A radical political website called WorldNetDaily is known for its bizarre commentary on current events, and its latest "story," pushed by Jerome Corsi, is that the Obama administration is considering Nazi-like concentration camps for dissidents.Benen: BECK SEES A 'COUP'....Jon Henke, a prominent conservative blogger and Republican strategist, has seen enough.
In the 1960's, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being "so far removed from common sense" and later said "We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner."
The Birthers are the Birchers of our time, and WorldNetDaily is their pamphlet. The Right has mostly ignored these embarrassing people and organizations, but some people and organizations inexplicably choose to support WND through advertising and email list rental or other collaboration.... No respectable organization should support the kind of fringe idiocy that WND peddles. Those who do are not respectable.
I think it's time to find out what conservative/libertarian organizations support WND through advertising, list rental or other commercial collaboration (email me if you know of any), and boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce any further support for WorldNetDaily.
Good for Jon Henke. The more prominent conservatives say "Enough" to fringe trash, the better it will be for the political discourse and the American mainstream.
There is, however, a small catch. Henke argues that those who advertise on WorldNetDaily shouldn't be considered "respectable," and deserve to be boycotted. That's an entirely defensible position, but the Republican National Committee is one of the entities that does business with WorldNetDaily. Indeed, they partnered on a mailing as recently as last week.
Perhaps Henke's call will encourage the RNC to reconsider its relationship with "fringe idiocy"?
It's certainly possible that Glenn Beck doesn't know what the word "coup" means. The poor guy does, after all, think "oligarhy" is a word.In fact, confusion over the meaning of the word might actually make Beck's wild-eyed rants less incoherent. "Coup d'etat" is, after all, of French origins, and Beck probably hates the French enough to use their idioms incorrectly.
Nevertheless, Beck today told listeners of his radio show that President Obama is seizing power as part of a "coup." As the self-described "rodeo clown" insisted on the air, there is "a revolution going on, and it is coming." Beck believes "they" believe "they can get away with it quietly." He didn't identify who "they" are, but it's probably safe to assume it has something to do with ACORN. He doesn't like ACORN.
The "revolution" that "they" hope to launch may work, Beck said, because "they are so far ahead of us." He lamented, "Most of America doesn't have a clue as to what's going on." So true, so true.
Beck was kind enough to fill us in: "There is a stealing of America, and the way it is done, it has been done through the -- the guise of an election, but they lied to us the entire time. Some of us knew! Some of us we're shouting out, you were: 'This guy's a Marxist!' 'No, no, no, no, no, no. And they're gonna say, 'We did it democratically,' and they are going to grab power every way they can. And God help us in an emergency."
I'm still not quite sure what it is the administration has done that has Beck on the verge of hysteria. Chances are, he doesn't remember, either.
dday: The Patriots
Dan Froomkin (HuffPost): Cheney Still Manipulating People -- Now In PublicThe counter-protesters at an event in Austin, TX yesterday just took the vile rhetoric we've seen on display this August one extra step:
"the protesters had Larry Kilgore, a “Christian activist” and candidate for governor who has endorsed executions for homosexuals; Debra Medina, a Ron Paul Republican and a slightly-less long-shot candidate for governor; and Melissa Pehle-Hill, yet another fringe candidate and a member of a self-appointed “citizens grand jury” investigating Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro."
Kilgore captured the sentiment of the mob. (video here)
“I hate that flag up there,” Kilgore said pointing to the American flag flying over the Capitol. “I hate the United States government. … They’re an evil, corrupt government. They need to go. Sovereignty is not good enough. Secession is what we need!”
“We hate the United States!"
Just a lone nut, I guess. Except the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, flirted with the secessionists a few months ago. He didn't attend this protest, which I guess is a positive step.
But this has increasingly become the Republican base. A group of people who feel completely justified in chanting "We hate the United States!" I seem to remember being told that I hated America and I was "on the other side" and "in league with the terrorists" because I didn't agree with an unnecessary, illegal and ultimately disastrous war. I don't have tape of myself from every day in that time, but you can trust me that I never chanted "We hate the United States" in front of a state capitol building.
Note, too, the lady who used the phrase, "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots," a quote from Thomas Jefferson, often misappropriated by extremists and the Patriot movement. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt that bore this inscription when he was arrested for murdering 168 people in Oklahoma City.What the report reflects is a reality that law enforcement trying to deal with domestic terrorism in America must confront: Their subjects are thoroughly American; many of the people drawn into these movements are, if anything, "hyper-normal." Their version of "patriotism," for instance, is so extreme that they actually hate not just their government but their fellow citizens -- in essence, their country: because, you see, it has been "perverted" from its original purposes.Patriots who use the symbols of American history while claiming overtly to hate America. This would be something good to ask Dave Neiwert about tomorrow.
The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.
In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.
This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.
When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he's no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons - he's just doing it in plain view. And it's the media that he's manipulating.
After years of speaking in whispers, operating by proxy, and leaving as few fingerprints as possible, Cheney has figured out that he can say pretty much anything he wants, the networks will show it on TV, and the newspapers will dutifully print it. And best of all, they will fail to put it in any context whatsoever.
The first bit of context for any Cheney comment, of course, is that he is a monstrous liar. News articles about Cheney should routinely reminded readers of some of the things he said in the run-up to war in Iraq. Like, for instance: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." By any reasonable standard, this man's credibility was shot a long time ago.
Cheney's latest coup is to get the media to obediently recount what Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times so naively and euphemistically called his "forceful defense of the full range of interrogation techniques used by intelligence officers."
In an interview with beyond-obsequious Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that aired on Sunday, Cheney once again alleged that what he calls "enhanced interrogation tactics" saved "thousands of lives and let us defeat all further attacks against the United States."
It wouldn't have been hard for reporters to put that particular claim in its proper context. Just last week, the CIA released two documents that Cheney had been huffing and puffing (and bluffing) about for months, insisting that they would once and for all definitively prove that torture had, as he put it, "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."
But just as us critics expected, when those reports were released, they included no such proof -- just a lot of cover-your-ass language from the CIA, vaguely describing intelligence findings gained from the overall interrogation of "high value detainees" generally speaking. There was no evidence that a single American life was saved, or of any valuable intelligence that couldn't have been gathered using traditional methods.
In fact, after all these years, and despite a slew of selective leaks while Cheney was still in power, there remains not one iota of proof that torture accomplished much of anything -- not that it would be OK if it had.
All we know for sure is that torture is still excellent at producing false confessions, just like it was designed to do.
Cheney also criticized Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to launch an extremely limited preliminary review into whether crimes were committed by the handful of interrogators who far exceeded even the Bush DOJ's patently illegal guidelines. Last week, I called this At Best, A Baby Step Toward Justice For Bush's Torturers. But Cheney, in his Fox interview, said the review "offends the hell out of me, frankly." He explained: "[W]e had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time? "
Any normal person -- or reasonable journalist -- would gasp at Cheney's spectacular gall, and marvel at his absolutism. (He even went so far as to say that the conduct being investigated, which includes threatening detainees with a drill, a gun, and the rape of family members to be "OK" by him.) But instead, the coverage was restrained, if not respectful.
And Cheney lied some more, in case anyone was looking for fresh evidence of his mendacity. Asked how much he knew about what the CIA was doing, Cheney replied: "I knew about the waterboarding. Not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved."
This is a laughably blatant falsehood from the man who was, by many reliable accounts, the chief choreographer of the program, up to his elbows in gory details.
As ABC News reported in April 2008, for instance, top Bush aides including Cheney met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other torture techniques starting immediately after the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, the low-level al Qaeda operative whose false confessions sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators chasing after imaginary threats. ABC reported that the CIA briefed the White House group on its plans to use aggressive techniques against Zubaydah and received explicit approval. Indeed, some interrogation sessions were virtually choreographed by the group.
And as blogger Marcy Wheeler points out, Cheney also mischaracterized what President Obama has previously said about who might or might not be prosecuted.
So what is Cheney's goal in all of this? I think Obsidian Wings blogger publius nails a big chunk of it, writing:
[H]e wants to politicize the torture debate as much as possible -- to transform a profound debate about our country's values into just another everyday Republican/Democratic partisan squabble that makes people throw up their hands and despair of knowing "the truth."
If you've noticed, Cheney tends to pop up in the aftermath of damning evidence. We just (re)learned, for instance, that our CIA agents murdered detainees, choked them, and threatened to rape their wives. Normally, you would think these revelations would give pause to even the most ardent Cheney supporters.But then Cheney comes along, and tries to reframe the whole story. His intended audience isn't the nation as a whole, but conservatives. He wants to make sure that they view these stories through partisan-tinted lenses.
Indeed, muddying the debate was one of the most effective Bush-era communication tactics.
But Cheney has some other obvious motives, as well. As I wrote in May, there's also the small matter of his understandably strong desire to avoid investigation or prosecution -- and ignominy in the history books. After all, the best defense is a good offense.
Meanwhile, Cheney is still operating in the shadows, as well. Indeed, it's impossible not to see him (by proxy) behind what must have been, for him, an extraordinary coup: A front-page Washington Post story on Saturday chock full of anonymous sources implicitly validating his view of torture as a great tongue-loosener, despite the lack of any supporting evidence - and with nothing said about all the lies they uttered while being tortured.
Now that the anti-science, superstition-based initiative presidency is over, we need Manhattan projects to make us great again and boost us out of this Grotesque Depression. First we must provide free advertising-based wireless internet to everyone to end land line monopolies. Better yet, renationalize the telephone companies like in 1917 and now put them and the DTV fiasco and the internet under a renationalized post office. Then we must criscross the land with high speed rail. Because bovine flatulence is the major source of greenhouse gases, we must develop home growable microbes to provide all of our protein. Then we must create microbes which turn our sewage and waste into fuel right at home. This will end energy monopoly by putting fuel in our hands. We must finally join the metric system and take advantage of DTV problems to create a unified global standard for television and cellular telephones instead of this Anglo Saxon competitive waste. We must address that most illness starts from behavior, especially from parents. Since paranoid schizophrenia is the cause of racism, bigotry, homelessness, terrorism, ignorance, exploitation and criminality, we must provide put the appropriate medications, like lithium, in the water supply and require dangerous wingnuts who refuse free mental health care to be implanted with drug release devices. Churches should be licensed to reduce supersition and all clergy dealing with small children should be psychiatrically monitored to prevent molesting. Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh were the ultimate superstition based initiatives. Aborting future terrorists and sterilizing their parents is the most effective homeland security. Preganancy is a shelfish, environmentally desturctive act and must be punished, not rewarded with benefits, preference and leave. Widen navigation straits (Gibraltar, Suez, Malacca, Danube, Panama and Hellspont) with deep nukes to prevent war. In order to fund this we must nationalize the entire financial, electrical and transportation system and extinguish the silly feudal notion that each industry should be regulated by its peers. Technology mandates a transformation of tax subsidies from feudal forecloseable debt to risk sharing equity. Real estate and insurance, the engines of feudalism, must be brought under the Federal Reserve so we may replace all buildings with hazardous materials to provide public works. Insects, flooding and fire spread asbestos, lead and mold which prematurely disables the disadvantaged. Disposable manufactured housing assures children are not prematurely disabled and disadvantaged. Because feudalism is the threat to progress everywhere, we must abolish large land holdings by farmers, foresters or religions and instead make all such large landholding part of the forest service so our trees may diminish greenhouse gases. Darwin led to the worst colonial, militarist, attrocity and stock market abuses in history - Lamarkian inhertiance and mitochondrial DNA show that Darwin was not all he is crackered up to be. We must abolish executive pay and make sure all employees in a company are all paid equally. We must abolish this exploitative idea of trade and monopoly and make every manufactured disposable cottage self sufficient through the microbes we invent. Southern Oligarchs destroyed the Democarts in the sixties and destroyed the Republicans this decade - they would not allow viable candidates like Colin Powell, Mitt Romney or Condi Rice to even be considered!
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