On the new "Stalinists": Watch out for that ice pick!

The bizarre race in New York's 23rd congressional district has engendered some equally bizarre commentary. In case you missed the news, here is a brief recap:

The 23rd district is rural, near the Canadian border, and has been safely Republican for ages. Needing a candidate to fill the vacant seat, a local Republican committee picked one Dede Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman with a conservative voting record. But it was not conservative enough on below-the-waist issues to please the tea-baggers, who decided to make a national example of Dede. After a wrenching intra-party fight, they "putsched" Scozzafava out, replacing her with one Doug Hoffman. He's a know-nothing carpetbagger, but he doesn't like gay marriage -- and that stance suffices to fetch him the Michele Bachmann/Glen Beck/Michelle Malkin stamp of approval.

To columnist Frank Rich of the NYT, this battle came as wonderful news. In a surreal column, Rich wrote:

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes.

Rich writes as though that outbreak of pathology led to the Republican party's destruction. In fact, "fear of minorities" -- along with plenty of anti-government rhetoric, paranoia and inchoate rage -- pushed the south into the Republican camp, resulting in the Nixon presidency, the Reagan revolution, and the decades-long dominance of libertarian economics. Rage, unreason and appeals to race are strategies that work, at least on the right. (2008 proved that such tactics also skew left.)

The truly annoying aspect of this column is the fact that Rich himself, an alleged Democrat, is an old hand at intra-party bitch-fighting. BDBlue at Corrente links to this Bob Somerby column from 2006, which in turn provides links to many previous Daily Howler posts about Rich, who was one of the main mainstream trashers of Al Gore.

Somerby reminds us that it was Rich who invented the "Love Story" canard, which helped to create the utterly unfair media perception of Gore as a serial yarn-spinner. As you may recall, Gore was accused of lying when he said that he was the model for the protagonist of that book and film.

Let’s say it again—Rich was faking his basic facts in this damaging column (published on December 16, 1997). Two days earlier, his own New York Times had reported an interview with Love Story author Erich Segal—the only interview Segal gave on this fatuous topic. In this interview, Segal said that Gore had been one of the models for his book’s main character. (Segal knew Gore when Gore was in college.) In fact, in the interview (reported by Melinda Henneberger), Segal agreed with every word Gore said on the meaningless topic. But so what? Rich just knew what Gore had been doing in his fleeting remarks on this topic—remarks Gore had made to a pair of reporters. Mind-reading brilliantly, Rich clued us in. Gore had been “bragging” and “boasting,” Rich said. Gore had “inflated his past” in his comments; and Gore had done this in an “effort to overcompensate for his public stiffness by casting himself as the role model.” Uh-oh! As noted, Segal had already told the Times that Gore had been one of two role models. But Frankly, Rich had a better story, a story the brilliant pundit loved—and so he went ahead and told it.

Rich calls Beck and Bachmann "Stalinists" for trashing the GOP nominee in a hitherto obscure sector of upstate New York. Yet in the late 1990s, Rich himself tried to do unto Gore as Stalin did unto Trotsky: The swoosh of the ice pick, the sickening thunk as it sinks into the back of the head. Love means never having to say you're a bourgeois deviationist.

Let's return to the basic point of Rich's column. Have suicidal crazies overtaken the Republican Party? And if so, is that a good thing from the standpoint of Democrats?

Taking an anti-Obama stance in 2008 placed me on some strange mailing lists. A couple of days ago, I received a mass emailing from Richard Viguerie, the eminence grise of the tea bagger movement:

"The GOP leadership's backing of Ms. Scozzafava was a slap in the face to Tea Party activists, town hall protesters, and conservatives across the country. The Washington GOP establishment's abandonment of fiscal responsibility led directly to the election of Barack Obama as President and Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. The American people see the GOP leadership and establishment every bit as much a part of the problem as the Democrats.

"Doug Hoffman and NY-23 is an earthquake in American politics, and is the first of many challenges to establishment Republicans that we will see for the 2010 elections and beyond. The stupid decision by Republican leaders to pour $900,000 into the NY-23rd race against a conservative has unleashed a fury that will lead to new GOP leadership.

"Conservatives anger at Washington-establishment Republicans will cost the national committees tens of millions of dollars as conservative money will start flowing directly to the Tea Parties and their candidates.

What mainstream pundits fail to realize is that the two-party system has, in essence, digitized American politics. Everything comes down to ones and zeroes, on or off, Republican or Democrat. If Obama and Pelosi fail -- which they probably will -- Americans will turn again to the Republicans, because there's no place else to go.

Viguerie is making sure that when the conservative re-ascent occurs, his conservatives will be the ones ascending. He is branding teabag pols as rebels -- a good strategy, since many Americans are feeling mighty rebellious. He is also re-branding the Dubya crowd as liberals-in-disguise, which is both awful history and great marketing.

Is Viguerie crazy? Like the proverbial fox.

Is he suicidal? No.

Is his movement helpful to Dems, as Rich claims? Hell no.

Should liberals -- true liberals -- mimic his tactics? Should we have an intra-party insurgency staged by Democrats who despise Obama's talk-like-JFK-but-act-like-W shtick? Hell yes!

If Rich can maintain his mainstream cred after taking a rhetorical ice pick to Al Gore, then I have every right to use similar weaponry on Obama and the Obots.