Dana Milbank makes the connection between Glenn Beck's crazy bullshit and crazy people with guns inspired by it.
Beck has prophesied darkly to his millions of followers that we are reaching "a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out." One night on Fox, discussing the case of a man who killed 10 people, Beck suggested such things were inevitable. "If you're a conservative, you are called a racist, you want to starve children," he said. "And every time they do speak out, they are shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?"
Here's one idea: Stop encouraging them.
Milbank has one of the most sensitive fingers to the wind of the DC status quo, so I'm betting on a bit of a backlash against the assignment editors at Fox from other media notables in the coming days.
Noted theologian, thrice married, blow-job aficionado, Little Newtie Gingrich strikes again! He must have another book to sell. At anyrate, the HuffPo tells us:
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich twice called on the United States to attack North Korea and Iran Thursday because the United States has only attacked "one out of three" of so-called "Axis of Evil" members by invading Iraq. He also claimed that Muslims are trying to install Sharia law on America and said that the "War on Terror" should have been a war on "radical Islamists" instead.
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Bigotry and hatred are only truly offensive when they are directed at *Jews*
The controversial plans for the so-called Ground Zero Mosque have taken yet another organization (the GOP being first, but they are crazy 24x7x365) down the rabbit hole:
The Anti-Defamation League has issued a statement opposing the building of a mosque near the World Trade Center memorial site.
The proposed construction of Cordoba House, a Muslim center at 45-47 Park Place, just two blocks form the former World Trade Center, has sparked a heated debate.
Supporters of the plan accuse opponents of bigotry, slamming them for equating all Muslims with the 9/11 terrorists.In its statement Friday opposing the plan, the ADL called the bigotry that has surrounded the decision "unfair and wrong" but nonetheless opposes the construction, it says, out of sensitivity to those who had family members killed on 9/11.
So, in other words, don't build it there if it might upset the locals? Isn't that, in a nutshell, the history of modern Israel?
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Cluster Bomb Ban Comes Into Effect - without U.S. support.
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THE argument against repealing DADT - Hitler was gay.
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They're laughing AT you, Boehner, not WITH you
President Obama held a meeting with Congressional leaders to discuss tax cuts where the following little story occurred.
Mr. Obama, who did not join the Senate until 2005, reminded Mr. Boehner and the Senate Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that the tax cuts' architects purposely left the deficit problem to a future administration, according to aides from both parties.
"I wasn't there," Mr. Boehner quickly countered. "I didn't structure that deal."
The room briefly went quiet as participants seemed to ponder that statement from a legislator first elected in 1990. "How long have you been here?," a Democrat asked Mr. Boehner, and the others broke out in laughter.
Steve Benen picks up the story.
They're laughing at you, John, not with you.
It's a telling anecdote. The White House vision is to largely follow the game plan crafted by congressional Republicans less than a decade ago. It was the GOP's idea — they passed tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and set the cuts to expire at the end of 2010. The point was to obscure the cuts' cost, play a dangerous budget game, and make it so that the GOP wouldn't have to pay for their own experiment. We saw the results, which can only fairly be described as "total failure."
[...]
Indeed, Boehner was, at the time, responsible at the committee level for helping shape the tax-cut package, and was on hand at the White House for the bill-signing ceremony.
No wonder the room broke out in laughter.
The guy's a cartoon and he doesn't know it.
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How global warming could sink Ron Paul
But how bad could global warming really be for Kentucky? We're far and high enough from the ocean that rising seas just mean a quicker drive to the new beach. Shorter, warmer winters mean lower heating bills. A longer growing season means bumper crops, right?
Wrong.
Weather extremes likely attributable to the climate instability of global warming are ruining Kentucky's corn crop.
Jeffrey McMurray at the Courier:
Corn and soybean farmers in western Kentucky are accustomed to adapting to spring floods or summer droughts, but the combination of both in the same year threatens to make this harvest season one of the shortest in recent memory.May downpours forced farmers to plant crops later than usual, and the lack of rain in June and July could also force them to harvest it weeks earlier than they want.
Darian Irvan, a University of Kentucky agriculture and natural resources agent for Hickman County, said corn is now at most shoulder high. Even more problematic, he said, is how little of it appears to be usable on each stalk.
"When the temperatures get up above 90 degrees, corn has a hard time pollenating," Irvan said. "You pull the shuck back, there might be 15 kernels on the cob. Several cobs have three to four, or less."
Although temperatures were cooling to the mid-80s by Friday, much of the damage has been done, prompting the likely premature harvest possibly as early as mid-August.
Before November, Kentucky farmers are going to be lining up for federal crop relief. When Rand Paul goes on television to berate them for sucking at the big-government teat, will that finally persuade Kentucky voters that the teabaggers don't have our best interests at heart?
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Daniel Elsberg has a WikiLeaks wishlist.
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Here's a chance to turn the Afghan clusterfuck around 180 degrees. Northwest Pakistan is Taliban/al Qaeda territory. Take that $50 billion Congress just voted for the war and spend it instead on the most massive relief operation the world has ever seen. Do it right now. "The worst monsoon floods in living memory have killed at least 800 people and affected one million in north-west Pakistan, a local official has said. Rescuers are struggling to reach inundated areas where transport and communication are down. Peshawar, the area's largest city with a 3m-strong population, is cut off. At least 60 people have died across the border in Afghanistan where floods affected four provinces. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier) province, announced the latest death toll. Earlier, he described the floods as the province's worst ever. Manuel Bessler, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (UNOCHA) in Pakistan, told the BBC about 1m people's lives had been disrupted. He could not say with certainty the full scale of the emergency in Pakistan, as he was having trouble reaching his own offices in some of the worst-affected areas. UN aid workers were helping to co-ordinate efforts to provide shelter, health care, drinking water and ready-to-eat food rations, he said. There was concern, he added, that swollen rivers running south would carry the floods to provinces like Sindh where heavy rain was forecast in coming days."
Record-breaking floods in Pakistan, record-breaking heat in Russia, there's something we've heard about increasing extreme weather, but we can't quite put our finger on it .... "Almost 240,000 people have been mobilised across Russia to tackle wildfires that have killed at least 30 people, officials say. The military has pooled resources with firefighters; the emergencies ministry said 25,000 engines were being used. But with temperatures forecast to hit 40C (104F) in some areas, the ministry has warned more fires are likely. Several villages and swathes of forest have been destroyed, but officials say they are now on top of the situation. "The fire situation in Russia is under control," the ministry said in a statement. Firefighters are currently battling blazes in 14 of Russia's 83 regions, and many thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes. Internet users across the country had been complaining bitterly on forums that the firefighting effort had concentrated on Moscow at the expense of other regions."
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Americans ignorant of nature of right wing and their own history
The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, Jr. was the latest national commentator to lose it over the insanity which has overtaken American politics.
In a column this week, Dionne threw up his hands and called Americans "incorrigibly stupid." Good for E.J., because we are.
How can we possibly be taken seriously by the rest of the world, E.J. wants to know, if we can muster the courage to fight two wars but can't find the political will to ask American taxpayers to pay for them? How did we allow ourselves to be boxed into a corner by Ronald Reagan and his progeny on the right into convincing us that we could be a global superpower that hates "Big Government" at the same time? And why are the only Republicans willing to say that theirs is a party of slogans and talking points -- but not good ideas -- the ones who've already left the party or been kicked out?
"We need a new conservatism in our country that is worthy of the name," laments Dionne as he surveys the wreckage of the modern Republican Party. "We need liberals willing to speak out on the threat our daft politics poses to our influence in the world. We need moderates who do more than stick their fingers in the wind to calculate the halfway point between two political poles."
As the proprietors of the world's oldest participatory democracy, the American people are astonishingly ignorant about their own history and politics, and it's time we starting saying so without fear of being called "elitist."
Because the reality is that the newly empowered right wing factions who want to steal our democracy and give it over to those approved authorities that have always governed conservative societies in the past, premise their grab for power on the public's basic ignorance. America's right wing is perfectly ready, willing and able to exploit the people's lack of learning for their own partisan purposes, while double-daring the rest of us to call them on their manipulations with the threat we'll be accused of being "condescending liberal elites" who think Americans are fools easily led to the slaughter, which sometimes they are.
When 40 or 50 or 60% of the public - and overwhelming majorities of the conservative public - believe in fantasies that are demonstrably false, then it's time to wave goodbye to the flattering self-conceit that vox populi, vox dei - "the Voice of the People is the Voice of God."
It's a basic truth of therapy. Real healing does not begin until the demons that torment us are identified, embraced and finally forgotten. Denied fundamental insight into our preconceptions and the inner-workings of our own mind, epiphany or catharsis is impossible. We are condemned instead to wander aimlessly in a fog of make-believe, mistaking friend for foe, unknowingly embracing our enemies, and creating alternative realities without cognizance, or even care, of the disastrous consequences that are the bitter fruit of our own ignorance.
This applies to nations as well as individuals. And so at the most basic level, the task for America today is to re-learn who we really are.
And that begins by acknowledging how little Americans know about their own history - and how little America has been touched by history itself.
Some conservatives like to call this "American Exceptionalism" and pretend it means that the rules which apply to everyone else don't apply to us. But what it really means is that, despite all that has taken place over the past 250 years or more -- despite all of the stirring events Americans have experienced -- America has never yet had a genuine rendezvous with human destiny. And that is because, as professor Louis Hartz says in his famous The Liberal Tradition in America, our "ironic flaw" is that America has "never had a real conservative tradition."
Throughout most of the world, revolutions and bloody civil wars and the long, slow march by which democratic freedoms were painfully won from ancestral and ecclesiastical ruling orders are the brute facts of life. This has been the natural progression for most other societies, and it has left a residue of scar tissue that gives the inhabitants of these countries an intuitive feel for the differences and the dangers of political ideologies, both Left and Right.
Yet, because of America's unique historical and political development, "the great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution," observed Alexis de Tocqueville, in his magisterial study of democracy in America. "They are born equal," said de Tocqueville of Americans, "instead of becoming so."
A 17th century Englishman like Sir Robert Filmer who believed that all governments should be modeled on the patriarchial family, with a supreme father in the person of a king who ought to go unchallenged and be free from all human control - such an individual would have been dismissed as an eccentric crank in America.
Or an 18th century reactionary Frenchman like Joseph De Maistre, who maintained that France had a divine mission to be the principal instrument of good and of evil in the world, and who believed that constitutions were not the products of man but gifts from God - such ideas would have been treated as antiquarian nonsense on these shores. And yet, these men and their ideas powerfully shaped the course and evolution of European politics.
Indeed, the most telling expression of de Tocqueville's point concerning the yawning distance which separates European and American political evolution may have been the fact that one of the loudest voices in favor of American Independence came from the Whig Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, who later made a name for himself as history's severest critic of another democratic revolution in France, thus earning himself history's title as "Father of Conservatism."
Yet, as the subsequent course of American politics has shown, this honeymoon from history has been as much a curse as a blessing.
Today, millions of right wing Tea Party Americans are putting on period costume and fashioning themselves as latter-day Sons of Liberty in their attack on the new tyrant they think is threatening American freedoms, using a rhetoric loosely borrowed from the Founding Fathers to wage a nationwide protest against the very national government those Founding Fathers created.
These same Americans are also uniquely susceptible to the fractured fairy tales of quack historians like Glenn Beck, who spin wild stories of fascist dictators inhabiting the White House -- after securing 365 electoral votes in the last free and fair nationwide election.
Portions of the Tea Party movement are also receptive audiences for the falsity that "America is a Christian Nation" and so needs to reestablish the clerical power being advocated by those like the late Catholic priest, Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, who perfected a language that makes theocracy and democracy seem like identical twins.
Other parts of the conservative movement have become the eager consumers for the race-baiting manipulations of reactionary oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch, who wield their cable networks like the monarchs of old once used their armies -- as an instrument for waging wars "For God and Country" to keep the masses occupied with ideas other than challenging the oligarch's privilege, position, power or profits.
And the outrage of all of this is that this vandalism against American political values and traditions is being sold to a gullible public as the fulfillment of America's promise instead.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident." Stirring words, those. But what the absolutist, authoritarian Tea Party right finds so alluring in that statement are not the truths themselves, which are incontrovertibly liberal, but the idea that these truths are "self-evident."
And it is that arrogant self-confidence that "We the People" - meaning white Christian conservatives - are the only "Real Americans" and everyone else is either an imposter or a usurper, is why cable and talk radio demagogues find it so easy to transform the Tea Party movement into an angry, fist-shaking mob -- but one that is strangely struck dumb the moment you ask it why, in particular, is it so angry in the first place?
Rather than poke fun at those caught up in the Tea Party insurrection, it's more important to understand that the Tea Party's incoherence has deep historical roots.
For Americans, says Hartz, history has always been "on a lark." We've largely escaped those elements in history that are second nature to the rest of the world - things like caste and class and governments based on religious law, like Sharia, which has weirdly become the right wing's latest bogyman.
That is because ours was a continent that was settled and won by people who brought their civilization with them, ready-made. America was occupied and conquered by those who had already internalized the promises of the liberal Enlightenment without having to win those liberties and freedoms outright from conservative establishments that were not disposed to grant them without a fight.
John Locke's ideas on a state of nature and a legitimate government arising out of those primitive conditions via a social contract, form the basis for American constitutional thought. But as Hartz points out, Locke's ideas about the state - about Big Government if you will - had two distinctive parts, only one of which took hold in America.
The first was a defense of the legitimacy of the state that was implicit. The second were the limitations on that state which were explicit.
Americans today, thanks to 30 years of right wing propaganda, are predisposed to see only the freedom-limiting aspects of government, not the fact that the state was the instrument of the people's emancipation from hereditary and "monkish" elites in the first place - in exactly the same way that the federal Union freed black slaves from America's Southern feudal order in the Civil War.
Europeans, because they actually experienced the Divine Right of Kings and the political consequences of Papal Infallibility, understand intuitively that it was the modern state that "untangled men from the myriad associations of class, church, gild and place in terms of which feudal society defined their lives," said Hartz. "And by doing so, it automatically gave to the state a higher rank in relation to them than ever before. The state became the only association that might legitimately coerce them at all."
In Europe, unlike America, the idea of social liberty was "loaded with dynamite," as Hartz said, because the idea of a free people rocked the foundations of Europe's conservative ruling orders. That is why Europe today is far less religiously observant, and enjoys much higher levels of progressive politics, such as national health care and a generous welfare state. Through bitter first-hand experience, Europeans understand the power of the Right Wing and the ideas used to justify it, where Americans do not.
That is only one of the reasons American politics are so confused today and where nonchalance over nomenclature, such as the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative," comes with costs. In America, as Hartz says, social liberty wasn't a hard-won acquisition but "the assumption of American political thought" upon which all subsequent political truths flowed. Liberty, said Hartz, "was as instinctive to the American mind, as the concept of the Polis was instinctive to the Platonic Athens, or the concept of The Church to the mind of the middle ages."
What we've missed by being spared the horrors of social revolution to overcome the feudal oppressions of Europe, is that instinctive appreciation of the liberal nation-state as the source of our basic freedoms instead of our deprivations - which is the fundamental distortion the radical right is trying to sell us today, with its notions of government as the problem and not the solution.
The battleground for politics today can be easily described in just two words: Big Government.
The conflict today is between those who understand we must reclaim the Public Estate against those who would turn this country over to the rich and powerful oligarchs who have always dominated those societies in the past that lacked the leadership and discipline to put their racial, religious, class and even economic interests aside in order to unite for the common good.
The fact that we are now experiencing a popular conservative uprising against our own popularly-elected democratic nation-state is only conceivable in a country that is ignorant of both world history and its own -- and is also oblivious to the true nature of right wing elites who have always seen the democratic nation-state as the natural enemy of their wealth and power.
And until we reconnect with our own past and who we are, American politics will continue to be - as E.J. Dionne called them this week -- "incorrigibly stupid." Because those who cannot learn from history, as George Santayana said, are doomed to repeat it. Or re-create it.
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