Barking crazy rightwingers

If there is one thing that seems constant among far right wingers it's fear and loathing. Here in America you turn on Fox News and you get nothing but rants about how horrible Muslims are, how blacks are criminals and all Latinos are illegals. All you hear is fear and loathing of anything different or foreign.

Seems that European right wingers are no less filled with fear and loathing than our own right wingers. Problem is, when you form an international bloc of barking crazy rightwingers, eventually that fear and loathing will split up the bloc. Which is exactly what has happened with the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Bloc (ITS) in Euopre.

ITS was a rag-tag collection of idiots in the EU Parliament that formed in January, 2007, from barking crazy right wingers primarily from France, Italy, Romania, Belgium and Bulgaria. Among their members is Alessandra Mussolini...yes, the granddaughter of Italy's biggest asshole, Il Duce. I guess having her grandfather shot and hung upside down on meat hook didn't discourage her from following his discredited ideology. The ITS platform seems basically to be a mishmash of anti-Darkie bullshit. They first gained enough seats in Parliament when Romania's entry into the EU brought in a fresh bunch of intolerant assholes, bringing the number of such anti-Darkie assholes to the minimum required to get seats in the EU Parliament.

Good catch from Alternet; it appears that the key to understanding God's hand in the universe rests in every humble jar of peanut butter.

Allow me to introduce my own theory of things. That theory would hold this: reasonable proof that God isn't active in the universe could be deduced from the fact that He doesn't occasionally reach down from the heavens, grab certain people by the neck, shake them, and shout "Hey! You! Shut Up Already! You're making me look bad!"

QED. Happy Easter.

So here's a puzzle: if you're running for the Democratic nomination, why would you put a column from the nation's most insipid right-winger on your web site?

As Hillary did with this piece by David Brooks?

Far be it from me to get in the middle of a liberal purge, but would anybody mind if I pointed out that the calls for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her support of the Iraq war are almost entirely bogus?

Wait a minute. Does Team Hillary see her as the victim of a 'liberal purge'?

And here I was thinking it was a primary. Silly me. Or maybe, just maybe, something is deeply wrong with a candidacy that relies on the sworn enemies of Liberalism and Progressivism to carry its water, and thinks the propaganda of said enemies is just what the doctor ordered to advance itself.

(Cross-posted on The Daily Gotham, Hillary's "hometown" blog)

From time to time we have Republican propogandists come by and regurgitate warmed over (not even fresh!) Republican talking points. When the complete falsehood of their claims is pointed out, they almost never respond, simply waiting around for another chance to regurgitate the pre-digested pap Rush Limbaugh or Bill "bomb America" O'Rielly have fed to them.

Our main pet regurgitator has been "MrMe," and his latest is here. Interestingly in that latest rant he seems to be claiming some kind of censorship around here even though we have been approving his comments for months and months despite their complete lack of substance. And, ironically, if he simply signed up he wouldn't need our approval to post, but that task seems to have evaded his abilities. So, instead, if we don't approve his comments fast enough, he claims censorship.

But that point aside, the simple fact is he is typical of a whole group of apologists for the right wing extremists and very little of what he says has a grain of truth. It isn't even traditional Republican conservativism he supports because traditional Republican conservativism didn't include the idea of giving the Federal government the power to push aside all states rights, Constitutional rights and checks and balances on the President to allow the President to run the nation like a dictator. But the current worshippers of the Bush Idol are more than willing to see unprecedented power concentrated in the hands of Bush.

This doesn't need much commentary. John "Escalation" McCain, the man who would be King after King George II, is touting his extremism. From the Washington Post:

"I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

Wingnut. I don't know why he is a hero to so many. I mean his record from Vietnam was very brave and honorable. But since he got screwed from behind by Bush and Rove he has been worse than useless. Now he is just another barking crazy rightwinger with no respect for our troops or the Constitution.

The bullshit tactics used by the Republican candidate in the 7th NY State Senate race reminded me of a comment a friend of mine from Seattle said about the bullshit tactics used by Republicans all across the country in Novemeber:

"HINT: if you can only win with BS tactics, maybe your politics SUCK!"

What a bunch of losers! I miss the days when the Republican Party was a GENUINE conservative, reasonable alternative...back in Eisenhower's day. Now they are a bunch of lying, sleazy, corrupt extremists. I wish they'd finally learn their lesson, turn on their corrupt members and get back to business.

As I blogged here recently, the Republic is having a Rome moment; now, The New Yorker sums up the feeling on this week's cover.

I knew it would be bad, back during the 2000 campaign and after the Supreme Court coup; how bad, nobody could have foreseen.

The country is undergoing a Rome moment. HBO has a series, titled simply Rome, and set during the transition from Republic to Empire; the show has the back page ad in this week's New Yorker. The buzzed-about biography of the moment is by one Adrian Coldsworthy and titled simply 'Caesar'. Over in the wingnutsphere, people are dreaming some feverish dreams of Empire, not all of them pleasant.

And of course, our legions are currently much engaged in the precise deserts where Rome once faught; and on our Capitol Hill, some are muttering darkly of war against Persia.

There is, however, something that we can learn from Rome; they knew, at least, what should be done with troublesome emperors.

There's a thread downstream featuring one of the oldest, and to me most tedious, tropes of American discourse: the fashionably cynical argument that there's no real difference between the two major parties where average folks are concerned. In normal times, this could be dismissed as a modish affectation, the kind that produces the pleasing feeling of being somehow smarter, more in tune with the Zeitgeist, so desired by those who'd like to keep at bay the tedium of making public choices; but these are not normal times. You're just not paying attention, and your argument is akin to doubting the existence of sharks because you haven't been eaten by one yet.

To put it in very stark terms: the foundations of the Republic are under attack. Simply put, while we may have seen precedents for this or that action taken by the former ruling party, we have never, in two hundred and thirty years, seen a systemic assault, on so many fronts at once, on the basic principles of American governance and the civilizational bedrock that underlies them. Once again: among people paying attention, in the academy, legislatures, the bar, business, even the church, this is not a controversial assessment; you, my friend, just haven't been paying attention. And I get impatient with it, because yours is fundamentally a lazy, solipsistic argument.

Just got an email from my friend Susan well worth passing on; it's an article in Frieze Magazine written by her sister, Nancy Spector, who is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim and Commissioner of the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2007.

The impact of the Bush administration on the art world, I always thought, was confined to its serving as malignant inspiration for any number of deprecatory pieces. We tend to forget that they have their hands on the slender levers of the government's arts funding; and lo and behold, the results are the same rot we've come to expect everywhere.

When I received a gold-engraved card from the White House inviting me to a reception to launch the administration’s new Global Cultural Initiative, I thought at first that it must have been an art-world prank – perhaps a tactical media intervention by the Critical Art Ensemble. But then I realized it was my current role as the commissioner of the US Pavilion for the 2007 Venice Biennale that had earned me this unexpected distinction. The correlation between the Bush White House and culture seemed oxymoronic to me; the title ‘Global Cultural Initiative’ does, after all, have the same vague propagandistic ring and sinister undertones as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

Set in the White House’s grand East Room lined with portraits of past presidents, the presentation was introduced by Laura Bush, who reminisced about the influence of culture during the Cold War, citing the Voice of America’s broadcasting of jazz music into the Soviet Union as a catalyst for the dissolution of communism. Under-Secretary of State Karen Hughes, Bush’s personal propaganda tsar, proceeded to outline the multiple-agency programme, stating that ‘art and culture can play a vital role in helping achieve our strategic public diplomacy goals’. She stopped short of explaining what those goals might actually be.

So not only are there goals, to the delighted astonishment of the world, but they can be achieved through jazz. Nobody knows, of course, if Osama bin Laden is a jazz fan. Perhaps if we'd actually, you know, caught the man, we'd know.

Empire Zone does a nice job of summarizing Glenn Beck's musings on drowning New York City.

According to a CNN transcript of the program “Glenn Beck on Headline News,” when it was suggested that a hurricane could cause a 20- to 25-foot storm surge in New York City, Mr. Beck said, “Actually, that would clean the streets out. It might not be bad.” Liberal blogs have cried foul, noting that studies show such a storm would cause “heavy loss of life.” One local blog’s summary: “Glenn Beck wants to kill you.” (It should be noted his show is based here.)

So you have to wonder: why aren't people talking about this? And why does the man still have a job?

As the Zone notes, it's the liberal blogs, pretty much alone, that are talking about this; certainly not the rightwing blogs (who are more interested in hysterically yapping about war with Mexico and muttering darkly about their crypto-terrorist luggage). You might think that those folks would occasionally wonder if their allies aren't bigger threats than whatever it is that they exercise themselves over so loudly and often. But that would require a bit of critical distance from the rightwing Kool-Aid, and that's a step none of these folks seem ready or able to take.