that the Times Travel Section committed treasonous behavior by printing a story detailing the accommodations -- and locations -- of Bush and Cheney's vacation retreats, all of which is already easily accessed public information.

But that wasn't enough. This was about beating the drum to eliminate the enemy. Horowitz set the rhythm:

Make no mistake about it, there is a war going on in this country. The aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists who began a scorched earth campaign against President Bush before the initiation of hostilities in Iraq.

And pretty soon everyone else joined in, including commenters like this:

since we've so civilized ourselves that it's highly unlikely that an angry mob with torches will show up on the NYT's doorstep.

Pity, that.

Greenwald's updates detail how the drumbeat started reaching a fever pitch:

UPDATE II: The outright derangement generated by this madness has now led one of the imbeciles who likely read Malkin and Powerline's blog to post the home address and telephone number of the Times photographers on his website. NOTE: After leaving the photographer's home address up for roughly 24 hours, he has deleted the page (a screen shot before its deletion is here) and now warns:

The post has served its purpose--we got your attention over the NY Times' lack of consideration for everyday Americans, (who its principals have utter contempt for), our soldiers (who they despise) and our President (who they have a seething hatred of). Subsequent posts will concentrate on the Times's reporters, editors and executives.

He then -- with more unintended irony than I thought possible -- pouted that the comments he received were "getting pretty nasty" and decried the "common ploy of the Left: destroy the messenger when he or she hits home with a good point, instead of discussing or arguing the merits of that point."

UPDATE III: Another upstanding, patriotic blogger -- after linking to the blog which posted the address of the Times photographer -- has now posted this:

So, in the school of what's good for the goose is good for the gander, we are providing this link so YOU may help the blogosphere in locating the homes (perhaps with photos?) of the editors and reporters of the New York Times.

Let's start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?

Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous -- grab for the golden ring.

He's urging people to find the names and addresses of New York Times editors and reporters in order to "hunt them down and do America a favor." And he said that right after he posted the link to the address of the Times photographer. And this is just the beginning of this syndrome, not the end.

This syndrome has a specific name: eliminationism. And it's important to identify it, because it has become not only a distinguishing but a dominating feature of right-wing rhetoric.

As I described it before:

What, really, is eliminationism?

It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

... Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

Of course, we all know that this isn't the first time that Malkin has pulled a Radio Rwanda stunt, nor, it's quite clear, is it likely to be the last. She's actually quite proud of the ugliness she's unleashing.

In that regard, she's really just following in the footsteps of the Eliminationist Diva herself, Ann Coulter, who wants to inspire mobs of skinheads to perform their manly duties and beat the crap out of Muslims and liberals.

What is perhaps most disturbing about this current outbreak is that it's occurring in a context in which the drums have been getting louder all around, especially in recent months. Perhaps the most important front for this has been the immigration debate, which has opened the floodgates for all kinds of right-wing extremism to gain adoption from mainstream conservatives.

The talk has also become a staple for local and national radio talk show hosts, and it has generally become imbedded in the media discourse to the point that it now seems almost unremarkable.

The rising question in all this, as Michelle Goldberg explored at Huffblog, is the extent to which this eliminationism signals a trend toward real fascism.

After all, eliminationism is the calling card, the signature project, of fascism. The natural outcome of "palingenetic ultranationalist populism" -- Oxford scholar Roger Griffin's definition of the core of fascism -- is always eliminationism; in order to revive the national spirit, the nation has to be purged of the elements that have caused its despoilment. The fascist always casts himself as the true representative of the national spirit, and always casts himself in a heroic light. But heroes always need enemies, and eventually, the fascist gets around to naming them.

When we hear the drumbeat of eliminationism, we know where it always ends up. Those who join in may not conceive of themselves as fascists, but they join in anyway.

After all, the drumbeat feels good. It's about scapegoating, telling people that their problems, and the problems of the world, are not their fault -- it's someone else's.

Boom ba boom.

It keeps drumming, and the louder it gets, the more people join in.

Boom ba boom boom boom.

And when they name their enemies, they're just getting started. First it's "illegals." Then it's "homosexuals." Then it's "Muslim radicals." Then it's "liberals." Then it's "the liberal media."

Boom ba boom boom Boom ba boom boom

And it just gets louder and louder. And pretty soon no one knows how to make it stop.

Did Gonzales lie to Congress?

Jonathan Singer at MyDD and John Aravosis at AmericaBlog are both pointing to the significance of Andrew Harris' story at Bloomberg News regarding the initiation of President Bush's authorization of the NSA domestic surveillance program, which says:

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11," plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion."

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

The story goes on to detail how the NSA went about setting up the operation:

The NSA initiative, code-named "Pioneer Groundbreaker," asked AT&T unit AT&T Solutions to build exclusively for NSA use a network operations center which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers claimed. That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the monitoring technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.

The NSA says on its Web site that in June 2000, the agency was seeking bids for a project to "modernize and improve its information technology infrastructure." The plan, which included the privatization of its "non-mission related" systems support, was said to be part of Project Groundbreaker.

Mayer said the Pioneer project is "a different component" of that initiative.

Mayer and Afran said an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee.

If the information in the lawsuit is correct, this means that the Bush administration authorized the NSA surveillance well in advance of Sept. 11 -- perhaps as early as February 2001, scarcely after Bush had been sworn in. As Singer points out, this severely undercuts its claim that the government could have prevented 9/11 with such a program in place.

Matt O. at The Great Society digs up two prime examples of these claims: one from Dick Cheney ("Cheney said if the administration had the power 'before 9/11, we might have been able to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon.'") and then-NSA chief (and now CIA chief) Michael Hayden ("Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such," said Hayden).

But perhaps just as importantly, it also raises questions about the administration's official response to questioning about the program. Because, as I pointed out at the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before Congress that in fact the program was initiated after 9/11 and the Sept. 18 authorization of force by Congress:

LEAHY: Let me just ask you a few questions that could easily be answered yes or no.

I'm not asking about operational details, I'm trying to understand when the administration came to the conclusion that the congressional resolution authorizing military force again Al Qaida, where we had hoped that we would actually catch Osama bin Laden, the man who hit us -- but where you came to the conclusion that it authorized warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States.

Did you reach that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, what I can say is that the program was initiated subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

LEAHY: Well, then, let me...

GONZALES: And our legal analysis was completed prior to the authorization of that program.

LEAHY: So your answer is you did not come to that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Sir, I certainly had not come to that conclusion. There may be others in the administration who did.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody in the administration that came to that conclusion before September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, sitting here right now I don't have any knowledge of that.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody coming to that conclusion before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001?

GONZALES: No, sir.

The only thing that I can recall is that we had just been attacked and that we had been attacked by an enemy from within our own borders and that...

LEAHY: Mr. Attorney General, I understand. I was here when that attack happened. And I joined with Republicans and Democrats and virtually every member of this Congress to try to give you the tools that you said you needed for us to go after Al Qaida, and especially to go after Osama bin Laden, the man that we all understood masterminded the attacks, the man who's still at large.

LEAHY: Now, back to my question: Did you come to the conclusion that you had to have this warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States to protect us before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001? You were the White House counsel at the time.

GONZALES: What I can say is that we came to a conclusion that the president had the authority to authorize this kind of activity before he actually authorized the activity.

LEAHY: When was that?

GONZALES: It was subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

Of course, as I also pointed out at the time, Gonzales was not sworn in when he testified, so technically this may not constitute perjury.

But it certainly constitutes lying to Congress.

It's not hard to understand why Gonzales would mislead the committee. After all, as I said then:

If indeed Bush took these steps before 9/11, then it should be plain it has little to do with fighting terrorism, and everything to do with expanding presidential powers.

And anyone who points that out, of course, is a traitor to be hunted down.

UPDATE: Gary Farber at Amygdala points out that the Groundbreaker program was a separate matter from the NSA domestic-surveillance program about which Gonzales was testifying. My bad. Be sure to read all of Gary's piece, and check out his links to his previous work on the NSA matter.