It’s not easy to kill a President. The Secret Service protects them pretty well. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be stopping the “Who will rid us of this meddlesome negro?” crowd this past week. They have been doing their best to incite violence against the man who won the Presidency with more popular votes and more electoral votes than their beloved Dubya ever did. Let’s run down our list, shall we?
(cont.)
On Saturday, a Republican Rep from Arizona, Trent Franks calls Obama an “enemy of humanity,” “godless” and “insane” as well as questioning his US citizenship for the umpteenth time.
Another speaker, Kitty Werthmann, at that same “Take Back America” conference compared Obama to Adolph Hitler (in great detail) and had this to say to her audience:
So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. […] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism.
On Saturday we also saw the publishing of a poll on Facebook which asked the question “Should Obama be killed?” The choices: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care. Ten percent of the voters in that online poll actually selected one of the options which supported murdering our lawfully elected President.
And yesterday? Well, we saw an online “news outlet” post an article by John L. Perry calling on the military to remove Obama from office in a coup.
Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
Not that this is anything new. We’re less than one month away from the anniversary of an actual plot in which two potential assassins and mass murderers were arrested. We’ve seen a massive uptick in threats made against President Obama’s life compared to the same number made against President Bush. We’ve seen right wing “tea baggers” brandishing semiautomatic firearms at town hall meetings attended by Obama. We’ve heard so-called “Men of God” openly pray for the death of our President and publicly claim he deserves to die.
And the demonization of our President by the right has been relentless. We’ve seen mass-produced posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache, or with a “Joker” face (no doubt in violation of copyrights related to the film, The Dark Knight). We’ve seen a Republican Congressman from South Carolina scream at Obama during a joint address of Congress “You Lie!” and become a mini-celebrity for doing what would have been considered unthinkable (and probably labeled “treason” by conservatives had it happened to Bush) with respect to any other President. We’ve seen calls for secession from prominent Republican governors like Rick Perry of Texas because Obama’s stimulus package was supposedly going to destroy our nation.
We’ve heard a TV clown call Obama a racist who hates white people, and a radio clown call who mocked Obama on the air as a “”Halfrican American” and “Barack, the Magic Negro” for the second coming of racial segregation. Obama’s speech to school children exhorting them to “work hard” and his support for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago have been turned into media controversies out of the thin air baseless accusations ginned up by Fox and its Republican “friends.” Obama has been called (take your pick) by conservative extremists a fascist, a socialist, the progenitor of a new indoctrination movement based on the “Hitler Youth,” the “Antichrist,” a “Nazi style eugenicist,” the man who shut down Republican Chrysler dealers because of their politics, etc.
Then add to that the killing of people identified with the government (any government) or with the “godless left” in some way. This Summer, we saw Bill O’Reilly’s personal jihad against Dr. Tiller help create the climate for his murder by a deranged right wing anti- abortionist at Tiller’s own church on a Sunday while the good Doctor served as a usher. We’ve seen Pittsburgh police ambushed by a man convinced his guns were going to be confiscated by the Government because of the lies the Republican zanies and their counterparts in the media spread. We’ve seen an African American Security Guard at the Holocaust Museum gunned down in the line of duty protecting the people inside from an old and bitter White Supremacist.
More recently we’ve seen the murder (yes, it was a murder no matter what spin law enforcement officials in Kentucky have tried to put on the case – No one duck tapes himself naked to a tree, scrawls “Fed” on his chest stuffs a gag in his mouth and then lynches himself a year after fighting off cancer) of a dedicated teacher, Boy Scout Leader, devoted father and part time Federal census worker Bill Sparkman. A kind and generous man who is now baselessly being accused of being a child molester for no reason other than venomous right wing refuse to admit that his murder is one more brick in the eliminationist campaign they have been fostering since before Obama was nominated, but which since his election they have taken to an entirely new level.
And yet … this has been quite the week. In a span of five days we’ve seen quite literally some of the most blatant, outrageous, and frankly dangerous statements made that I can recall, ever. Statements made in public speeches and online that make it very clear they consider our duly elected President of the United States a menace who must be removed from office ASAP, dead or alive (and they’re not too choosy about which of those is employed to accomplish the deed). Not since the tumultuous days of the 1960’s when assassination of major Democratic politicians and other prominent Civil Rights leaders seemed to have become the new national pastime, have I seen such an outpouring of vitriol. And make no mistake: they intend to incite violence against President Obama, other Democrats and liberals, African Americans, Latinos and other minorities, gays and anyone else they deem not a legitimate citizen of “their America.” Not our America. Not a country where freedom, liberty and justice for all is promised regardless of race, color or creed, but an America limited to “right thinking” “real Americans.” Fundamentalist Christian Americans (and maybe a few right thinking Jews). Their reach already extends deeply into the Republican party, and, more ominously the United States Military.
It’s easy to pass this off as just so much hot air by a few blowhards who will never act on their stupid, pitiful threats. No doubt that’s what many Jews said about the Nazis before Hitler became Chancellor. No doubt that’s what many Tutsis thought about all the hate speech on the radio by Hutu radio announcers prior to the genocide in Rwanda. But history tells us nothing is unthinkable, and nothing is impossible, and no country is safe from the threat of political violence. How soon we forget our own history. Who in 1858 thought that the election of President Lincoln would lead to a bloody Civil War in which more people died than in any other conflict in our history (including Lincoln himself). Who imagined the incessant Republican and right wing hate speech that was aimed against President Bill Clinton, as conservative a Democrat as has ever been elected to that office, would end in the worst domestic terrorist attack in our country?
I didn’t use to think such things were possible in our country. But I’m not a right wing fanatic who’s feeling hopeless and helpless right now because a black man has been elected president. I’m not a person who ingests the lies promulgated by Fox news and right wing bloggers and Rush Limbaugh and every other hate talk radio host like it was manna from heaven. And those people are out there. Some of them have lost their jobs. Some of them have lost their health insurance and their homes. Some of them are just anxious and afraid and angry. But they are filled with fear and filled with rage. That rage is being directed at anyone who does not look like them or think like them or believe what they believe. And it is no coincidence. There are groups in this country who are planning to use that rage, some for political gain or media attention or money from lobbyists, but others with a more sinister agenda: to incite violence and intimidate those of us who aren’t members of “the club” with the threat of such violence.
A fire is building within those people, the same sort of fire that led to fascism in the 1930’s, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, assassinations, right wing militias and plots against another popular Democratic President at a time of a grave domestic economic crisis when the interests of the rich, of large corporations, of bankers and their friends, the con artists on Wall Street were threatened.
To pretend it doesn’t exist, or to pooh pooh the danger it poses to our nation’s democracy would be foolish. This is why Democrats need to succeed in delivering on their promises of more jobs, of universal health insurance, of better times. because if they don’t the storm that is moving ever closer each day they fail to act, each day they appear weak in the face of right wing agitprop, will come. No doubt the politicians of the Weimar republic never thought the Nazis would obtain power. They only won roughly 30% of the vote in 1932, after all? The actual number of party members was much fewer than that. How could they destroy a democratic society with so few adherents?
Well, it was easy. All it took was the inability of Hitler’s opponents to believe what their eyes were showing them on a daily basis. Well I believe what my eyes are showing me. I hope that enough Democrats do too. My fear is that they will refuse to acknowledge the threat and continue down the path of incrementalism, and caution, and playing to the mythical middle and politics as usual. That strategy and those tactics could lead to something far worse than a mere electoral disaster for their party. It might very well lead to the end of the United States as we have known it.
This basically touches on my main feeling at the moment. We are in a situation where we simply cannot afford to lose. That’s why I am uninterested in all this talk about third parties from the left. We don’t have that luxury. We have too heavy a responsibility to keep the GOP out of power. I don’t know how long this fever will last in the GOP but it is showing no sign of let-up at the moment.
So, yeah, we have to deliver so that the people don’t decide the only solution is try something else. That something else is lethally dangerous.
There is always the fate of the GOP’s predecessor, the Whigs.
Damn right that Democrats had better deliver. If they continue to play footsy with Republicans, Bankers, and other corporate whores, they will lose the people.
How many of us are safe in academia, government, or are students? In the corporate world, a holocaust is happening. No, that isn’t hyperbole. People are burning themselves alive in their foreclosed houses. Desperate jobless men sink into crime to support their families. Just because the stock market is up doesn’t mean that total unemployment isn’t reaching levels unknown since the 1930’s. Desperate blue collar workers listen to the demagogues who feed their prejudices and fears. Saddling them with mandatory private insurance will push them over the brink. A resurgence of the far right is in the offing. Moderate forces in Germany and Britain thought they could parley with Hitler. They couldn’t. They just enabled him. Obama and the Blue Dogs are doing the same. You thought Bush-Cheney was the worst? Think again.
A diary over at the Big Orange makes a similar argument. The diarist got a lot of pooh-poohing about making too much of the loony fringe. Someone mentioned the plot against FDR and I picked up on that. If those plotters had had Eric Prince and Blackwater instead of Smedley Butler and a handful of disgruntled military officers, the outcome might have been very different. Yeah, most of the noise is just loons venting, but I don’t think it’s wise to ignore them. It may not all be just loons, and it may not all be just noise.
In that regard, it would be wise to remember that the greatest permeation of the religious right has been in the US Air Force.
For sure! I dropped my membership in the Air Force Association about six years ago because I was sick of the blatant right wing editorials. Also, the corporate shilling.
Yeah, that too. All the heavy duty proselytizing in the military, especially in the Air Force, already had a certain ominous undertone to me. Then when reports starting coming out about Eric Prince thinking of himself as a modern crusader, and Blackwater goons using call signs that invoked the Knights Templar, the alarm bells in my head got a lot louder. I think we ignore those two trends — and their possible connection — at our peril.
Of course it’s just loons. That doesn’t mean they can’t hurt people like their loon brethren did on Sept 11.
This is the best you’ve ever done, Steven D.
This is the exactly the issue.
And this is exactly the solution:
During the Bush administration, there was a lot of talk from the right about changing the reality faster than analysis could keep up. And they implemented that tactic right into disaster.
Democrats need to implement that tactic to get us out of disaster.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is worth a read at this point in history. It is about how unbridled “competition” eventually created the resentments that lead to totalitarian dreams and actions.
At least Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner and Jay Rockefeller are standing up to move in the direction you recommend. And Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO is not idle in the battle.
The first battle is to get healthcare reform with a minimum of a public option. The second is to get the Boxer-Kerry climate change bill passed-a jobs creator. The third is to get real reform of the financial industry. The fourth is to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed–actually to make it easier for workers to obtain a collective bargaining agreement with employers.
Then there is bring the Wage and Hour Act up to the 21st century, which means undoing a lot of overtime mischief and upping the minimum wage to levels it was in the 1960s (adjusted for inflation). …and the list goes on…
And all of this before 2012.
Remember, hope is what you have when your optimism runs out. And as Frank Herbert says, “Fear is the mind-killer.”
Thank you sir. More praise than I deserve.
I’d also recommend Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.
Smedley Butler stopped the coup attempt against FDR.
But the military today has no reason to overthrow Obama. If the military ever has a sit down with “those who control” Obama they would in large part be talking to themselves. The military’s agenda has continued during Obama’s White House residence with barely a hiccup. Iraq still occupied? Check. War in Afghanistan getting bigger? Check. Hey, we may even get a third war in Iran if we can borrow enough from China.
The DOD is run by Bob Gates and Gates has his people running the show. Gates was head of the DOD for Bush II and CIA chief for Bush I.
All this is just a fantasy of racists. While the oligarchy continues to drain the blood from the rest of us, racism and nativist is the illogic that solves the riddle of “Why do things suck now?” Obama is being left with the proverbial bag of sh*t (that was a proverb, right?). The boodle boys get to keep their loot and the angry white guy can blame Obama, the Democrats, illegal aliens, coloreds and hippies who get abortions and smoke grass.
Expect to see films about illegal aliens as rats spreading disease across America, just like the Nazi propaganda films.
There is a pacifist tendency on the left that is a good thing most of the time, but not very helpful in certain situations — like when the opposition party is advocating assassinations, military coups, and outright civil war. It’s especially unhelpful when dealing with the modern GOP base: the dregs of civil society, incapable of understanding anything but armed force.
For those people, it really doesn’t matter if the Dems deliver or not. The only thing that will get through to them is if the left somehow convinces them that, in the event of an assassination or an armed uprising, we will kill them in large numbers, and keep killing them until order is restored. People like Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachman, and Glenn Beck need to be put on public notice that if one of their followers assassinates our president, they will not live to see sunset.
There, I said it.
I’ve been biting my tongue for the better part of the last year, but that’s what I think is necessary, drawing on the lessons of my youth when I was involved in street fighting against neo-Nazi skinheads. When you are dealing with that kind of animal — an ex-person who has voluntarily seceded from the human race — the only thing they understand, much less respect, is domination by force.
How did the Nazis bring down the Weimar Republic? The same way their ilk eats away at democracies everywhere: by taking advantage of the civilized misconception that all speech and belief must be tolerated. Sadly, that’s just not a sustainable model. At the end of the day, any democracy that doesn’t want to eventually vote itself out of existence must recognize that toleration of intoleration is a self-defeating behavior. The post-war Germans learned this lesson, and they banned the Nazi party and its symbols and speech forever. If we don’t want to learn that lesson the hard way like the Germans did, we need to be prepared to move against the rapidly degenerating GOP as soon as they step over the line into direct action using the full power of the state.
Tolerating advocates of assassinations and coups d’etat is not a concession a free society needs to make; it is not one a free society can make for long if it wishes to remain a free society. We can either send such people to prison or to the gallows, or we can wait for them to do much worse to us.
Much of the American dream — the original dream of freedom and equality, not the 1950’s crap about owning a house — was always a bunch of empty promises and ideals admired but never lived up to, grand and lofty gestures made by men who owned slaves and conducted genocide against the original owners of the land. But even so, we made progress, bit by bit, towards realizing those ideals and making the dream real. For all intents and purposes, that progress stopped with the right-wing violence and assassinations of the 1960’s.
Today, we are approaching the same kind of real progress that triggered the fascist backlash of the late 1960’s. They mean to finish us this time. I say that the time has come for us to finish them, to stop tolerating the implacable internal enemies of the original American dream, to defeat them, if necessary by force of arms, and certainly by force of law. We will not win this battle in Congress or the ballot box alone. The enemy must know that we will defend the American dream by any means necessary. They must know that we will not be cowed by their threats of violence, and that we are fully prepared to meet their force with an order of magnitude more force if necessary.
The alternative is to let the Rahm Emmanuels of the left continue their incremental retreat from the dream until the psychopaths of the neo-fascist right sense that their time has come and they turn our retreat into a rout.
I can only disagree with you on the point that Rahm Emanuel is “of the Left.” In a very real sense there is no Left left in America. There are people who are right wing fanatics, people who are racists, people who are libertarian fanatics, people who are corporate sellouts, a vast ignorant mass of people who go with whatever they last heard on TV and those of us who just want pragmatic solutions to the many, many problems that we as a nation and a world face. The Left to me are real Marxists, Communists and socialists and we just don’t have very many of those people in America.
yup. the second amendment is for left wingers too.
Best believe it…
This is pretty much a must-read post by a right-wing blogger http://tinyurl.com/yblw5us
Last Honest Man sounds like.
Nice but you forgot to mention the Business Plot of 1933. Hitler had a lot of right wing fans in America before WWII really hit the news.
It’s the in the links toward the end. Honest.
Go to far down that path and you have to have violence to sort the thing out.
There’s a lot of good insight in scattered places throughout this essay and the comments which follow it. But there’s just as much (very understandable) confusion over various key points. For both those reasons, it’s a very interesting essay and deserves lots of consideration—the kind of extended consideration which is just what the ADD-style of U.S. culture apparently cannot muster.
On the points where I most strongly agree I’d place at #1
this situation is not going to simply melt away—and I’m convinced that it shall persist whether or not “Democrats” “deliver” on jobs, health-care, etc.
To suppose that such measures could defuse the explosive situation now at work is to misunderstand what is really going on.
A stark ideological rupture has already occurred; it means that in a specific way that matters most, the people of the U.S. have already disintegrated into two or more irreconcilable camps. That has now been left ignored for so long that it is anything but clear at this point that it is reversible prior to seeing the entire civil order dissolve into chaos.
Right now, two (or more) irreconcilable views of what the U.S. are supposed to “be” as a people and as a government are in open conflict to such a point that many among the antagonists refuse to recognize those opposed to them as deserving to be counted as “Americans” or the government as it is constituted under Obama or as it was constituted under Bush and Cheney as a legitimate government.
What’s going on is now is the continuation of an already long-at-work process of break-down—social, cultural, ideological—with all that it implies for the political and economic “orders” recently so clearly discredited. Any interested reader could find tremendous help in better understanding what is wrong and why if he or she read Amin Maalouf’s book, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong [ http://www.amazon.com/Name-Identity-Violence-Need-Belong/dp/0142002577/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=book
s&qid=1254390833&sr=8-2-catcorr ]. That book alone doesn’t supply all the needed intellectual background to the disaster now unfolding but it offers a useful place to start.
If I were to pick out just two major elements to summarize the fault-lines where Western society in general is foundering (and the predicament we are in encompasses all of the Western socio-cultural-economic order, and not only the culture, society and economy of the U.S.) I’d point to these two:
the industrial revolution of society since the 17th century and, with it, the profound collapse of the whole edifice of organized religion as it was then known and practised—thus, in particular, the judeo-christian world of Catholic and Protestant and Jew. To the long collapse of these we must now add, in own time, that of Islam, against which collapse a fanatical fundamentalist version is the present-day manifest reaction.
Certain unifying themes and threads, however, run through and across many of the seemingly disjoint and disparate phenomena. It the particular virtue of Amin Maalouf’s analysis in his book mentioned above that these themes and threads are brought into startling relief for the reader to consider.
Another of his key insights is that in no way, shape or form does our “salvation” consist in “recovering” what has been lost of the past. Rather, if societies are to survive the upheavals now in effect, they are going to have to correctly grasp what about their social, political, cultural and ideological heritages has been fundamentally false and erroneous, jettison these in a deliberate way and replace them with other, sounder, more humane and livable arrangements. This process could and should include the much-talked-of alternative world order as embodied in such movements as those associated with Porto Alegro [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermondialism ].
Such a re-thinking would entail recognizing what parts of the European Enlightenment period’s liberal-democratic and economic theory which form so fundamental a part of the ideological infrastructures of our time were deeply flawed and planted the seeds which have now flowered and propagated so much mischief—especially evident in spirtually empty a mass-consumption ethic which has deeply accentuated confused moral collapse which is at the heart of what now haunts us through its influences on our economic, social and political disorder.
There’s much to add here but at this writing not the opportunity to continue.
Re: Pot is Boiling : Hitler’s rise misinterpreted here:
“No doubt the politicians of the Weimar republic never thought the Nazis would obtain power. They only won roughly 30% of the vote in 1932, after all? The actual number of party members was much fewer than that. How could they destroy a democratic society with so few adherents?”
The answer to that question is obscured in the brief account given in Wikipedia’s page; even so, the Wikipedia account itself does point out that, so far from Weimar’s politicians never imagining that Hitler might one day come to power, they watched as, at last,
You’ll find better indicators in Ian Kershaw’s [ http://www.amazon.com/Ian-Kershaw/e/B001ITX4WI/ref=sr_tc_2_0 ] work on Hitler and Nazism on how Hitler eventually came to power, including the fact that, despite all Hitler’s many short-comings, he proved to have an immense appeal as an orator. Whatever the relatively meager NSDAP membership, Hitler’s voice and message reached and captured the imagination of many millions of Germans—especially by the time Hindenburg made his fateful decision. By that time, it was thought that there was little alternative to allowing Hitler to assume the post which he demanded and claimed was his due.
By the time he actually came to hold his first post as Reich Chancellor, Hitler was any _but a surprise. Victor Klemperer [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer ] gives us a day-by-day account as a very perceptive eyewitness to it all in his brilliant diaries: http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1254405551/ref=sr_pg_1?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=victor%20klemperer%2
0diaries&rh=n%3A%211000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Avictor%20klemperer%20diaries&page=1
They thought they could control him, that he would be their puppet.
They made serious and fatal errors in that regard.
Indeed. It’s a mistake that bureaucratic and legitimately political organizations occasionally make. Hitler’s power was based on structures outside of the German political bureaucracy: his control of the private army of the Sturmabteilung, and his co-option of the moneyed industrial interests and having mollified the Prussian military elite.
By the time the bureaucrats tried to move against him, they discovered that the foundations of their power — obedience to, or at least acceptance of, the rule of law — had evaporated.
The difference between the two kinds of power is the difference between a subpoena and a gun. Civil society exists because we have all agreed to uphold it. When that agreement is dissolved, superior force carries the day. Civil society exists in the first place to avoid that state of affairs.
I remain hopeful that we will avoid having to suffer through a refresher on that topic.
regarding,
“They only won roughly 30% of the vote in 1932, after all?”
this overlooks the fact that, in a parliamentary election, a mere 30% might amount to one the largest portions of the total totes cast.
Considering the circumstances I find this deeply disturbing-from Common Dreams-
09.30.09 – 4:04 PM
Full-Service Thuggery
A weirdly ominous story out of tiny Hardin, Montana, where the little-known, Blackwater-ish American Police Force, a global security and military training company, has taken over the town jail, which has no prisoners – having arrived in shiny SUVs with the logo of the Hardin police department, which doesn’t exist. Who are these guys, and howcome their Bolero-themed website boasts that they interdict terror activity and sell weapons that include “Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (WMD)”?
“American Police Force is dedicated to maintaining our well-deserved professional reputation as a results oriented full-service private investigative and security agency by way of commitment, diligence, unique resources, creativity, and tenacity on behalf of our clients.”
Very disturbing.
Scary link-
http://www.americanpolicegroup.com/index.html
Opinion / The Los Angeles Times:
Politics as religion in America
“Conservatism has been converted into a religious belief, and now compromise doesn’t have a prayer.”
By Neal Gabler
October 2, 2009
link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gabler2-2009oct02,0,7817347.story
I’ve heard other military guys talk about opening their own consultancy shops and this may be nothing more than some ex soldier wanting to get on the government’s gravy train.
Lot’s of military guys want to be the next Blackwater (lots of filthy lucre).
Kind of what this sounds like to me. Ordered a decal to put on his truck, started a website, probably registered with the state, trying to do the minimum for a fed contract, etc. Probably forgot to get legal counsel though . . . .would have told him about the whole impersonating a police officer thing.
If anyone understands the implications of what, of all people, Chuck Norris has said, then we should be talking some serous turkey.
They are picking a different banner, arming and calling for the dear leader’s head.
People might pay more taxes for a health care system, but would they literally fight for it?
Doubtful. But they might fight to avoid a Republican Dominionist police state.
Me personally, I’d fight just for the chance to shoot some of these fuckers.
You gotta put it in terms of putting down the neo-Conderacy.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent the last 50 years expecting this country to dissolve into anarchy… keeping guns and ammo handy… playing out various flight/fight scenarios in my head. <heavy sigh>