August, 2010 archive

Or, if you wish, anatomy of hysteria.

John Cole traces the history of the fuss over the Moslem community center planned for the site of the abandoned Burlington Coat Factory store in Lower Manhattan. Follow the link for the supporting evidence:

Basically, as with everything else with the modern GOP, fringe lunatics gin up a story, Murdoch pimps it, and then the rest of the Wurlitzer takes over. Loudmouth radio announcers, shameless politicians, wingnut bloggers, and unhinged lunatics unite to create a controversy out of nowhere.

This serves to use hatred and bigotry to distract us from the effects of Republicanism: Making the rich richer and the poor, poorer.

Excerpt (emphasis added):

A few years ago, we had a debate about privatizing Social Security. And I’d have thought that debate would’ve been put to rest once and for all by the financial crisis we’ve just experienced. I’d have thought, after being reminded how quickly the stock market can tumble, after seeing the wealth people worked a lifetime to earn wiped out in a matter of days, that no one would want to place bets with Social Security on Wall Street; that everyone would understand why we need to be prudent about investing the retirement money of tens of millions of Americans.

But some Republican leaders in Congress don’t seem to have learned any lessons from the past few years. They’re pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall. It’s right up there on their to-do list with repealing some of the Medicare benefits and reforms that are adding at least a dozen years to the fiscal health of Medicare – the single longest extension in history.

Republicans never learn. It’s part of their credo:

If it doesn’t work, do the same thing harder.

Hofstadter was correct (if you’ve not read the article, do so now).

The common thread of rightwingnuttery is fear.

Witness this (indirect) quotation from an organizer of the “Agenda 21” (see Note Below) conference in Valley Forge, which reveals far more than the speaker intended (emphasis added):

Every time the government enacts a law that deals with trade or land use or energy consumption, it plays into the Agenda 21 program.

In other words, everything a local, state, or federal government might do becomes evidence of conspiracy.

The right wing never fails to find fear, for, if it can’t find it, it makes it up. It seems to find gratification in quavering with fright.

Fearfulness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the philosophy of cowardice. As I write this, it occurs to me that this explains conservative war mongering: those who are always looking for enemies, well, they always find them.

It is the politics of three-year-olds, the politics of monsters under the bed.

Note Below:

Agenda 21 is a fairly innocuous UN program, meaning that the members of the UN agreed to create it, signatories to which promise to promote a sustainable environment.

At Balloon Juice, Dennis G. takes aim at the “Myth of Southern Honor.”

I think he could have worded his thesis with more felicity, so I’ll deconstruct it as a preface. He’s referring to the idea that the Civil War was a struggle of honor for some sort of ideal on the part of the secessionists.

He is not arguing that individuals on either side may or may not have conducted themselves with personal honor (and in some case, as always in war, dishonor) in battle.

The myth of which he speaks is one of those used by the monied classes to sell secession to the mass of voters (the other two were “States’ rights” and inherent racial superiority as cloaks for defining a class of persons as property in perpetuity).

I am not sure that I agree with the part I’ve emphasized in the excerpt below, but, for all practical purposes, he’s so correct as to nevermind:

There are many myths about the Confederacy, but one of the biggest is that it was a political movement built around honor. It wasn’t. It was a movement built around protecting a system of stolen labor and the ‘rights’ of a selective few to grossly profit from that system. Selling ideas of honor, states rights and outright racism was how a small group of 19th century Southern Oligarchs built an army to fight for injustice. Ever since their defeat these Confederates and their idealogical descendants have worked hard to spin their treasonous racist enterprise into an honorable ‘lost cause’ and in recent decades they have completely captured the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement.

Republicans used the odious Southern strategy to capture the bigot vote.

Now the bigot vote has captured the Republican Party.

Image via Kiko’s House.

Via Shaun Mullen.