From DailyKos' DemfromCT:
Real time word cloud:
As you may know, conservatives completely dominate twitter, or so they tell me.
Matt Taibi: The peasant mentality lives on in America
It took a good long while for news of the Teabag movement to penetrate the periphery of my consciousness — I kept hearing things about it and dismissing them, sure that the whole business was some kind of joke. Like a Daily Show invention, say. It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of “teabag parties” as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis.
What’s next? The Great Dirty Sanchez-In of 2010? A Million Man Felch? (Insert Rusty Trombone joke here).
This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.
This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.
It’s been strange and kind of depressing to watch the conservative drift in this direction. In a way, actually, the Glenn Beck show has been drearily fascinating of late. It’s not often that we get to watch someone go insane on national television; trapped in an echo chamber of his own spiraling egomania, with apparently no one at his network willing to pull the plug and put him out of his misery, Beck has lately gone from being a mildly annoying media dingbat to a self-imagined messiah who looks like he’s shouldering more and more of the burdens of Christ with each passing day. And because he’s stepping into a vacuum of conservative leadership — there’s no one else out there who is offering real red meat to the winger crowd — he’s begun to attract not professional help but apostles, in the form of Chuck Norris (who believes we have to prepare for armed revolution and may prepare a run for “president of Texas”) and pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin’s Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!
This new Holy Trinity of right-wing basket cases has been pushing all sorts of crazy hallucinations of late, ...
...
JedL: Texas declares sovereignty from U.S.
If you dismissed Glenn Beck's argument for seceding from the Union as the isolated ravings of a lunatic, think again.
In this video, Texas Governor Rick Perry wades into General Beck’s loony bin and declares Texas' sovereignty from the U.S., saying that the time has come to "draw the line in the sand" against the federal government. "No longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas."
Links: Digg | Reddit | Twitter | DKTVNow we know why Sarah "Alaskan Independence Party" Palin endorsed Perry over KBH in the GOP gubernatorial primary.
Transcript of this video:
I believe the federal government has become oppressive. It’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion in the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affaris of our state.
Texans need to ask themselves a question. Do they side with those in Washington who are pursuing this unprecendented expansion of power, or do they believe in individual rights and responsibilities laid down in our foundational documents.
Where’re you gonna’ stand? With an ever-growing Washington bureaucracy, or are you going to stand with the people of this state who understand the importance of state’s rights.
Texans need to stand up. They need to be heard, because the state of affairs that we find ourselves in cannot continue indefinitely...
...We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas. That’s what this press conference, that’s what these Texans are standing up for. There is a point in time where you stand up and say enough is enough, and I think Americans, and Texans especially have reached that point.
Full press conference available here.
digby: Tale Of Two Hitlers
Robert Parry observes an important Beltway phenomenon:
Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about “progressive fascism” – and muse about armed insurrection – or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the “most polarizing President ever,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that today’s U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.Just in case anyone thinks that's hyperbolic, here's a little trip down memory lane from just five years ago:
By and large, the Washington press corps continues to function within a paradigm set in the 1980s, mostly bending to the American Right, especially to its perceived power to destroy mainstream journalistic careers and to grease the way toward lucrative jobs for those who play ball.
The parameters set by this intimidated (or bought-off) news media, in turn, influence how far Washington politicians feel they can go on issues, like health-care reform or environmental initiatives, or how risky they believe it might be to pull back from George W. Bush's "war on terror" policies.
[...]
...the American Left never took media seriously, putting what money it had mostly into "organizing" or into direct humanitarian giving. Underscoring the Left's fecklessness about media, progressives have concentrated their relatively few media outlets in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away - and three hours behind - the news centers of Washington and New York.
By contrast, the Right grasped the importance of "information warfare" in a modern media age and targeted its heaviest firepower on the frontlines of that war - mostly the political battlefields of Washington - thus magnifying the influence of right-wing ideas on policymakers.
One consequence of this media imbalance is that Republicans feel they can pretty much say whatever they want - no matter how provocative or even crazy - while Democrats must be far more circumspect, knowing that any comment might be twisted into an effective attack point against them.
So, while criticism of Republicans presidents - from Ronald Reagan to the two Bushes - had to be tempered for fear of counterattacks, almost anything could be said against a Democratic president, Bill Clinton or now Barack Obama, who is repeatedly labeled a "socialist" and, according to Beck, a "fascist" for pressuring hapless GM chief executive Rick Wagoner to resign.What MoveOn.org wanted was for people to submit 30-second ads that were critical of President Bush, but what the liberal-leaning organization got was a controversy over one entry that compared Bush to Adolf Hitler.Here's Beck this past weekend:
The ad in question used a tape recording of the Nazi leader speaking while it showed images of Hitler and German military prowess during World War II. At the end of the ad, a photo of Bush raising his hand to take the oath of office is seen.
"A nation warped by lies. Lies fuel fear. Fear fuels aggression. Invasion. Occupation. What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003," the ad said.
Republican groups and Jewish organizations expressed outrage over the ad, which has been removed from the MoveOn.org Web site. The Republican National Committee (search) called on all nine Democratic candidates to condemn the ads.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie (search) called the ad, "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech."
[...]
MoveOn.org spokesman Trevor Fitzgibbon said, "we had no idea the Hitler thing even existed."
When a liberal activist group accidentally put a 30 second citizen generated ad featuring a comparison between Bush and Hitler on its web site, the political establishment goes nuts.
Glenn Beck, a highly paid television pundit spends an entire hour comparing audience Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini to Obama and the political establishment acts like it's perfectly normal.
Cliff in the comments to a previous post, offers a link that is well worth a look:
On the DHS report, here's a post I found on Bill and Bob's Excellent Afghan Adventure, a milblog Andy Wahl (remember that guy?) directed me to:
From Lizette Alvarez To Homeland Security
I don't go there very often, since the military speak is usually too dense for me, but I happened to catch this one.
The interesting and alarming part for me is how the author focuses in on a small part of the report, and seems to completely miss the idea.
Benen: THE UNSHAKABLE VICTIM MINDSET....
Most Americans are Christians. Most members of Congress, most of the Supreme Court, and nearly every governor is Christian. The president is not only Christian, but has spoken publicly and repeatedly about the importance of Christianity in his life.So, it was a little jarring to see Fox News' Martha MacCallum host an on-air segment yesterday, telling viewers, "I think most people accept that there is ... an anti-Christian bias in this country. It's fine to bash pretty much, you know, the only acceptable bash-able group. You know, 'Ha ha ha, look at the Catholic Church.'"
Um, Martha? When was the last time any American of any prominence said, "Ha ha ha, look at the Catholic Church"?
Of all the far-right canards, this notion that Christians are persecuted victims in the United States has to be one of the more ridiculous. The Rev. Barry Lynn, who is both a Christian minister and a friend of mine, asked MacCallum for evidence of this "anti-Christian bias." She eventually pointed to a court case that said public officials couldn't put a Nativity scene in New Jersey.
That's proof of "bashing" Christians? Please.
Anti-Semitism exists. Muslim bashing is painfully common. Denunciations of non-believers is fairly routine. But to argue that the United States, with its Christian majority, embraces "an anti-Christian bias," and that Americans find it "acceptable" to "bash" Christians is absurd, even for Fox News.
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