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Monthly Archives: August 2010

Ethnic Unrest

“Ninth and Seventy-Sixth.  Take the Triboro Bridge.” – Alice Tompkins
“I will find some other way to cheat you.” – NYC Cab Driver

Some four decades after the events depicted, Nixonland remains the essential book for understanding modern right wing politics.  One of the most subtle and profound points of the book was to note that, for all America’s history of democracy and argument, Americans had taken it upon one another to settle political scores with violence.  The political changes afoot in the late sixties and early seventies were so objectionable to some people that they began to view murder and beatings, and the inevitable intimidation that goes with them, as legitimate political tools.

While there have been numerous acts of right wing violence lately, the attack on a New York City cabbie by a drunken jackass represents something new.  The usual targets of these types of attacks are the ancient enemies: women and minorities.  This was different, this was predicated on the victim answering a question not about who he was, but about how he prays.

If Ahmed Sharif had answered the question, “Are you a Muslim?” – a religious distinction – differently, he would not be a national celebrity; and Michael Enright would have found himself at home with a hangover instead of in jail with his life destroyed.  (Look at the picture of Enright in court, that is a middle class white boy who has just had every societal protection he took for granted shattered.)  Instead, one American tried to murder another* because of his religious beliefs.  Fuck.  We are capable of some fucked up behavior in this country, but involving sharpened steel over how someone salutes an invisible man in the sky isn’t supposed to be in our repertoire.

That sad decay of American values brings us to the political question at the heart of this assault.  One has to hand it to the Red masterminds, they realized that racism against Hispanics (a/k/a “immigration”) was a vote loser, while racism against Arabs/Muslims is a Lee Atwater home run.  If you’re going to run on racism, run on the kind the maximum number of voters find comfortable.  In a neat piece of political jujitsu, they managed to pour all the fear from one cup into the other without spilling a drop.

And it is in discussing that well targeted racism that we must pause a paragraph for some sympathy for the would be murderer.  Enright is a shit, there is no denying that.  He deserves our overcrowded penal system a lot more than many of its current occupants, and that doesn’t even count the eternal shame he’ll bear.  But he’s barely an adult.  The press has his age at twenty-one, which, depending on when he was born, would make him either twelve or thirteen for the 2001 attacks.  His testicles had not descended when Muslim paranoia ramped up in America.  His pubescence and (brief) adulthood have been marked by war; not some cold conflict for abstract ideas, but a weapons hot “crusade” (in Bush the Younger’s words) against an entire religion.

Maybe the current hysteria over the Not Mosque at Not Ground Zero had no bearing on his crime.  It is too soon for any authoritative account.  But we can say for certain that the “man” that pulled the knife in the cab had never been a man in an America that celebrated religious freedom.  He grew up amidst a war he didn’t want to fight, and, if the stories about him becoming radicalized in Afghanistan are true, when confronted by that fight, fought it in his own cowardly way.

For obvious reasons, most of the coverage (including the above) has focused on Enright, but Sharif is the far more interesting story.  He came to America and made a life, and by all accounts he has made a good one.  Like many immigrants he took some shit along the way, surely more than his fair share after this disgrace.  But his children have been given gifts by the Mayor of New York City, and there’s a non-zero chance that one of those kids could someday be the Mayor of New York City.  We cannot stop every nativist fucktard, but we will keep the idiots with knives from representing anything but cell block C.

*Fuck you if you don’t think Sharif is an American.  I’ve not seen any reports on his actual citizenship status, but he’s been here for decades and has fathered four children here.  That is America.

Aw, Fuck Pakistan

“We were collecting canned goods for the starving people in, uh, you know, one of them loser countries.” – Moe

The massive and devastating floods that are taking place in Pakistan right now are a human tragedy on an almost unimaginable scale.  The pictures are jaw dropping and the numbers behind them are even worse:

- 800,000 people are completely cut off from the world except by helicopter

- 17 million people have been affected

- 1.2 million homes destroyed

- 1.6 million people suffering from water borne diseases, including such old favorites as cholera and dysentery, which if left untreated can lead to you shitting and vomiting to death

And those are just the numbers of people directly affected.  There are some other numbers as well, ones that ought to cause those of us on the rest of the planet to hang our heads in shame.  This one being the worst (from the same BBC story linked above):

The US has deployed at least 18 helicopters to fly regular relief missions, but the UN said it would need at least 40 more heavy-duty aircraft working at full capacity to reach those who have been cut off.

You’re telling me there aren’t another forty big helicopters sitting around somewhere?  And if no one else is willing to provide them, pique is a very poor reason for us not to.  I’d be willing to bet the Pentagon has misplaced more helicopters than that in the last decade alone, and they’re the ones who are always telling us our vital national interests are at stake in what it has become sadly fashionable to call “Af-Pak”.

The historical ignorance displayed in that term, especially since it was coined by people who are theoretically experts, is almost as staggering as the floods.  As an entity, Pakistan was created and run by the British, mostly to British benefit.  It was then born independent in the massive tragedy of the Indian Partition.  Since then, it’s fought a series of pointless wars with India while going through a rotating cycle of brutal military governments and incompetent civilian ones.  The only continuity the country has experienced is massive corruption.  Through all that time we’ve been playing games with them, either by supporting inept governments of one kind or another or by flooding their territory with arms.

Like a lot of other countries, Pakistan has been fucked over for so long and in so many ways, by both foreigners and its own government(s), that when something like this occurs (global warming, by the way, will make shit like this more common), it has no chance in hell to deal with it.  The outside world only pays attention when it’s time to drop bombs or food aid, and you can take a guess as to which is greeted with greater enthusiasm.

Human tragedies, even the ones with horrendous video, just don’t register far from home, even in countries we’ve deemed geopolitically important.  In the immortal words of George Carlin:

Some guy comes on television and he says, ‘6,000 people were killed in an explosion today.’  You say, ‘Where?  Where?’  He says, ‘In Pakistan.’  You say, ‘Aw, fuck Pakistan!’  Too far away to be any fun.

(Skip to the 8:05 mark here for the full video.)

Simple human decency says we should do more than we’re doing, but simple human decency has never been a prime motivator in international affairs.  And so Pakistan will languish and wallow and drown and starve and shit itself to death.  Once the rivers are back to normal, we’ll continue meddling, and sometime after that this will all happen again, and Pakistan will still be unable to cope on its own.

[Update 26 August: For a much more local and far more detailed take on just how bad things are, see today’s New York Times op-ed piece by Ali Sethi.  Incidentally, on my paper copy, the other side of the page on which this article appeared was a full-page ad for a department store featuring a flirty and fashionable young couple with pearly white teeth and big smiles.  Aw, fuck Pakistan.]

Couple of F.U.s to Go

“You know, I’ve attempted to enjoy your family on a personal level, on an ironic level, as a novelty, as camp, as kitsch, as a cautionary example.  Nothing works.” – Hugh Parkfield

There’s no deny that the withdrawal of what we’re euphemistically calling the last of the “combat” troops from Iraq this week was a very good thing.  Much like last summer’s withdrawal from “the cities”, this latest de-sexualized, de-escalation of our Mesopotamian adventure is both encouraging and frustrating.  It’s the former because it means were that much closer to getting the hell out of that country; it’s the latter because we still have a long way to go.

The icy staring contest between the various factions of Iraq’s government over who gets what plums and positions has led to the worst kind of hung parliament.  Deadly violence remains routine.  And we’re about to continue our war under the direction of diplomats guarded by mercenaries.  (Take a look at the map in that article and tell me that we’re not setting ourselves up to back the Kurds when they inevitably fight their neighbors to the south.)  In any other context, these kinds situations would be cause for massive alarm; in Iraq, they count as progress.

The real test of that bloody progress will come at the end of next year when even our don’t-call-them-advisors non-combat troops depart.  Then the State Department weenies and their ex-jock merc sidekicks will be all that’s left.  How long we’ll be able to maintain our massive diplomatic presence without the actual military there to back them up will be an interesting question.

Of course, even that isn’t going to end our involvement.  Juan Cole, who remains indispensible, estimates that we’ll still be bombing them at their own request all the way to 2018.  That years long repeat of our low level 1991-2003 air campaign isn’t quite what anti-war people had in mind from the skinny kid with the funny name.  But again, this is Iraq, where disaster is an improvement.

There are just two and two thirds Friedman Units remaining until the end of 2011 and, hopefully, the next end to this misbegotten war.  No one wants to have spent their life to add a few seconds of footage to our Imperial Blooper Real, but the time for the lamenting and the rending of garments has already come and gone.  We went; we failed; we declared victory and left.  The mistakes cannot be undone, and the only grown up thing left is to take it on the chin.  The consolation prize is the almost certainly futile hope that, twenty years from now, when the next war is being debated, that someone in charge will remember this grand American fuckup and decide that, just maybe, America’s vital interests don’t actually need to be paid with the blood of our youths.

Looking for War in All the Wrong Places

“What about us brain dead slobs?” – Barney Gumble
“You’ll be given cushy jobs!” – Lyle Lanley

The pushback against ending the Iraq War continues, the pushback against even thinking about ending the Afghan War continues, and the push forward on an Iran War is making a comeback.  What is it with these people?  Even if you lack any and all sympathy for other human beings, what positive US foreign policy goals have been aided by dropping bombs in the last decade?  Can anyone answer that question?

When asking such a question, the first thing we have to do is completely discount the humanity of our targets.  If we are to understand them, we must get into the same mindset as those who still advocate for war.  So, the Iraqis are sectarian lunatics, the Iranians are religious fanatics, and the Afghans are primitive barbarians.  There, now we don’t need to consider the down side to them at all.

But even that doesn’t discount human suffering enough to get us to the level of immunity to suffering achieved by anyone who still thinks war is a good American policy tool after nine years of war’s perpetual failure.  After all, when we send the Navy and the Air Force to bomb someplace in preparation for the triumphal arrival of the Army and the Marines (triumphal arrivals are the one thing we’re still good at), those planes and tanks and trucks are all filled with Americans.  To countenance war in 2010, one must care almost as little for them as one does for their targets.  It helps, of course, that those Americans have little to no access to the elite circles in which their fates are decided.

The occasional trip to Walter Reed, “be thankful for what you’ve got” fluff piece, and the other empty pieties that masquerade as human decency do not mitigate the decision makers’ utter contempt for the well being of other Americans.  If anything, such opportunities for chest thumping and tear soaked flag waving serve only to harden the minds of those whose offspring will never know the pitiless bark of a drill instructor.  Caring about the concrete and unpleasant realities of individual Americans requires a lot more from a person than braying over the abstract idea of the “American People”.

So, the people in charge don’t care about most Americans, and can’t be bothered to even pretend to be concerned about foreigners.  Even if we accept both of those premises in their decision making, can we justify sticking around in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, much less opening another front in Iran?  If so, how?

Take the case for war with Iran (don’t let the word “bombing” fool you, war is what they’re pushing), it’s the spitting image of the one that sucked us into Iraq.  (Please note that it remains very unlikely that we’ll do such a thing.)  A bunch of guys we don’t like might, maybe, someday get a bomb, but for all you (and the anonymous sources quoted) know, they could already have one!  Panic!  There’s no time to ask questions about whether or not it will work!  Doing so amounts to capitulation!

It certainly helps, as Glenn Greenwald points out, that many of the people who were hysterical and hysterically wrong in 2002 are still around.  Indeed, not only has their brand of bullshit not been discredited, they’ve been promoted (emphasis in original):

I’m now finishing up a long article for Harper’s about America’s War Culture:  why war advocacy has been and continues to be the reflexive, required perspective of the nation’s foreign policy elite.  I don’t want to say too much about the piece, but one central reason for this is that those who were most spectacularly wrong in cheering for the attack on Iraq have not only faced no accountability, but have thrived, been rewarded, have seen their positions of influence elevated.  Conversely, those who were right continue to be marginalized.

[…]

Why should Goldberg confess to any errors?  There’s no incentive for him to do so.  Most other people in influence — Obama’s leading national security officials, media stars, think tank experts — are guilty of the same sins Goldberg committed regarding Iraq.  All of them therefore collectively and conveniently agree that they will just forget about that whole messy Iraq business, and thus ensure that one’s responsibility for it does not impede one’s ongoing career success or level of influence.  Goldberg is still treated as credible and influential despite his unrepented Iraq falsehoods because the people who determine credibility and influence did essentially the same thing he did, and are thus incentivized to maintain a Look Forward, Not Backward amnesia, ensuring that nobody pays a price for anything that happened

And thus we have a full view of how one can advocate for war in 2010.  Not only do you not care about the people your policies destroy, but you are rewarded for your callousness.  No wonder questions about the efficacy of the policies are never raised.  They’re immaterial to everyone in charge.  What’s the Upton Sinclair line people like to quote?  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”  There you go: cushy jobs for brain dead slobs, endless war forevermore.

We Can Fight on This Line

“I guess it was inevitable.  Let this be our final battle.” – Eric Cartman

Among the habitually amnesiac cognoscenti that reflexively set our political discourse to its most childish level, the belief still exists that twas Hurricane Katrina that broke Bush the Younger.  (And that ignores the many of them who never gave up on him, believing to the end that a twenty-first century American President should be little more than a hat wearing hero.  They richly deserve ridicule, but that is for some other time.)   The truth is that Bush the Younger was broken months before New Orleans drowned, during his battle against the third rail of American politics.  It was Social Security that stopped him, Katrina just sank a ship that was already dead in the water.

It can be similarly hoped that the latest depraved offensive from the right wing, the panty bunching conniption over an Islamic activity center (with a swimming pool!) on the island of Manhattan, has found itself entangled in hopelessly nasty ground.  This time the nativist morons have found themselves caught and hampered amongst the beautifully sharp edges of the First Amendment.  For a while there it seemed as though the un-American keening over the “mosque at ground zero” (altogether now: not a mosque, not at ground zero) was just another fabricated right wing non-problem.  There have been many of them.  What’s one more paranoiac sales pitch about the fall of America and the immediate need to buy gold, horde non-hybrid seeds, or donate to the church of your choice?  A hustle is a hustle, and since this is America so you’ve always got to be on your guard.

However, to the tribal spear chuckers of the professional right, and their sedentary but garment rending audience of purchase conditioned dupes, the non-mosque at not-ground zero became more than that.  It became a symbol for a war they know they are losing.  Not the one against al-Qaeda, to whom they are unwitting brethren, but the one against the inevitable America where they are only a part, and can no longer pretend to be the whole.  To these people, mosques are not places of worship, they are signs of conquest.

If that idea seems preposterously un-American to you, please remember to differentiate between American ideals and American culture.  The former has long been rooted in nearly unconditional tolerance; the latter has, in the last few decades, come to represent little more than flag draped masturbation.  Forgive the simplification, but America is supposed to be more than lapel pins and church socials.  Of late, far too many people see anything other than that as deviancy, instead of what it really is: proof of the universal nature of American values.  There is an inexplicable gap between canting words like “liberty” and “freedom” and then turning around and telling someone else where they are allowed to pray.

Their late, lamented hero, Bush the Younger went where Republicans fear to tread in attacking Social Security, and this new wave of rightists have suddenly found themselves in similarly deep shit.  Religious freedom isn’t impractical, wishy-washy liberal territory like the basic humanity of women or the ordinary normalcy of minorities.  Those lands are ill protected and can be raided on a whim.  Freedom of religion resides in a different place, in the rock ribbed homeland of American values, and it is protected by two hundred year old titans who don’t care a whit for your bumper stickers or tribal affiliations.

If President Barack Hussein Obama has decided that this is where he wants to fight against the intolerant right wing hysteria that has swept the country, then he has chosen his ground well.  It is sad that a core Americanism needs such secure ground upon which to be defended, and sadder still that a man with his background feels the need to mollify his own words, but it is good place to make a stand nevertheless.  His enemies have overreached, and telling nakedly bigoted fucktards to sit and spin over a building they will never visit, on an island most of them will never go to, is that rare occasion where civics class and marketing class point to the same conclusion: fuck these people.

Fuck them for their narrow minded tribalism.  Fuck them for their selective interpretation of religious freedom.  Fuck them for telling scary stores about Muslim boogey-men who go bump in the night.  Fuck them most of all for making such an innocuous municipal undertaking about Red vs. Blue. We shouldn’t have to fight about this, but if we’re going to fight, this is as good a place as any.

Tea Leaves, Tea Parties and . . . Aw, Fuck It’s Only August

“I see nothing here.  But I’m afraid it’s splitsville for Delta Burke and Major Dad.” – Princess Opal
“But they seem so happy.” – Chief Wiggum

The kneejerk takeaway from last night’s multi-state primary elections is that there’s Blue hope yet.  In addition to the crazy lady in Nevada and the racist bully in Kentucky, last night the Blues saw their list of eminently beatable Senate opponents gain a pro-wrestling conservative in genteel, liberal Connecticut and another Tea Party insurgent in Colorado named Ken Buck.  Not much is known nationally about Buck just yet, at the moment he’s most famous for joking that “I do not wear high heels” is valid reason to vote for him over his now vanquished female primary opponent.  I’m looking forward to several embarrassing revelations in the coming weeks.  It’s happened so many times now you could almost start a pool: 5:1 has made secessionists statements, 3:1 is less than adept at hiding his preference for white people, 2:1 just asking questions about Obama’s birth certificate, etcetera.

That’s all welcome news, both that the Reds are putting up candidates who actually reflect the nuttiness of their current party, and that the people in those states will have an at least somewhat honest choice between dull and moderately corrupt Democrats and batshit crazy and equally corrupt Republicans.  Of course, at least some of these rather unpleasant people are very likely to become United States Senators, so while pointing and laughing is entirely appropriate, at least some of that scorn rightfully reflects back on we the people.

More importantly, as it is only August and elections are held in November, we have nearly three months of twists and turns and other unaccountable unknowns.  That may provide crazy candidates time to embarrass themselves out of contention.  It may also provide time for another few made up scandals and actual disasters, to say nothing of the human wrecking ball that is the unemployment rate, to trash whatever mojo the Blues have left.  In the meantime, the instant analysis industry will continue to pump out “but what does this mean for the midterms!?!?!” type articles at a fever pitch.

The only prediction I’d hazard at this point is that the overwhelming majority of those will be utterly forgotten about six hours after they hit the web.  As usual when I write a post like this, I have no real point other than that it’s still three weeks until Labor Day Weekend, it’s a mid-term year, and very few non-political junkies will even pay attention to this type of thing until sometime in October.  Also, the unemployment rate isn’t going to plummet in the next twelve weeks.  That’s important too.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

“Muntz, Nelson.  You’re failing history, geography and math, but, uh, you’re doing quite well in Home Ec.” – Principal Skinner
“Hey, keep it down, man.” – Nelson Muntz

There is plenty of sad shit going on here in America during what will almost certainly end up being the hottest year in recorded history.  The economy is floating around like a directionless turd and the only thing that seems unaffected is our multi-billion dollar pursuit of a few fools in turbans, everything else is falling apart.

But all is not lost, not even close, and this week came two stories that let you, the home viewer, know that not everything is going to hell, that on some bedrock level, this is still the United States that prides itself on caring about one of its principle freedoms.  I speak of this week’s bicoastal bigotry failure, one in New York, one in California.

In New York, the Islamic activity center that is neither exclusively a mosque nor actually at what we’ve come to call “Ground Zero” is going to go forward.  This is in spite of a publicity motivated campaign of fear mongering picked up and propagated by the nastiest parts of the right wing.  That prompted some good old fashioned Americana rhetoric from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who isn’t exactly known for his stirring speeches):

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another.

Huzzah to that.

Some three thousand miles away, in California, a scene of equally stirring Americana played out.  Much like when neo-nazis win court cases to march on city halls and are then swamped by anti-asshole protesters, a bunch of dimwitted shitheels in California turned out to protest outside of a mosque.  The hook here was that they were going to bring dogs, because, you know, dogs.  It didn’t go well:

Here’s how it all turned out: the anti-mosque protesters were outnumbered by pro-mosque supporters, the local tea party disavowed the protest and called it hate speech, the protester we talked to dropped off the face of the earth and only one dog made it to the planned protest.

Double huzzah to that.

Neither of these victories for decency and justice are going to make jobs rain from the sky or get the Reds to stop acting like children or even keep other embarrassing attempts at un-American intolerance from happening in the near future.  But damn it, they were good to see.  For a hazy Sunday in August when the future looks a little bit dimmer than it used to, that ain’t half bad.

Broken Scoreboard

“That’s it, I’ll take you on right now.” – Leela
“Very well.  But you see, I have the will of the warrior.  Therefore, the battle is already over.  The winner?  Me.” – Master Fnog

In the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Frank Rich reads Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” and wonders aloud to himself just why is it that people have become disillusioned with Barack Obama?  Rich runs through the usual litany of woes, from pundit class fantasies that Obama needs to appear more emotional in public to genuine catastrophes like Afghanistan and the economy.  It’s a typical list, though some of the details from Alter’s book make it worth reading (according to Alter, Al Gore withheld endorsing Obama over Hillary Clinton because his climate change efforts receive support from Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative).

Four thousand or so words later, Rich comes to the same “things suck, but if anyone can get us out of it, he can” conclusion that everyone else does.  Though he can break out of it from time to time, Rich is at least partly captive to idiotic pundit ideas about the importance of presentation and cheerleading.  (Quoting Peggy Noonan is supposed to prove what, exactly?)  But he comes very close to a source of frustration that I’ve not seen articulated in too many places.  Talking about the inadequacy of the White House’s marketing:

They are certainly no match for a focused, Fox-perfected Republican message that conjures up vivid bogeymen like “government takeovers,” “out-of-control spending,” and “death panels.” That the GOP, which perennially pushes for the castration of Medicare, could present itself as Medicare’s valiant defender during last year’s health care wars was a particularly telling feat.

Very true, except that Rich goes on to lament that the White House never had a sufficiently slick counter argument.  Surely that’s a part of the problem, but that people with no credibility were allowed to drag their zombie lies out for a fresh spin on the media merry-go-round was far more frustrating than anything else.  When someone as totally discredited as Betsy McCaughey, especially on a subject like heath care policy, is allowed to be a part of the debate, something very fundamental is broken.

Let’s be clear, no really plugged in political observers expected the Reds and the right wing to just start playing nice after Obama won.  But it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that they might change a few of their lies.  “Death panels” was horseshit from the get go, but at least it was creative.  “Government takeovers” was as false in 1993 as it was last year.  Keeping government out of Medicare was similarly heard during Clinton’s failed health plan, knocked down, and then allowed to pop out of the grave as though it had never been bullshit in the first place.

And health care is just the beginning.  Look at the things the right is pushing right now (other than hearings on the constitutionality of the Constitution): Bush tax cuts, slash Social Security, attack Iran.  Jebus, what has to be done to get these things off the table?  They’ve been defeated logically, rhetorically and twice at the ballot box and yet, there they all are, still receiving mainstream coverage and being taken very seriously by people who seem to have utterly forgotten 2006, 2008 and all the terrible things Bush the Younger did.

The dismantling of Social Security was turned away just five years ago, and now it’s back (with a big assist from Obama himself) as though that colossal defeat of Bush the Younger (at the height of his power) had never occurred.  That twerp’s tax cuts did a ton to ruin the federal budget and shrink federal revenue without benefitting anyone not earning high six figures, and now all of those positions are controversial again.

That’s a big chunk of why so many on the left are disappointed in Obama.  It’s as though we’ve come out of the locker room for the second half and the opposition has declared that all the points we scored in the first didn’t carry over.  When we complain to the refs, the lazy and prideful traditional media, they just shrug their shoulders and blow the whistle to start play.  When we look to our coaches, they say everything’s fine even though it plainly is not.

Things are better than they were under Bush the Younger, no doubt about it, but if each battle needs to be won twice or more, it’s going to take a lot of presidential terms to get America off the plutocratic war footing that fucked it up in the first place.

End Note: Rich’s piece from Sunday about the Wikileaks Afghan document dump was far and away the best individual article I read about it.

Pushed

“Oh no, aliens, bio-duplication, nude conspiracies!  Oh my god, Lyndon LaRouche was right!” – Homer Simpson

“Madness”, says the Joker near the end of 2008’s The Dark Knight, “Is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.”  That idea, of the straw the broke the mentally ill camel’s back, is lurking on every page of John Amato and Dave Neiwert’s highly useful new book “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane”.  The various right wing fringe groups, militias, neo-Confederates, and good old neo-Nazis, that were largely quiet during the eight years of the Bush Catastrophe have suddenly found themselves in an America with a black, left of center President.  They aren’t happy.

But this isn’t a book about fringe groups that find themselves shut out of mainstream American discourse.  If that were the case, there’d be no need for this book.  Instead, “Over the Cliff” exhaustively documents the relatively clean lines from the batty edge into the core of the American right.  From talk radio to perpetually angry websites to Fox News, provable falsehoods and paranoid hysteria are given room to breathe and spread.

The results of this mainstreaming range from the amusing to the deadly.  At the fatal end of that spectrum are the men who’ve masturbated to gun porn one too many times.  Most recently, a right winger opened fire on the California Highway Patrol.  More famously, there was Scott Roeder, the twisted fundamentalist who murdered Dr. George Tiller.  Tiller, like so many other targets of right wing wrath, was largely unknown to the population at large despite being a Dillinger level menace to fans of Bill O’Reilly.  That disconnect, between the mundane reality of America and the horror filled hellscape America conjured by right wing media, is the main theme of the book.

A benign health care bill that was more or less designed by the Heritage Foundation becomes a government plan to euthanize old people.  An innocuous proposal to help FEMA deal with displaced people after hurricanes becomes concentration camps for conservatives.  A Nobel Peace Prize becomes proof of an international conspiracy to castrate the United States.  The list is vast, but the one thing they all have in common is an inconsolable hatred of the left in general and Barack Obama in particular.

More unsettling than any of that, however, is the way the elders of the right and the Republican Party establishment have either looked the other way or outright encouraged such lunacy.  This too Amato and Neiwert document, including the parade of high level Republicans, congressmen, governors and – bless his heart – Michael Steele, who were forced to grovel before Rush Limbaugh after having mildly criticized him.  Whatever control the Republican Party once had over the nuttier parts of its base is gone.  John Birch Society types are no longer the shock troops of the right, now they’re in headquarters, furiously barking orders.

Depending on what happens in November, this could be catastrophically bad or merely regular bad.  The victims of right wing violence will be fucked either way; the only question now is whether or not the rest of us will be.  Whatever happens, we can’t say we weren’t warned.  “Over the Cliff” has obliterated that flimsy excuse, and if you want a good idea of what’s going on in the darker fantasies the right, fantasies that may soon turn into Congressional investigations, it’s a good place to start.

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