Frenzy on the Right

Several bloggers have been posting some very good stuff the last few days about the spasms of our wrong-wingers over the New York Times alleged "treason".

I should start off by saying that the charge against the Times is horse-pucky.  The best single piece I've seen on this is by Gene Lyons: Times revealed little that Bush hadn’t told us Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 07/05/06.  I excerpted part of it at The Blue Voice.  Lyons shows how its possible to recognize the nastiness of the Republican campaign against an independent press while recognizing that the Times is not the Holy Grail of journalism.  Do I need to say more on that than "Judith Miller"?

Paul Waldman also has a good analysis of the right's frenzy over the Times:  A declaration of war Media Matters for America 06/30/06.

The right has kept the media under constant assault for decades, and the response from the media has been to bend over backward to prove they aren't biased - by being harder on Democrats. They should have learned long ago that the "liberal bias" charge has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the news. It is a political strategy, a way of "working the ref" and providing easy excuses for public rejection of the right's goals. But what we have seen this week is something qualitatively different.

Given the constant drumbeat of criticism directed at the media from conservatives, it might be easy to dismiss this latest expulsion of bile as just more of the same.  But it's worth stepping back to take a look at exactly what has occurred over the past week.  Members of Congress have suggested revoking the Capitol Hill credentials of journalists, so that only news organizations that do not displease the ruling party may be permitted to report from Congress.  Other members have accused members of the media of "treason" and advocated their prosecution.  A conservative television and radio personality suggested that the government establish an Office of Censorship to screen the news.  Another said, "I would have no problem with [New York Times editor Bill Keller] being sent to the gas chamber." The House of Representatives passed a resolution saying it "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations."

In short, the right assembled a posse this week - vigilantes stalking television studios, radio airwaves, print, and the Internet, their apparent goal to revoke the First Amendment.  (my emphasis)

Billmon has a good piece looking at the Bush administration's authoritarian measures from a traditional democratic viewpoint, asking what would happen if a Democratic President were to do such things:  The Totalitarian Temptation 07/02/06.  Billmon has obviously put a lot of thought and research into this issue of the erosion of democracy. 

But I think he misses something key in this piece.  The Republicans have effectively established The Party as their ultimate measure of authority.  When The Party controls all three branches of the federal government as it does now, Republicans are generally willing to back an authoritarian Presidency.  Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was a serious legal setback for Bush's "unitary Executive" doctrine of Presidential lawlessness.   (Al Gore's description of it as a "unilateral Executive" theory is actually more appropriate.)  But the Republicans in Congress and the rightwing echo chamber have been fine with it.

If a Democrat becomes President again, Republicans will have not the slightest hesitation to use the powers of Congress as well as the courts to restrict even legitimate exercises of Presidential power.  This is one of the problems of having merged their Party with the Christian Right.  As Gene Lyons describe the latest frenzy of the right in the article linked above, "Reasonable people never want to believe that extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. This is mass psychosis."

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates is doing a series of posts on the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and the video game inspired by it.  He writes in The World According to Tim LaHaye: Chapter OneTalk2Action blog 06/26/06:

LaHaye expects there is an upcoming huge battle between good and Godly Christians and the forces of evil working with Satan's chief End Times henchman, the antichrist.

So the outcome of Tim LaHaye's "non-fiction" writing, the Left Behind series of novels, and the video game, is the training of young Christian evangelicals to rebel against the elected government of the United States when they decide government leaders are in service to the antichrist. And the task for these young Crusaders is to gun down the agents of Satan and their witting and unwitting allies among the ranks of the non-believers.

And from the Left Behind novels, we know this list is likely to include not just secularists, but also homosexuals, feminists, abortion providers, as well as Jews, Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims...especially Muslims.  (my emphasis)

When you're looking at things in abstract religious terms of Good vs. Evil, and when you see the GOP as God's Own Party, it makes sense that you would be willing to use extreme measures to keep God's Party in power, and also to use extreme measures to return it to power.  There is some reasoning like this going on in today's Republican Party, and not just on the fringes.  From the Clinton impeachment to Bush's unilateral Executive claims, the Republican Party has acted in that manner.

This is how they can be authoritarian in relation to The Party but militantly anti-government when the Antichrist Party is in power.

Molly Ivins hears the raw, authoritarian growl of bigotry in the Republicans' anti-immigrant rhetoric (More Immigrant Bashing on the Way TruthDig.com 07/05/06):

A “Bush Signals Shift in Stance on Immigrants” headline is the early warning sign that we’re about to get an all-out immigrant-bashing campaign for the fall, complete with xenophobia, racism and blaming the weakest, least powerful people in the country for everything that’s wrong with it.

Glenn Greenwald is writing about how The thug and intimidation tactics of the Far Right go mainstream 07/05/06  (scroll down; his blog is oddly configured somehow), specifically the attempt to intimidate bloggers by prominently posting their names and addresses along with inflammatory descriptions of them.  This is a lot like the cowardly Klan practice in the South during the segregation days of making anonymous threatening phone calls.  His conclusion:

As the Bush movement collapses, it is only to be expected that its more fevered adherents will resort to increasingly extremist rhetoric and tactics, out of frustration and anger, if for no other reason. The penetration of these thug tactics into increasingly mainstream venues on the Right is one of the more glaring, and more disturbing, developments of late.

David Neiwert has been excellent about describing the ways in which radical-right ideas and practices are "mainstreamed" into the Republican Party, most recently in the immigration debate with racist and white-supremacist rhetoric and the thuggery of the vigilante border guards.  He has done original reporting and research on the radical right for years and is the best I know of right now in describing the far-right fringe.  Neiwert wrote on 07/03/06 about The drums of elimination.

Documenting the mounting drumbeat of eliminationist rhetoric from the American right has long been a staple of this blog. But even I have to shake my head in wonder at the turn of events this past week - most of it in the wake of the New York Times' publication of stories detailing the Bush administration's use of banking data in its search for terrorists.

The upshot has been a significant escalation in this rhetoric, coming not just from the usual rabid quarters but coming over the national airwaves from figures who supposedly represent mainstream conservatism - and it is aimed not just at the usual "liberal" targets, but at the entire institution of the free press.

And perhaps most remarkably, the press itself - continuing its chief trend so far this century -- has been remarkably timid about confronting it. ...

What is perhaps most disturbing about this current outbreak is that it's occurring in a context in which the drums have been getting louder all around, especially in recent months. Perhaps the most important front for this has been the immigration debate, which has opened the floodgates for all kinds of right-wing extremism to gain adoption from mainstream conservatives.

The talk has also become a staple for local and national radio talk show hosts, and it has generally become imbedded in the media discourse to the point that it now seems almost unremarkable.

He also links to this post by Michelle Goldberg, whose excellent book of reporting on the Christian Right, Kingdom Coming, was published this year:  The F-Word Huffington Post 07/02/06.  The f-word in this case being "fascism".  I find it difficult to use the concept of fascism as a framework for talking about the rise of authoritarianism in the US, just because even political scientists and historians have trouble defining just what is distinct about fascism from other form of dictatorship.  It's also a concept that's mainly used as an insult word in American political language.

But Goldberg's short piece is good:

In his book The Nature of Fascism, the historian Roger Griffin explains how fascism goes mainstream. "In its chrysalis stage fascism is but a publicistic and activistic (or 'agit-prop') phenomenon on the fringe of mainstream political culture and developments, condemned to lead a marginal existence in articles, pamphlets and books, often with negligible readerships and in the radicalism of ineffectual political factions," he writes. "Even the progression to the columns of large-circulation newspapers and well-attended public meetings represents a quantum leap for the diffusion of fascism which is still far removed from nation-wide mass rallies, extensive paramilitary violence and the 'seizure' of state power."

American fascism has made this quantum leap. Low characters with plenty of access to the columns of large-circulation newspapers - not to mention TV talk shows - have spent the last few days screaming for the heads of the journalists at the premier newspaper in America. ...

In my book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism I write that, while I certainlydon't believe America is on the verge of religious totalitarianism, something dark is loose in this country, and it could get worse as the right's military triumphalism curdles in the wake of failure in Iraq ...

... Mention fascism, and immediately people think you're comparing Bush to Hitler. (In fact, he's much more like the bastard spawn of Paris Hilton and Francisco Franco.)  Yet while America remains long way from real fascism, fascism has come a long way in America.

That's an inspired phrase!  Bush as "the bastard spawn of Paris Hilton and Francisco Franco."

I wonder how she would describe Cheney and Rummy.