OneNewsNow.com is featuring a story titled “TX congresswoman accused of ‘elitism’.” (Someone remind me–is that a misdemeanor or a felony?) The reason given for Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s malfeasance? She was “taking a phone call during a Houston town hall meeting while a cancer survivor was attempting to ask her a question.”

Of course, Jackson Lee was evidently talking to people in Washington trying to get answers to a question that had already been asked, and I doubt she knew the person clamoring for attention was a cancer survivor (not that this status makes a difference). And Jackson Lee’s assuring the person “I’m here” was apparently taken as a joke by the OneNewsNow “journalist.”

It gets better, though. Enter Cathie Adams, president of Texas Eagle Forum, an outfit further to the right of James Inhofe and Pat Robertson combined. Adams was “not buying Jackson Lee’s story”:

“I think if that’s what she was doing — I think I heard the word ‘dude’ being screamed into her phone — and not only did she take it away from her ear, but put it up to her mouth in order to speak rather loudly into her cell phone,” Adams points out.

“So I think what we were looking at…is a member of the ruling elite dealing with the working class. This is not the American way,” she remarks. “That is socialism, and no thank you.”

First of all, if you watch the video, it is crystal-clear that the word “dude” was uttered by the person filming the event.

Second, how does one get “socialism” from this incident, even were Jackson Lee guilty of ill behavior? Easy! You decide in advance that all Democrats are socialists, you get pissed at something inconsequential ,and you open your puckered maw and say one of the six words in your vocabulary.

The finale:

Adams contends that the public health insurance plan supported by President Obama and Congresswoman Jackson Lee would eventually lead to a single-payer system that would take away a patients’ choice of doctors.

And I have no doubt that 99% of the site’s regular readers (or “read-tos”) will accept this uncritically.

The main reason I can’t stand dumbfuck sites like this isn’t that they print laughably stupid things. It’s that this is exactly the kind of crap that whips the blinkered base into a blind, churning frenzy, and the “editors” of OneNewsNow damned well know it.

Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, has been accused by two ex-employees of murdering or facilitating the murder of people cooperating with federal authorities who were investigating the company. According to one of them, Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”

The allegations state that Prince “purposefully operated his disgraced private mercenary machine as a modern-day crusade battalion against the evil forces of Islam—found dominant in the middle-eastern region. And just a few months after the release of tapes showing soldiers in Afghanistan being told to ‘hunt people for Jesus‘ and to ‘get them into the kingdom.’”

Watch this sick-ass nonsense:

Support the troops!

And here is the evidence.

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Hey, remember when the right took that DHS report about violent right-wing extremists a little too personally? That shoe fits better every day, as the teabaggers and their media enablers veer farther and farther into outright eliminationism.

Consider these examples from just the past couple of weeks:

July 29: Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) hanged in effigy, with a sign reading “Congress: Traitors to the American Ideal.”

August 3: Rep. Brad Miller’s (D-NC) office gets telephone death threat warning “Miller could lose his life over this.”

August 4: Teabagger urges Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to kill himself with painkillers and alcohol.

August 4: Republican Rep. Todd Akin gets laughter and applause from a crowd of supporters by joking about his Democratic colleagues “almost [getting] lynched.”

August 6: Three days after begging his viewers not to kill anybody, Fox News host Glenn Beck sets a great example by pretending to poison Nancy Pelosi’s wine.

August 7: Twittering teabagger urges fellow protesters to bring guns, and also tweets that “If ACORN/SEIU attends these townhalls for disruption,” (oh the irony) his fellow protesters should “stop being peaceful, and hurt them. Badly.”

August 10: CNN anchor Lou Dobbs calls Howard Dean a “blood-sucking leftist” and says “you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy.”

August 11: Teabagger shows up at Obama townhall with a loaded gun strapped to his leg and a sign reading, “It Is Time To Water The Tree Of Liberty!” (That would be the tree that Thomas Jefferson said “must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”)

August 11: Teabagger with bullhorn at Obama’s townhall yells, “Send [illegal immigrants] home with a bullet in the head” and “Read what Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty – it’s coming, baby!”

And yet, as repellent and crazy as these people are, prominent Republicans like David Vitter, House Minority Leader John Boehner, NRSC Chair John Cornyn, and NRCC Chair Pete Sessions embrace them as Patriotic Concerned Americans Speaking Their Minds And Giving Those Democrats What For. Dave Neiwert was right – conservatives really do identify with right-wing extremists, and they don’t seem to care who knows it.

I wonder how campaigning as the Angry Mob Party will work out for them next year.

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(Source: Firedoglake)

As they say, this is disturbing.

Ordinarily, an article titled “Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism?” would be one more overwrought blend of reality and attention-grabbing hysteria. This one by AlterNet‘s Sara Robinson, however, doesn’t qualify, and in fact is more than a little scary.

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All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. “Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet.”

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you’re looking for, it’s suddenly everywhere. It’s odd that I haven’t been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I’d tell you that if we’re not there right now, we’ve certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield — and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what’s changing now, and what’s at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win — or even hold their ground.

What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, “Everybody is somebody else’s fascist.” Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton’s essential definition of the term:

“Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”

Elsewhere, he refines this further as

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

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Jonah Goldberg aside, that’s a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I’ll be referring to here.

From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us — and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.

In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls “palingenesis” — a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it’s always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture’s traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.

Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) — but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.

As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From “Morning in America” to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it’s easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it’s blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn’t have a moment’s shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers’ strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage “depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.” He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: “deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement.”

And more ominously: “The most important variables…are the conservative elites’ willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate.”

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can’t even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can’t win elections or policy fights, they’re more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage — the transition to full-fledged government fascism — begins.

The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it “fascism” because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations — passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of “mainstream” conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn’t act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas — the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer — being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We’ve seen Armey’s own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process — and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We’ve seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”

This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.

The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment — and the worst part of it is that by the time you’ve arrived at that point, it’s probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics — escalated and perfected with each new use — against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don’t like. In some places, they’re already making notes and taking names.

Where’s the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we’re three for three. That’s too close. Way too close.

The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there’s no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, “if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it.” Paxton (who presciently warned that “An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black”) agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold — as ours is now scrambling to do — it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.

What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites — church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.

Paxton characterizes stage five as “radicalization or entropy.” Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)

It’s so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It’s a freaking puppet show. These people can’t be serious. Sure, they’re angry — but they’re also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you’d worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they’re going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country’s most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We’ve arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we’re slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

How do we pull back? That’s my next post.

(This is a companion piece to this video, and develops its themes further.)

If you don’t think that people not only swallow the most outrageous lies coming from the right these days but nurture them, you haven’t spent enough time perusing wingnut blogs. And I don’t just mean conservative blogs on the whole, I mean the functionally illiterate types who have no problem condemning the science behind global warming even though the extent of their research and schooling in the area reaches no further than knowing how to tell whether it’s raining.

The real hard cases are clearly trying to make up for shortcomings in their personal lives. They don’t really care about politics or the country’s future; they just want to be heard, as in their meatspace lives they are largely social isolates no one would listen to.

Here are the things you’l almost always find:

1. Some kind of “badass” long or header: a cartoon bulldog with sunglasses, Sarah Connor from The Terminator packing heat, that sort of thing.
2. Large American flags and associated stuff, such as bald eagles or a rendering of General Patton. After all, these people intent on fucking up the country are its greatest fans.
3. A PayPal donation button. It’s funny–the bloggers railing against socialism are usually the ones asking for handouts to keep a free Blogspot blog going.
4. A huge number of graphics in total, normally arranged in a random sidebar jumble. This causes the page to load in no more than about 15 seconds. Just awful Web design in general.
5. Badly misspelled words, often in the blog title itself.
6. Posts that are often 90% cut-and-pasted articles and 10% “Yeah, loony libtards!” sorts of sentiments to wrap things up.
7. Quotes from Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, etc.
8. Daily references to people like Rush Limbaugh, as in, “Rush nailed it again…” or “Glenn Beck eckoes my sentimants perfectly…”
9. Fifth-degree hypocrisy and self-contradiction. For example, a complaint about the all-left media followed by a boast of FOX “News’” ratings and the dominance for righty talk radio.
10. Complete ignorance of the subject matter, e.g., railing that “I don’t want to fund socialized medicine” from someone making $20K and therefore just slightly under the $250K starting point for increased taxation.
11. An explosive temper, making it fun to comment on these blogheaps.
12. A habit of banning people or deleting and altering their comments by way of seeking infantile revenge.
13. Self-aggrandizing claims: “I am a sharpshooter for the SWAT Team and I can’t wait for the New Red Dawn so I can start shooting liberals, immigrants and homosexuals.”
14. Hypocrisy: NO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE AND DON’T TAKE AWAY MY MEDICARE!!!
15. ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME.
16. Mad love for Sarah Palin.
17. The belief that Malkin the lemon-faced gargoyle is a physically beautiful human being.
18. Blaming every one of Bush’s fuckups and examples of raw malfeasance on Clinton and congressional Democrats.
19. A consistent need to agitate blindly against their own self-interest when it comes to economic policies.
20. Delusions about what the 2010 midterm elections are certain to entail.

Owing to my participation on a number of pissed-up Facebook polls lately (“DO U BELEIVE IN EVOLUTIONS?” “WHAT HAPPENS IN UR LIFE AFTER UR DEATH?”) I’ve been getting some unsolicited mail. Here are four of them, received back-to-back from the same source minutes apart this morning. I am not going to answer, but reckoned I might as well further pollute the blogosphere by disseminating the writer’s idiocy here.

Men of the cloth wrong young boys because they are men first. Therefore, they are subject to sin just as you and I are. Likewise, hardcore Christians fall from grace. Remember Jim Baker and the PTL Ministry? He and Tammy Fay Baker had people sending their ministry money hand over fist and they were spending it on things that were not of God. They were finally brought down and Jim Baker went to jail. He lost everything, including his wife. Later, he asked God for forgiveness and I understand he is doing well. Tammy divorced him and married his best friend; later she died a long and horrible death. I don’t know if she ever asked for forgiveness. Jim was a man of the cloth, but first a “regular, common” human, subject to sin, as was Tammy, and as are priests, pastors, ministers, etc.

It is one thing to not KNOW about Jesus or God such as someone who has never seen a Bible, or heard the Word of God as is written in the Bible. However, to know about them but to choose to IGNORE them is unacceptable. I believe you would be condemned to hell. As to the Muslims thinking Christians are going to hell, I can only say that I have the Bible to back up what I believe. As I stated before, the Bible is God breathed, and therefore, what is in the Bible is there because God wanted it there. In it, He says that if I believe and I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and ask for forgiveness of my sins, then I will meet with Him in Heaven. I believe that’s where I’m going, regardless of what the Muslims say. After all, they are only men, capable of sin and error.

Kevin, As I said before, there is evidence in the Bible that Jesus did indeed live among us and that He preached, prayed, played, ate, fished, etc. The Bible is an historical document that recounts His life and death in great detail, as seen by the multitudes. Just as we have historical documentation of past presidents that we haven’t actually “seen”, we know they lived. In the same way, we have the historical documentation to prove Jesus lived.

Kevin, I know you choose not to believe but I didn’t realize you were so cynical. Nothing stated so far has been physically impossible, and neither heaven nor hell is a non-existent place. Only in death can you truly find out if you don’t believe….how sad. I wish you the best. I truly do.

From Concord Monitor commenting stalwart Dave in Suncook:

A theory

I think Barry wanted to get preferential treatment into college,more than just being black, so he listed himself on his college apps. as an immigrant,that way he gets more freebies. We all know Barry has no problem lying,but maybe that’s why he won’t release early college docs. He was lying back then for the cash?
Now he’s stuck.Back when he was smoking pot and dealing coke he had no idea it would come back and bite him.
A little like him lying about domestic spying,Gitmo,Iraq,taxes.For Barry it’s whatever works at that moment.

From some other guy:

An equally valid theory

Barack Obama is actually a robot invented by Cold War-era Soviet scientists in order to rile up a large segment of the U.S. populace, one with a known distaste for minorities, intelligence, education, and fairness. This was to be their way of taking down America from the inside once the number of idiots in the U.S. reached a critical mass and allowed for the possibility of revolt. However, they failed to anticipate that the North Koreans would invent an android of their own: Sarah Palin. This MILFian robotress has soothed the would-be revolutionaries by redirecting blood from their cheeks to their loins.

On the other hand, maybe he’s simply one of the Anunaki.

Didn’t get your nappy-poo in today, Dave? Because you sound cranky!

There are so many unfounded rumors about the Obama administration flying around these days that it’s easy to miss one or two, but most have probably heard this one: Under the terms of the American Affordable Healthcare Act, old people are basically going to be tossed out into the street to die. For a quick summary of the roots of this rumor (right-wing talk radio, of course) and its utter disregard for the facts, see this article in today’s Washington Post. For an even quicker summary, read this excerpt:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as “guiding you in how to die,” “an ORDER from the Government to end your life,” promoting “death care” and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to “kill Granny.”

And the campaign has worked. Two local examples: this letter to the editor and this one, both published within the past three days. It’s no mystery where these unfortunates have gotten their “information” from. Read the rest of this entry »