The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it “fascism” because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations — passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of “mainstream” conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn’t act like a married couple.Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas — the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer — being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We’ve seen Armey’s own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process — and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We’ve seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”
This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.
Which chance she disappointingly postpones discussing until her next column. Does it matter what we call it? The tactics being embraced by the opposition party are blatantly disruptive of Democracy. If the progression described in the column continues, our world is going to get massively worse.
What do we do about it?
you should call the AFL-CIO in and have some union reinforcements. Then you’d have some blackshirts to counter the brownshirts. Then you could set up a white house email address so the Obama administration can begin compiling a list of dissidents and people to maintain a level of domestic surveillance on.
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p>All that’s left is to strip these fascistii of their first amendment rights, because after all, it’s a blatant distruption of Democracy, and then you can start locking them up without worrying about them squawking about it.
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p>With all of them out of the way, you’ll have no impediments to a single-party state for years! With that kind of power, you can dump the 22nd amendment and Obama be president as long as he wants! After all, only those un-American fascistii would vote against him. Not that we would worry about it, because they are all in jail!
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p>Paradise baby!
When I first started reading your comment I thought it was JohnD; I was disappointed to see it was you.
visits to copy this article. I thought that both you and Kirth were above that kind of left-wing nuttiness. JoeTS is just giving back the same kind of nonsense that is written in this clip from the blog.
…I DON’T think we’re there yet, though I was on Salon earlier today and some of this is starting to concern me.
that I was merely pointing out silly nuttiness with more silly nuttiness. It’s just as ludicrous a notion that the right is attempting to institute some sort of fascist regime as it is to say that Obama is plotting to make himself president for life.
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p>Embrace your inner tin foil hat.
When I see GOP elected officials loudly rejecting rightwing “nuttiness” the way that Democrats reject leftwing nuttiness, I’ll be more sympathetic.
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p>So long as GOP officials enable and encourage garbage like the birthers, they can and should expect to be called out for it.
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are democrats. If you guys had stopped talking about them, they would have fallen off the face of the earth.
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p>Just because you continue to invoke their name at every step and insist that they are a paramilitary arm of the GOP doesn’t make it so.
Instead of “falling off the face of the earth”, they instead began disrupting meetings nationwide.
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p>Just because you claim they’re harmless doesn’t make it so, either. They are causing harm. The rabble-rousers like Rush Limbaugh are doing everything they can to fire them up — just like Bill O’Reilly did everything he could to fire up the anti-abortionists about Dr. Tiller.
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p>Tell the family of Dr. Tiller that the anti-abortionists are just “nutty”, and harmless, and that we should just ignore them.
Congressman Sullivan didn’t get the memo.
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p>The notion that only Democrats are talking about this nonsense about Obama’s birth certificate is patently false. Republicans around this nation constantly belch this gibberish to rapt and gullible audiences. As a Democrat, I think that’s a good thing because such behavior will only continue to ensure that the Republican party remains marginalized as the party of loons and kooks. As a Republican, however, you might want to rescue your party from such lunacy instead of denying its existence.
Really?
.. Rush. Bigger conservative audience and pull.