What IS it with Farhad Manjoo?

First things first: I've sparred with MooJuice in the past, back when he wrote about politics and general interest stuff. He and I even spoke on the phone, on which occasion he suspiciously asked if "Joseph Cannon" was my real name. The weirdness of that question sunk in only after the chat was over -- apparently, this guy thinks that the name "Joseph Cannon" sounds phony and "Farhad Manjoo" doesn't.

MooJuice (as my ladyfriend rechristened him) went on to cover computer tech for Slate. And he is, like, almost always wrong. Never moreso than here, where he argues that the consumer should cheer the end of unlimited data plans:

And say hooray, too, because unlimited data plans deserve to die. Letting everyone use the Internet as often as they like for no extra charge is unfair to all but the data-hoggiest among us—and it's not even that great for those people, either. Why is it unfair? For one thing, unlimited plans are more expensive than pay-as-you-go plans for most people. That's because a carrier has to set the price of an unlimited plan high enough to make money from the few people who use the Internet like there's no tomorrow. But most of us aren't such heavy users.

He says this at a time when an increasing number of people are encouraged to get video content from sources like YouTube and Hulu and (if you're in the U.K. or if you know a good proxy) the BBC's iPlayer. In fact, internet video is the big (fake) rationale for the end of net neutrality -- to allow more throughput for better-quality video delivery.

But it's not just that unlimited plans raise prices. They also ruin service. Imagine what would happen to your town's power grid if everyone paid a flat rate for electricity: You and your neighbors would set your thermostats really high in the winter and low in the summer, you'd keep your pool heated year-round, you'd switch to plug-in electric cars...

That "nightmare" scenario sounds pretty good to me, if the juice were provided by solar, wind, hydrogen, fusion or some similar just-over-the-horizon tech. But MooJuice's analogy is wrong-headed. Here's a better one: Imagine if you had to pay X to watch 30 minutes of television, and 2x to watch an hour and 3x to watch...

Sound like fun?

None of this matters to MooJuice, who has tech companies begging to give him all sorts of cool electronic gizmos -- a situation he seems to think is his rightful due, even though he doesn't seem particularly savvy. (Would you ask him to help you fix an intractable networking problem?) He's one of those "Whole Foods" pseudo-progs who simply cannot conceive of what life is like for the poor.

Me? I can conceive.

I don't have and don't want an iPhone, or any other kind of fancy-shmancy phone. But: In order to earn an alleged living, I often have to send massive psd files back and forth to clients -- and I now find myself inhabiting an attic which a cable would not easily reach. Pay-as-you-go 4G is my nightmare, and MooJuice expects me to shout huzzah. Fuck you, Farhad.

Treason, say I

In the previous post, we looked at Brad Friedman's piece (which drew, in turn, from this article), about Glenn Beck's apparent call for the murder of Democratic congressfolk. These guys (at a blog called Patterico) think that they can explain away what Beck had to say:

The full transcript is here. When you read it, you will see that the word “you” refers to the leftist politicians in Washington and their pals in the media, and “they” refers to their radical leftist friends — who, Beck warns, actually believe there must be violent revolution . . . and if they don’t get what they want, they may start one.

Beck is warning the comfortable pols that the people who put them in power aren’t going to be satisfied with seeing just a little of their agenda accomplished. They want it all. Because they are revolutionaries at heart — people who have called for violence and never repudiated it. And if they aren’t satisfied, Beck tells the pols, they will come after you. Violently.

Even if we ignore, for the moment, the question of just which parties Beck wanted shot, the quotation given above offers prima facie evidence that many right-wingers are mentally sick. Just who are these "radical leftist friends" who insist on violent revolution? They are a bogeyman, a phantasm, an imaginary enemy. I've been a liberal all my life and I've never met such people.

Hmm. Okay, maybe I should walk that one back a bit...

During my UCLA days (more years ago than I care to admit), there was this group of gibbering Maoists called the Revolutionary Communist Party which formed a cult of personality around a clown named Bob Avakian. They disrupted the student newspaper where I worked -- and in that sense, you could say I "met" them. Then they carried out a variety of insane, self-defeating "revolutionary activities," none of which were actually violent, although they were usually loud and annoying. Such antics made the Bobbies universally despised by the students.

The thought crossed my mind: Could cult leader Bob be a government stooge? I mean, if you're going to spend so much time and energy helping the cause of Reaganism on campus, why not take payment?

Apparently the Bobbies are still around, and they are still as laughable as ever. But if Beck thinks that they, or anyone even remotely like them, put Nancy Pelosi into office, he's out of his freakin' coconut.

I don't know how many actual dreaming-of-revolution commies still exist in this country, but their numbers must be vanishingly small. Judging from the genuine far-left writings I've seen (produced by the Bob-heads and similar tiny groups), they don't care about electoral politics and would consider Pelosi indistinguishable from Hastert. They certainly do not have the money, the numbers or the desire to put any Democrats into office.

(Tradionally, most radical lefties have wanted conservative candidates to win, on the grounds that the worse things get, the more rebellious the people become. That's why American communists hated FDR.)

Throughout the past 200-odd years, the extreme right has told scary stories about fictitious bogeymen. Back in the '50s and the '60s, the John Birchers used to believe that the CPUSA was an extremely powerful and influential organization, directing hundreds or thousands of secret Red agents in D.C., one of which may or may not have been President Eisenhower. Actually, by that point in history, the CPUSA was moribund; half the people who bothered to show up at meetings were infiltrators. Some wags have suggested that the group's funding depended on donations from J. Edgar's boys, because they were the only ones who had jobs.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have spun similar scare-stories about other groups -- the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Elders of Zion, the Committee of 300, the Cosmopolitans, the Palladium, the New World Order, and so on. All of these conspiratorial conclaves were and are imaginary. So are the amorphous violence-prone "radical leftists" that Glenn Beck seems to think are running the Democratic party.

(Okay, three of those organizations -- the Illuminati, the Masons and the CPUSA -- are non-fictional, although the Illuminati died out centuries ago. But the real-life versions bear/bore no resemblance to the groups as they exist in the far-rightist imagination.)

So even if we put the very best light on the matter, what do we have?

Glenn Beck called for liberals to be murdered; in response, one of his viewers enacted a very serious plot to kill people in the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. The guys at Patterico do not, and cannot, dispute this sequence of events.

Wasn't it just a few days ago that the right insisted (vis-a-vis Jared Loughner) that there was no connection between teabagger rhetoric and violence?

Now that that stuff is out of the way, let's re-examine the question of just which people Beck wanted to eat hot lead. Did he target congressfolk or the imaginary "radical leftists" who allegedly put those congressfolk into office?

Let's look at a fuller version of the quote than I gave previously:

"I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

"You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

"They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they're revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

Now, some of this makes no sense. "...change the pose. You will get the ends." WTF? Is Beck talking about politics, or is he directing a porn shoot?

But this bit is more or less clear: "We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington [probably should be "you in Washington"] have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing..."

Obviously, he is talking about radicals brought to Washington by a nihilistic media.

Is Beck saying that Katie Couric scooped up some "Bobbies" and bought them nice townhomes in Georgetown? I don't think so. The "radicals" referenced here are clearly supposed to be Democratic members of Congress, whom "the media" allegedly put into power. No other reading of Beck's words makes sense.

And Beck goes on to say that these members of Congress need to be shot in the head. There's no other way to interpret the statement.

Treason, say I.

(Granted, Beck's image of Nancy Pelosi pulling out a gat and crying "Come and get me!" is pretty damned funny.)

Demons

Those of you looking to prove the "stochastic terror" theory of right-wing violence should glance away from Arizona, because we have a much better example in California's Byron Williams. Brad Friedman has an excellent new piece on would-be mass murderer Williams, who admits that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck's calls to arms. Here's Beck on congressional Democrats -- and apparently, this was the bit that aroused Williams:

They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

"They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they're revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

Although there's a fair amount of schizophasia in this locution, Beck's meaning is clear enough. It is also clear that the man is insane. I doubt that Nancy Pelosi has even read Marx, and I doubt that anyone else in Congress -- even Barney Frank -- ever gave a damn about Uncle Karl. And just when did this call for revolution allegedly take place? The only revolutionaries I see are on the right, telling disgruntled Americans to shoot congressfolk in the head.

Why isn't Beck on trial for treason right now? Ya got me!

Thanks to Beck and his confreres, millions of righties in this nation now seem to think that, once the "real Americans" are out of earshot, all liberals break out the red flags and start calling each other "comrade." This is madness, and it is incredibly dangerous. The Beckies, the teabaggers, the fundamentalists and their ilk have become emotionally wedded to a view of liberalism that has no basis in fact. (Frankly, applying the word "liberal" to Pelosi is, in and of itself, debatable.)

Brad Friedman is the only blogger I've ever hung out with on a face-to-face basis. He seems to be somewhere to the left of me, in that he finds the Democratic party hopelessly compromised by corporate interests. Yet in private conversation, he never brought up Marx or Marxist notions. He doesn't have a copy of Das Kapital on his bookshelves, and I would be surprised to learn that he has read that work.

I have, of course. I even skimmed the later volumes -- betcha didn't know that there were sequels? -- and got a few paragraphs into the Grundrisse, one of the great unreadable books. I've also read The Wealth of Nations, which most of the people who worship Adam Smith would never actually do. I've also delved into Mein Kampf, Yockey, Gobineau, some Cleon Skousen (which you used to be able to pick up cheap), tons of weird-ass JBS literature, Robison, Weishaupt, Taxil, The Book of the SubGenius, Jack Chick comics, and a whole lot of other wacky stuff. Hey, it's me.

One of the lessons one gleans from extremist literature is that many people have an easy time imagining that their opponents are getting up to horrors which they would never actually commit. Are the folks next door sacrificing infants to Baal? You might be able to convince yourself that they are, until you actually visit the folks next door.

Has Byron Williams ever spent much time with liberals? Has Beck?

There's one problem with Brad's piece. This is Brad talking:

But remember, both sides do it! Remember all of those quotes from the top stars in the Progressive media like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann imploring supporters to shoot Republicans in the head?

Me neither.

I remember Keith Olbermann calling for the murder of Hillary Clinton. (He apologized -- years later.) I recall Randi Rhodes calling Hillary a "big fucking whore." (She refused to apologize.) I can cite -- have cited (many times) -- the repeated and explicit calls for violence against Hillary which were published on Kos, D.U. and other big liberal blogs. I recall an endless stream of imaginary horrors that were attributed to the Big Dog and his pantsuited She-Devil. ("Vince Foster! Vince Foster! Vince Foster!") And I ain't never gonna forget, or forgive, the death threats I personally received from the Obots -- particularly the ones that came from a certain ISP in Chicago.

I can, in short, recall how a cult of personality swept the nation and caused many once-sane progs to screech in a robustly Beckian fashion about the Baal-worshipers inhabiting casa Clinton.

Funny thing, though: I do not recall Brad denouncing any of that at the time.

Am I wrong, Brad? Care to offer any citations from 2008...?

(In honor of Glenn Beck, I'm listening to Khatchaturian's Symphony #3, a very loud piece written in honor of Glorious Soviet Revolution. Is being heavy metal for Stalinists, da? Great stuff, comrades!)

(PS: Speaking of wackiness -- I actually broke down and started watching Zeitgeist. Alas, the emetic qualities of this presentation forced me to bow out during the segue into the 9/11 stuff. Good freaking lord, what a piece of shit! This thing is an even worse example of crackpot pseudo-scholarship than are What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret. One of the key sources for this film is that notorious far-right crank, Jordan Maxwell! Compared to the maker of this movie, Dan Brown is a model of solid academic research.)

The virtue of incivility

The Arizona tragedy caused many to call for a new civility in American discourse. I would like to argue in favor of not being civil.

As most readers know, I view the Tea Partiers as an American fascist movement. That statement shocks many. But it will not be controversial to anyone who has studied fascist movements in Europe in the pre-1933 period or the post-1945 period, and it won't surprise anyone who has read the forgotten history of American fascism in the 1930s.

Alas, too many Americans do not know that history, and they view fascism purely in terms of the way Hitler wielded power. The beast acts differently when getting into position than it does after it has attained control.

Fascism must not be defined purely in terms of anti-Semitism, German nationalism, militarism, or even the cult-like reverence directed toward Adolf Hitler. Mussolini was not a notable anti-Semite (except when prodded by Hitler). There were (and are) many fascists outside of Germany -- Subash Chandra Bose, Julius Evola, Eduard Limonov, Robert Matthews and many, many thousands of others. During the war, some non-German fascists didn't care about Germany, and some even opposed Germany. Most people don't know that there were pro-fascist generals on Douglas McArthur's staff. (I've spoken to the son of one of those generals.) A surprising number of fascists have denounced Hitler -- for example, Tom Metzger believes that Hitler was "a pawn of the Jews," and Myron Fagan used to insist that Nazi Germany was run by the Rothschilds. There have been fundamentalist Protestant fascists, Catholic fascists, Islamic fascists, Hindu fascists, pagan fascists, occultist fascists, atheist fascists -- and even Jewish fascists.

Those who sneer at the idea that the Tea Partiers represent a fascist movement have no idea of fascism's scope, appeal, manifold disguises or insidiousness. They also never understood Huey Long's observation: "When Fascism comes to America, they will call it anti-Fascism."

The tea party movement represents the very thing that I have feared for two decades: The extreme right made mainstream. Now the question is: How should we treat the growing fascist menace in America? Can we speak to them in a civil manner? Are they even capable of reasonable dialogue?

The answer depends on the stage of fascism.

If fascists gain control of this country -- I don't refer to a mere electoral victory; I refer to overturning our constitution (and their talk of a “second constitution” is code for doing just that) -- then we will have no choice. We must take up arms and kill them. Plain and simple.

That is a hard saying. But that’s the way fascism was fought in all of occupied Europe in the 1940s; how can it be any different here?

If tea partiers create a successful secession movement, then, once again, we must take up arms and kill the seccessionists. Why? For the same reason that Abraham Lincoln was willing to do just that. My position will not be controversial to anyone who thinks that the Union was on the correct side in the Civil War.

(Incidentally, I hold with those who believe that the Confederacy was the first fascist state.)

We haven't yet reached that grim stage. I hope that we never do.

Until that time, the best recourse is fierce, unrelenting verbal opposition.

I would counsel people to talk to the tea partiers the same way one talks to someone wearing a swastika or Klan robes. Talk to the neo-Birchers, the Alex Jonesians, the Dominionists, and the CD-ers the same way you would talk to a Holocaust revisionist: Reluctantly, rarely, and always with a tone of sneering disgust.

Eventually — I hope — many among their number will tire of being treated that way. Ridicule, social ostracization and a lack of career advancement will put the tea partiers back into the margins.

You know why the Holocaust revisionists never made many converts in this country? Not because Americans understood the true facts. Since when do Americans give a damn about facts? No, people steered clear of revisionist arguments because they saw that the people making those arguments were usually treated as the scum of the earth. No-one wants to be treated like the scum of the earth.

For similar reasons, the 9/11 truth movement is dying. The good guys didn’t win that one on the facts, even though the facts were on our side. We won because too many truthers behaved oafishly, and normal people started treating them with disdain. Trutherism, in short, became uncool.

By contrast: Creationism is far, far more widespread now than when I was a boy. Only 48% of the populace believes in evolution today; that figure was above 80% in the 1960s (if I recall correctly). Why has Creationism taken hold with half the population? Perhaps because scientific-minded people have been too damned polite and deferential -- too civil -- when dealing with religious fanaticism. Whenever scientists and professors mount fact-based arguments in favor of evolution, they always come across as studiously non-combative, apologetic, simpering and soft. The reasonable approach has failed. The Bill Maher approach may work better: “YOU JACKASSES ARE A BUNCH OF FUCKING MORONS!”

Incivility has worked when civil discourse has failed.

So — yeah, I advocate relentless opposition to tea party fascists. If you call this approach "verbal dehumanization," so be it.

I don’t know if that strategy will work.

I do know that all other methods will fail.

A further note about Hitler the lefty

After writing a comment on the Confluence earlier today, I spent a little time looking up various factoids about dear old Otto von Bismarck. One of the links went here:

...I see his two most important contributions as:

(1. Instituting tax-supported public medical care (1871), and

(2. reforming the bureaucracy with inspired civil service systems, testing, and patterns, which eventually spread all over the world...

A lot of truly idiotic Americans think Germany's medical plan is leftist and began with Hitler. This is a form of insane lie spread by their right wing propaganda diatribes and liars like Glenn Beck. It is false. It [Germany's national health care] was right wing, and began eighteen years before Hitler was born in 1889.

This is from GERMAN IMPERIAL HISTORY (1928) and any of a dozen or more other German histories I have on hand.

The "idiotic Americans" referenced above got their pseudo-history from Glenn Beck, who has been trying to imprint the following equation on the public mind: "Health care reform = Hitler = communism."

That's like saying "Kung Pao Chicken = Mary Pickford = cubism."

The guy I've quoted above made a good faith effort to set the record straight, but he failed on one key point: Beck's insane placement of Hitler on the left must not be allowed to stand. That idea would offend every single historian of the Nazi period -- hell, it even would have offended Hitler. I can't believe that Americans are getting their Third Reich history from a FOX News maniac and not from (say) William Shirer.

This shit has gotta stop.

Debating people like Beck is like debating Holocaust revisionists: It's both irritating and dangerous. Such people simply are not worthy of debate, and even acknowledging their existence offers them an undeserved credibility. Eventually, though, responsible people came to understand that the misleading arguments offered by Holocaust revisionists had to be answered, one by one. The only alternative is to let the poison seep into more minds.

Same with Beck.

Maybe Beck will now try to place Bismarck somewhere on the left. Won't that be fun?

Oh, I should clear up the Second Reich history: Germany's national health care system did start in 1883 (not 1871), under Bismarck, but it was not really right-wing in origin. Bismarck had allowed a certain degree of democracy, mostly because he could depend on the peasantry to vote in a conservative fashion. But Bismarck's Kulturkampf had alienated Catholics in the south, while in the north, the socialists were making strong headway in heavily populated areas. In 1883, Bismarck instituted a health care program, accident insurance and an old age pension program. He did these things in order to recapture the working class and to stave off any further advances by the socialist party. Had he not appeased his opponents, rebellion was likely. In essence, an arch-conservative was forced to take measures that went against his instincts.

A lesson for our time, perhaps.

We're not in Kansas anymore

Having no place among Democrats or Republicans, Joe Lieberman won't seek another term.

Dick Cheney needs a heart.

Barack Obama thinks that he can woo Wall Streeters by writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

One doesn't have a home. One doesn't have a heart. And one doesn't have a brain.

But I can name one guy who had a ton of courage.

Okay, one more Loughner post...

First: Riverdaughter's latest is brilliant. We have allowed the right to accuse the left of politicizing the Arizona tragedy, and this must not stand:

We seem to have forgotten how ruthless and unsentimental the right can be about politicizing personal tragedies when their agenda can benefit from it. No one here should be under any illusions about what the right is capable of when it comes to turning on the histronics to 11.

If it had been a Republican legislator gunned down, the right would be on the air right now screaming for the rescission of the first amendment from the Constitution and some Republican extremist in Congress would be drafting legislation to make sure that Fox was the official news channel and the Roberts’ court would be standing by, ready to not only invoke the amendment but retroactively remove all of the speeches it finds offensive in elementary school text books. Goodbye, “I have a Dream”.

It's worse than that. The right has itself politicized Tucson -- nonstop. Remember the words of Tea Party leader Judson Phillips? "The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words."

Nothing is too small or too large for the right to politicize. If it could profit by doing so, the right would not balk at politicizing a murder, a kidnapping, an earthquake, a toothache, a song by Miley Cyrus, a bad burrito from Taco Bell, that dreadful show starring Amy Poehler, or a bad paint job from Earl Schieb. When the Second Coming hits, a FOX news team will be spinning their coverage ruthlessly -- right up until the moment they are cast into the lake of eternal fire.

Second: It's true that some of Loughner's former schoolmates said that he used to be "liberal" (circa 2006). Why did they use that word? Why did they come to this conclusion? Because Jared suspected Bush of masterminding the 9/11 attacks.

This raises a further question: How would those kids even know what a liberal is? How would young people raised in Arizona's bizarre culture define the term?

Michael Parenti (I think it was Parenti) used to tell a story about perceptions of news bias. As he traveled the country, he encountered many young people who believed with jackass certainty that liberals control the media. They "knew" this because Rush Limbaugh told them it was so.

Parenti responded: "Okay, tell me who is the liberal equivalent to Limbaugh. Name a liberal commentator who has that kind of power." The kids, stuck for an answer, finally blurted out one name: "Howard Stern."

Stern (whose shtick started to bore me about halfway through his second Letterman appearance) is a YAL -- Yet Another Libertarian. He mostly supports Republican candidates, although he came to hate Bush.

This brings us right back to Loughner's callow school chums, who resorted to the term "liberal" because they had no other frame of reference. They didn't know of any other way to describe someone who did not love Dubya.

Third: Let's get back to the blame game. One Cannonfire reader has asked:

Joseph, I appreciate that you love to riff on this subject, but I'm still left wondering what the point is.

I mean, even if Loughner had been obsessed with, say, Moby Dick, to the point where he went out and harpooned a half-dozen fat white men, what would that prove aside from the obvious: that people who are insane will do insane things, occasionally even violently lethal things, and there's no telling what's going to set them off?

My answer was that guys like Loughner function as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. That response now strikes me as true but inadequate. This is simpler and better:

One needn’t be sane in order to be moti­vated by a polit­i­cal agenda.

Just so. The debate between "Loughner was a nut" and "Loughner was political" centers on a false dichotomy. Presidential assassin Charles Guiteau was an absolute toon who heard voices in his head -- but he was also a political animal who belonged to a faction of the Republican party that felt betrayed by Garfield.

Thus, whenever a winger tells you that "no evidence" links Jared to the right, we may legitimately bring up such items as this:

The Times also noted Loughner’s references to the “second Constitution,” right-wing jargon for the amendments to the Constitution adopted in the decades after the Civil War, and regarded, like the Civil War itself, as illegitimate.

One of the experts interviewed by the Times is Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racist and neo-Nazi groups. He wrote of Loughner’s references to the US currency: “The idea that silver and gold are the only ‘constitutional’ money is widespread in the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers.”

Although this link goes to a Kos entry, I think that the concept of "stochastic terrorism" merits discussion:

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.

This is also the term for what Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and others do. And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such"), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

Let us quickly note that Markos Moulitsas published one hell of lot of stochastic terror throughout 2008. Examples:

Just slit her throat, lock her in a car boot, and drive the car into river in West Virginia. Ain’t gonna let no whore screw with the man

The heinous Hillary hag with a bullseye on her forehead is reason enough to vote for Obama

And a Drive-By Won't Be Out of the Question. What goes around, comes around. The stupid fucking bitch !!

Talk About WHITE TRASH that bitch better keep looking over her shoulder.

Even though the Kossacks refuse to 'fess up to their ghastly hypocrisy, the concept of "stochastic terror" has, in my opinion, much to recommend it.

In the early months of 1922, right-wingers in beer halls throughout Germany recited a ditty which translates thus: "Death to Walther Rathenau -- the Godforsaken Jewish sow." (Rathenau was a brilliant Jewish German politician who had argued that Germany needed to respect the treaty of Versailles.) The singers of that song were stochastic terrorists. When Rathenau was killed, they were, in a sense, the true authors of the crime. The actual hit men (a handful of army officers employed by this secret group) were mere tools.

There are plenty of Loughners out there. Take the case of Jim Adkisson, the unemployed truck driver who, in 2008, shot up a church he considered overly "liberal":

"This was a symbolic killing," he wrote in a four-page manifesto. "Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate, + House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the Mainstream Media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me."

Inside the house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.

Adkisson explicitly wrote that he wanted "to encourage other like-minded people to do what I've done."

One such "like-minded person" was Byron Williams, who last year made plans to kill members of the ACLU and a progressive group called the Tides Foundation.

According to Thomason, Williams told investigators that he was disturbed because he was unable to find a job due to the poor economy.

Williams' mother, Janice Williams, said to the San Francisco Chronicle that her son was angry with "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items."

A similar case occurred last year, when Jerry and Joe Kane -- two radical rightwingers -- killed two cops in Arkansas:

Kane and his son, by all accounts, didn't trust the U.S. Government. They didn't respect it, didn't think the laws that apply to the citizens in this country applied to them. They had particular beliefs and habits, like thinking they didn't need driver's licenses.

When those beliefs came into conflict with Officers Paudert and Evans, it was, according to hate group experts and friends of the Kanes, the perfect storm.

In April of 2009, Daniel Hayden was arrested for planning a terrorist attack in Oklahoma. Previously he had posted the following on Twitter:

Since we are already criminals in the eyes of the New World Order, and they intend to enslave us all, and to kill those of us who will NOT submit to their slavery, I say to IGNORE gun "laws" and keep your guns (AND ammo) handy. You only have three options:

1) Submit to total spectrum domination i.e. total enslavement.
2) Be rounded up and sent to a FEMA camp where you will be killed.
3) Die at the hands of the New World Order oppressors by taking as many of them with you as you can.

I recommend option number three and to keep your powder dry.

In Florida in 2009, Joshua Cartwright was killed after he had shot two Sheriff's Deputies.

An offense report filed against Cartwright the day he died outlines an angry husband who threatened his wife, kept guns and knives on hand, was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama had been elected president, and believed the U.S. government was conspiring against him.

Also in 2009, a bomb factory was discovered in the home of Mark Campano, of Ohio.

Barbara Vachon lived next door to Campano at the Center Park Place Apartments for several years and said he was a big reason she moved.

"He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos," said Vachon. "I would never watch them. He was some kind of radical, and he didn't believe in the government."

I could list a number of similar episodes. In each case, scoffers might sneer: "Oh, it's just an isolated incident."

That's what people said when Walther Rathenau was killed.

Can we talk?

This isn't another post about Jared Loughner, although he provides the starting point. My intent here is try to set up some ground rules when talking about far-right conspiracy theories.

1. Some readers presumed, based on my previous post, that I was minimizing Loughner's obvious mental illness. Actually, if you scroll down to an earlier post, you'll see that I clearly stipulated that Loughner was, in all likelihood, schizophrenic.

But, as everyone knows, unbalanced minds can become more unbalanced if they abuse certain psychoactive substances. Right-wing conspiracy theories are a kind of junk. They can be psychotoxins (if that term is permissible). Some people become addicted to the "high" they get from weird memes, and they scour the internet in search of an ever-stronger fix.

Loughner is, I think, such a person. Hence his attraction to works about banking conspiracies, NASA conspiracies, controlled demolition and so forth. I don't think that he has a very coherent political philosophy; people who have scrambled eggs in their brains are rarely noted for coherent thought. But most of his ideological input was of right-wing origin.

2. On the Confluence, my post evinced a few truly bizarre reactions:

I’ll leave Joe Cannon and others to their own paranoia. Just read for the umpteenth time MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

I re-read that letter earlier today, as it happens. It's the most brilliant argument ever constructed by any American addressing an important subject. It's also irrelevant to my post.

Well, perhaps relevant in this: The same (southern) culture which produced streams of propaganda labeling King an agent of Bolshevik conspiracy went on to produce much of the literature that Jared Loughner considered mighty fine reading.

But, jeez -- why lump me in with the paranoids simply because I write about them?

Just because I know a great deal about the conspiracy-spotter subculture does not mean that I am part of it. Audubon studied birds. That doesn't mean he was a bird.

3. The Loughner case underlines the need for greater sophistication when it comes to political labels. Many commentators have presumed that Loughner's embrace of the 9/11 "truthers" means that he must be a liberal. It's a simplistic equation -- "If you dislike Bush, you must be a lefty" -- and it just ain't true.

We are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the John Birch Society has infiltrated much of the conservative movement. I'm not just talking about card-carrying membership in that organization: I'm talking about an ideology, a mentality, a weltanschauung. When I say "Bircher," I'm actually talking about a general philosophy shared by a number of groups.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a battle between the Birchers and the William F. Buckley faction for the soul of the conservative movement. Buckley won. He's not around now, and the Birchers have gained new muscles.

This means that younger folk who are new to all this stuff have to learn some basic facts about the history of American extremism. And the first fact is this: Birchers and their ideological confreres have often criticized prominent Republicans from the right. They have formed conspiracy theories about Republican presidents (Robert Welch thought Ike was a commie) and about other conservatives (such as Buckley). The Birchers even thought that the USSR had gained control of the CIA.

Extreme right-wingers have even mounted scathing criticisms of -- hold on to your hats -- capitalism itself. Glenn Beck heavily promotes Cleon Skousen, the author of The Naked Capitalist. This bizarre volume argues that communism and socialism were secretly sponsored and kept in power by the wealthiest families in the world.

Believe it or not, this malarky became a key tenet of Bircherism. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, many far rightists genuinely believed that Wall Street bankers created both the USSR and the even worse menace (in their eyes) of Fabian socialism. Whenever you asked a Bircher why the bankers would do such a thing, they would always mutter something incomprehensible about Hegelian dialectics.

Back in the 1960s, there was a surprising degree of overlap between the followers of Ayn Rand and the Birchers who pushed this "Wall Street commies" malarky. As you know, the Randroids are a big part of the modern Tea Party movement.

It gets even stranger.

There was even a faction of the anti-Semitic far right that worked up a grudging affection for Joe Stalin. These rightists understood that Stalin was showing signs, in his last days, of turning into the sort of monster who might well have completed Hitler's genocide. Stalin employed the code word "cosmopolitans" when he talked about the Jews whom he imagined to be behind the schemes he saw all around him. Various American writers picked up on this term, and a few still use it. All of this deep-dish paranoia made Uncle Joe a potential member of the Good Guy Club, at least in the eyes of certain American racists. One writer in this category was the Reverend Kenneth Goff, who argued that Stalin was murdered by a Jewish conspiracy.

My point is simple: It gets really, really, really strange out there on the American fringe. Alas, the fringe isn't so very fringe-y these days, now that the extreme has become so closely interwoven with the "mainstream" Republican party.

Right-wing extremists are radical, even revolutionary. Their opposition to the Washington establishment (even when a Republican sits in the oval office) does not make them liberals. Quite the opposite. If they have their way, states will secede from the union -- and the leaders of those secessionist states will make George W. Bush look like JFK.

Jared and Adolf: Just a couple of lefties

Although this post appears about five days later than intended, the points raised here remain pertinent.

Jared Lee Loughner is the would-be assassin of a Democratic politician. He is a paranoid plot-spotter who spent a great deal of time blathering on about the gold standard, controlled demolition, NASA fakery and the use of "grammar" to control minds. These are all far-right conspiracy memes, familiar to students of American extremism. Anyone who pretends otherwise is disingenuous.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting spree, the right wing media infrastructure quickly repackaged Jared Lee Loughner as a "leftist."

"The hard left is going to try and silence the Tea Party movement by blaming us for this," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote. "The left is coming and will hit us hard on this. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words."

This sentiment was not confined to a single nutjob -- it became the party line of the day throughout right-wingerland. From the New American:

Far from being a tool of the right, it appears as if Jared Loughner, the notorious mass murderer who killed six persons last week in Arizona, was schooled in a program hatched by that American terrorist par excellence, Bill Ayers. World Net Daily reports that Loughner was a student in one of Ayers' radical education projects. And the man who ran the program, WND adds, is "a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers."

Turns out, however, he went to a high school associated with radicals and communists — most notably, Ayers. The school program to which the high school was attached was funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, whose chairman at the time was Barack Obama...

And so on. This has to be the loopiest conspiracy theory I've heard all month. Even someone as nutty as Jared Lee Loughner might have a hard time believing that Barack Obama somehow managed to turn Arizona high schools into communist training grounds.

Here's that ever-reliable propagandist for psychopathology, Jerome Corsi:

Jared Loughner, the alleged Arizona assassin, may have been inspired by the radical leftist punk-rock band Anti-Flag, one of his favorite bands, according to a schoolmate who posted on Twitter.com her reminiscences about her association with Loughner.

By this logic, I must be an anti-Semite because I listen to Wagner. I must also be a neurotic Jew because I listen to Mahler.

Now looky here:

LOUGHNER - LEFTIST ASSASSIN - USED GLOCK 19

Despite this headline, the contributors to the above-linked blog seem impressed by Loughner's marksmanship. I'm reminded of R. Lee Ermey's memorable line about Oswald in Full Metal Jacket.

Check this out:

The evidence that assassin was on the left of the political spectrum continue to pile up. Friends, political ideology, religious beliefs, favorite books and activities already proved this lunatic was a progressive-liberal. Now comes word that Loughner was anti-Bush and a 9/11 Truther.

Hardly a Palin follower or Tea Party member, wouldn’t ya say?

Actually, I would say.

The "bombs in the buildings" mythos originated with Holocaust deniers and conspiracy buffs who came out of the far right John Birch/Milton William Cooper tradition. Circa 2005, the meme began to infect the left, forcing the more intelligent progs to staunch the spread of the virus. When the moderators at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground put a lid on "CD" posts, infuriated conspiracists derided the "liberal gatekeepers."

One of the key conspiracists pushing that "CD" nonsense is Alex Jones, the famed blowhard from Texas who is no-one's idea of a progressive. Jones originally stumped for the Tea Party, although he now believes that Sarah Palin has betrayed the movement. While it is true that the split between Jones and Palin exemplifies a larger rupture within the conservative movement, let's not pretend that there are liberals standing on either side of that line.

"Truther" Jones also supported the ultra-conservative teabagger candidate Debrah Medina in the Texas race for governor. Medina, you may recall, famously came apart on Glenn Beck's program because she wouldn't distance herself from the theorists who believe in a controlled demolition of the twin towers.

In fact, the tea party movement is hopelessly intertwined with the so-called "truth movement" and other strains of reactionary American conspiracism. See here. Also see here:

Tea Party Patriots for 9/11 Truth are a diverse group of non partisan supporters of the constitutional liberty and free enterprise message espoused by liberty candidates such as Ron Paul during the 2008 presidential elections.

Many of our members joined us after taking Constitution Classes with the Institute on the Constitution (iotconline.com). Most of our members are members of national truth and liberty groups such as the Campaign for Liberty, John Birch Society, GOOOH, Institute on the Constitution (iotconline.com); Restore the Republic, National Veterans Committee on Constitutional Affairs (NVCCA.net), and/or are members of various local Tea Party groups and national 9/11 Truth groups such as AE911Truth.org; pilots for 9/11 truth, the DC for 9/11 Truth, Truth-March.net, scholars for 9/11 Truth, military intelligence of 9/11 truth and many others...

And that, friends, is the truth about the truthers. Today, there are very few remaining left-wing CD nuts; the phenomenon skews sharply right.

The right-wing propagandists who have tried to paint Loughner as a liberal want you to believe that anyone who has ever had an unkind word for Dubya must be pinker than Emma Goldman. That false dichotomy shouldn't fool anyone with a triple-digit IQ. In fact, many right-wing conspiracists (Alex Jones being the most famous example) have always viewed the Bush family with suspicion and animus. Throughout the postwar period, reactionary conspiracists have often damned traditional Republicans -- yet no-one in his right mind would ever use the word "liberal" to describe these right-wing extremists. The most infamous example was provided by John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, who genuinely believed that Eisenhower was a communist.

Today, the Birchers, the Skousenites and their ideological confreres have taken over a large segment of the GOP. This takeover has created an under-recognized fracture within the right.

Fundamentalist Christians created a similar fracture when they put George W. Bush into office, because the fundamentalist mind-set is also notoriously receptive to ultra-paranoid political theories. Many of those theories target the neo-cons and the Bush family from the right.

Loughner himself was a self-proclaimed atheist, of the sort familiar to Flannery O'Connor readers: The perpetually enraged God-denier whose loud, inarticulate blasphemies mask a secret longing for the blood of the Lamb. Only someone raised in a culture of fanaticism would mount a rebellion of this sort. Both Jared Loughner and Hazel Motes might have turned out differently had they lived in a community where moderation has a voice; alas, in Arizona, the ultra-right controls the mainstream media and the ultra-ultra-right controls the samisdat alternative. When all trails lead back to the same place, confused young people have nowhere to go. Except when they go crazy, as Loughner did.

Of course Loughner became a right-winger between 2006 and today. He had no other frame of reference.

Back in the days when I hobnobbed with hard-core conspiracists, I met quite a few Jared Loughners -- including at least one unhinged individual who, I suspect, may one day commit a similarly violent act. (That's a tale for another time.) I've seen many naive and unstable individuals make the same segue that Loughner made.

To put the matter very simply: People can become Weirdness addicts. They get hooked on bizarre political ideas. Those who have the most serious addictions will eventually turn to right-wing pushers, because they're the ones who supply the hardest shit.

That's why the teabagger takeover of the Republican party is so dangerous. Today, one can no longer easily distinguish the "mainstream" Republican party from the underground culture of paranoia addiction. The modern GOP has become the party of conspiracy, both in its willingness to exploit fearmongering (example: Glenn Beck) and in the actual practice of dirty tricks (example: Karl Rove).

The most insidious forms of deception involve the rewriting of history. From Alex Jones' site:

In a Tweet, fellow student Caitie Parker said the accused gunman was “quite liberal” and a “political radical.” He listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Marx’s Communist Manifesto as his favorite books.

But it was not simply leftist radicalism and worship of diehard socialists like Marx and Hitler that motivated Loughner.

Even more reprehensible is this:

The Associated Press didn’t want to use Adolf Hitler’s or Karl Marx’s name, since these are the heroes to those on the left who have a fondness for Socialism and Marxism.

I have cited but two examples; one can find many more.

Apparently, right-wingers believe that you'll find swastikas and pictures of Der Fuehrer at any given left-wing gathering. In fact, you're much likelier to encounter that kind of imagery at a gun show in Utah -- as I once did.

(Conservatives never mention that Loughner's reading list also includes a seminal work by the vile Ayn Rand, who has become a Tea party goddess.)

For decades, the John Birch Society has pushed the notion that Nazism was a form of communism. Neo-Bircher Glenn Beck has tried very hard to make this notion mainstream -- and he has had an appalling success.

What astounds me is not the ignorance of the young, but their jack-ass certainty about the things they know that just ain't so. If much of our population no longer finds Hitler locatable on the right, then all dialogue has become impossible. One cannot debate the mad.

In a later post, I suppose I'll have to demonstrate why Beck is wrong. I'll have to point out that Hitler was never a socialist (despite the name of the party he commandeered), that Nazi brownshirts and other Freikorps thugs routinely beat and assassinated leftists, and that the Nazi movement was funded by the fiercely anti-socialist Henry Ford. I'll also have to demonstrate that the Birch movement itself grew out of the pro-Nazi segment of the American right of the 1930s -- and that, to this day, the Birchers idolize Henry Ford, Hitler's paymaster. Birchers invented the "Hitler was a socialist" canard in order to camouflage their own Nazified origins.

Yes, I'll have to write a post like that. More than one.

But, frankly, the task is infuriating.

I used to have an entire floor-to-ceiling book case filled with works about Nazism. Each and every one of them was written by historians who understood Hitler as the ultimate exemplar of radical revanchist conservatism. Alas, nowadays one must argue with nearly-illiterate ninnies who would rather eat Vegemite on cowcrap than read a book by Shirer, Heiden, Toland, Bullock, Waite or Infield. This smug new generation prefers to get what it is pleased to call "history" from fruitcakes like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.

Being asked to prove that Hitler was a right-winger is like being asked to prove that water is wet and the sun is hot. It's galling.

Hell-Hound across America -- or: A Winter's Tail

I should save this non-political post for the weekend, but for various reasons, I must publish now.

This photo-essay documents how a family of economic refugees (two adults and one Hell-Hound) crossed the United States of America in the dead of winter. We packed all of our possessions into a seriously over-burdened minivan purchased from the post office for well under $1000. Despite our lack of license plates, the constabulary of fourteen states never assailed us.

The protagonist of our story is Bella, the fearsome Hell-Hound who functions as mascot to this blog. Here she is in sunny California, snoozing contentedly, unaware that she is about to undergo the adventure of a lifetime. She is eleven years old.

We named our minivan the Hippo because we got it for Christmas. Bella, now fully awake, sits in the belly of a fully-packed hippo. That seat will be her domain for the next week.

Riverside, California. This is what the San Bernardino mountains looked like on the day we left.

We crossed the San Bernadinos and made our way toward the California desert.

The Hippo, parked in front of our motel room in Flagstaff , Arizona. (The shooting in Tucson was still some days away.) This was the morning when Bella first discovered snow. She agreed with Carl Reiner's assessment: "A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water."

We weren't the only ones doing the "Ma and Pa Joad in reverse" trip.

In New Mexico, Bella met Native Americans.

A friend to this blog graciously offered to buy us dinner when we got into Albuquerque. Alas, we entered that town far too late; our deepest apologies. The next morning, we had blue corn enchiladas at a place called Joseph's in Santa Rosa. Man, were they good!

Texas. We liked everyone we met there. Even so, we would prefer that they never give us another president.

Oklahoma. Bella knows she belongs to the land. And the land she belongs to is grand. However, she did not say "Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!" while pooping.

Both Oklahoma and Texas are big on massive roadside crosses.

The splendor that is Mulhall, Oklahoma. We stopped here when we realized that we had wandered onto the wrong highway. Fortunately, righting our course took us through the town of Stillwater, which may be the nicest small town in all of America.

In magnificent East St. Louis, Bella posed with the famous arch. Having heard that East St. Louis can be a tough burg, she tried her best to look intimidating.

The small town of Trenton, Illinois. Bella had a grand time romping through these fields. We stayed with my ladyfriend's aunt, a former free spirit from Seattle who -- oddly enough -- knew Mia Zapata rather well. In fact, she had been out drinking with Mia on the night she mysteriously disappeared.

In Trenton, our dining companions included a female liberal and a male conservative. They both agreed that no-one should ever trust a politician from Chicago, regardless of party affiliation.

Indiana. I have nothing to say about Indiana except that it was beautiful and frozen.

Bella inspects a visitor's center in Kentucky, located between -- I kid you not -- Simpsonville and Shelbyville.

On the Ohio side of the Ohio river (where the temp had dropped to two degrees the night before!), Bella directs our attention to the Silver Memorial Bridge, which crosses into West Virginia. This bridge replaced the one which fell in December of 1967. And that brings us to...

Mothman! Now we are on the other side of the river, in the lovely town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. According to local lore, the wave of Mothman sightings in 1966 and 1967 heralded the bridge disaster. I've long been a big fan of the Mothman legend.

Intrigued by the Mothman mystery, Bella goes undercover to conduct further investigation.

We're still in Point Pleasant, WV, which is now the site of a major art project. The new Silver Bridge, in the background, bypassed the town, harming local business. The old Silver Bridge came directly into Point Pleasant -- at the spot marked by these snow-covered steps.

The Mothman statue (barely visible behind the Hippo) looks through this gate toward the steps pictured in the image above. In other words, Mothman continues to haunt the spot of the great tragedy. On either side of the gate is a massive wall which faces the Ohio river -- and on this wall will be the largest mural in the United States.

Some sections of the mural are already completed -- and as you can see, the work is not bad at all. In fact, it's awe-inspiring. The paintings depict scenes from local history, including one of the great evils committed during the Revolutionary War period: Chief Cornstalk, having come to the British under color of truce, was taken captive and then slaughtered.

More of the mural. The artist is Robert Dafford, of Louisiana.

Bella inspects Dafford's work.

Bella, having finally reached her destination, explores her new home -- Baltimore. As you can see, she has made a new friend.

In Baltimore, the houses are mostly up-and-down affairs, designed for use by Peter Parker and no-one else. People in this city quickly get used to dealing with stairs. Lots of stairs. Narrow, twisty stairs without handrails. In fact, they're more like ladders than stairways. Getting to our attic pad is a bit like mounting an expedition to the summit of K2.

The yuppies in Canton take a perverse pride in the narrowness of their domiciles: "My house is only fifteen feet wide." "Fifteen? Pheh! Our home is twelve feet wide!"

As I write, Bella is taking a well-deserved rest.

She informs me that I am supposed to end this chronicle with the words "Go Ravens!" -- a phrase which apparently refers to some local sporting fraternity. Since I don't usually keep up with such things, I can only express the hope that the wittily-named Ravens will continue to do well whatever it is that they do.

Many thanks to the Cannonfire readers who made this adventure possible.

Yes, conservatives DID create Jared Lee Loughner

Would-be political assassin Jared Lee Loughner, a fan of the Above Top Secret web site, has an abiding interest in the subject of mind control. Like most other conspiracy buffs, he defines that term loosely: He considers the expression of any opinion contrary to his own to be the equivalent of brainwashing. Predictably, his fellow buffs now suspect him of being an "MKULTRA" assassin.

Based on what evidence?

Before you answer, take a look at Loughner's internet postings. His writing style demonstrates schizophasia, popularly called word salad:

It is characterized by an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them. In this context, it is considered to be a symptom of a formal thought disorder. In some cases schizophasia can be a sign of asymptomatic schizophrenia; e.g. the question "Why do people believe in God?" could elicit a response consisting of a series of words commonly associated with religion or prayer but strung together with no regard to language rules.

If Loughner is schizophrenic -- a safe bet -- then he probably would not be a good subject for hypnosis. Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a recognized expert in the field, has argued that schizophrenics cannot be hypnotized. That opinion appears to be commonly held, although some professionals disagree. (A few assert that placing schizophrenics under hypnosis is possible but dangerous.)

If schizophrenics cannot be hypnotized, then the whole notion of Loughner as a hypno-programmed "MKULTRA assassin" stands exposed as a silly fantasy offered up by conspiracy-crazed reactionaries desperate to distance themselves from the violence committed by one of their own. Myiq at the Confluence links to this story by William Galston of The New Republic, which brings us a bit closer to the hard truth of the matter:

Starting in the 1970s, civil libertarians worked to eliminate involuntary commitment or, that failing, to raise the standards and burden of proof so high that few individuals would meet it. Important decisions by the Supreme Court and subordinate courts gave individuals new protections, including a constitutional right to refuse psychotropic medication. A few states have tried to push back in constitutionally acceptable ways, but efforts such as California’s Laura’s Law, designed to make it easier to force patients to take medication, have been stymied by civil rights concerns and lack of funding.

Although this passage contains some accurate information, Galston gives the impression that deinstitutionalization of the mentally unstable was a liberal idea. It was anything but.

This tragic story goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, when various investigative reports, films, dramas and novels sensitized the American public to the sad conditions prevailing in many mental hospitals. These institutions were funded -- in too many cases, under-funded -- at the county and state level. Responding to these concerns, the Kennedy administration initiated a program designed to move patients out of mental institutions and into an outpatient program overseen by federally-financed community care clinics.

Conservatives supported the idea of closing down asylums, but they did not want to spend money on outpatient care. Many accepted the bizarre views of Dr. Thomas Szaz, a libertarian who argued that mental illness does not exist. Similarly, R.D. Laing argued that schizophrenia was simply a mystical state of awareness, much like an LSD trip. Inane arguments of this sort proved useful to right-wingers who, for ideological reasons, have always opposed spending money on the less fortunate.

After JFK’s death, federal funding for mental health care ran into severe obstacles, including a particularly bizarre propaganda campaign mounted by conservatives. On the radio and in newsletters, right-wingers screeched that all attempts to provide humane aftercare for the mentally unstable were actually Soviet conspiracies perpetrated by Marxists in Washington. The fraudulence of this (now largely forgotten) propaganda effort was exposed in an article titled “The Far Right’s Fight Against Mental Health," published in the January 26, 1966 issue of Look magazine.

(In the years since, we've seen a steady stream of these ridiculous agit-prop campaigns, which, alas, soon plummet down the memory hole. Fifty years from now, will anyone recall that the teabaggers once tried to frighten the citizenry with the specter of Obamacare "death panels"?)

In short and in sum: We should blame the right, not the left, for the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill -- and we must not allow today's conservatives to rewrite that history. The fact that The New Republic attempted such a rewrite tells us much about that publication, which some wags have called The Newly Republican.

I will grant that the left does deserve a share of the blame. Half-a-century ago, many liberals were desperate to close the "snake pits" and thus accepted the presumption that a disease such as schizophrenia is treatable on an outpatient basis. As a matter of obdurate fact, schizophrenics usually avoid treatment unless compelled. What was and remains needed is a reformed program of institutionalization, properly funded, with a publicly-accountable body overseeing the patients' rights.

That outcome isn't likely.

Even if a hundred Jared Lee Loughners were to commit atrocities over the next hundred days, conservatives would still prevent the expenditure of public money on care for those who cannot function as their own masters. As long as the virus of libertarianism continues to infect our national discourse -- as long as the Grover Norquists among us continue to send government services spinning down that well-known bathtub drain -- people with serious mental illnesses will afflict their families until tossed into the streets. Many homeless schizophrenics will die of exposure to the elements; others will be warehoused in prisons unequipped to offer treatment.

We Americans treat our mad abominably. Our willingness to do so is a sign of our national degeneracy.

Get this to Keith: Apology accepted

I am in Baltimore -- and a hell of a town it seems, on initial impression, to be. So THIS is that thing called "winter." I've heard about it and seen it in movies.

I'll have a full post about our trip soon. In the meantime, let me state that we heard about the horrible AZ events while staying in a small motel on the Ohio river, bereft of access to the internet. There was nothing for it but to get the details from one K. Olbermann -- who, in his special comment, castigated all violence-inducing speech against politicians.

He then went on to offer an apology for his own infamous public call for the murder of Hillary Clinton. (I will not re-phrase that. He said what he said.) It was a proper apology: No special pleading, no "What I meant to say...", no "some people took this remark out of context..." None of that crap. Just pure, straightforward loss of face. THAT's how to do it.

I once said that all I wanted was an apology from the great offenders of 2008. Finally, we got one.

A less classy act was offered by Josh Marshall, who also appeared on Olbermann's program. Marshall, wearing his trademark chin stubble (like so many of today's hip hypocrites) derided intemperate political speech without once mentioning that he had published tons of the stuff during 2008.

Boo, Josh. Bravo, Keith.

And now I must be off. Be back as soon as I figure out how to install permanent internet in our new digs...

The Obama nightmare continueth...

Robert Gibbs has said that he will step down as press secretary in order to devote himself to Obama's re-election campaign. Which means that the Big O has decided to run again. The guy can't even admit that he has failed.

This news means that there MUST be an intra-party challenge to Obama. We simply cannot survive any more of this crap.

It gets better. Obama will probably give the press secretary position to Richard Daley's brother. When the House Republicans get their investigative engines going, they will be looking hard at Obama's links to Chicago corruption. This won't be like the Clinton years, when the Republican attacks were just smears. In Obama's case, the corruption was real.

And now he is going to have a member of the Daley family function as the voice of the administration. This will be fun.

Here is an example of what to expect:

Mayor Richard Daley has often sought to portray himself as above involvement in machine-style politics, once declaring, "My political organization is myself."

But testimony Monday in a federal corruption trial linked the mayor's brother William Daley and longtime top strategist Timothy Degnan to the embryonic stages of what became the Hispanic Democratic Organization.

Although the mayor has denied knowing that city job openings were rigged for his supporters, a former HDO leader from the Southeast Side testified Degnan dangled jobs in return for loyalty in Daley's first successful campaign for mayor in 1989.

And another former top Latino political operative said he helped build HDO on the North Side for Daley's political organization in the early 1990s at the urging of Degnan, William Daley and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.)

Hope you like reading about this sort of thing....

Status Report

I had a bit of a "Sullivan's Travel's" beginning to my trip. In fact, my last hours on my home turf were spent watching Jerry Brown get himself sworn in as Governor, while we waited for wheel bearings to be replaced on our hideously overweight minivan. Brown talked about the trials experienced by the settlers who came to California via wagon train -- an appropriate image, since we are going in the opposite direction.

So are a lot of other folks, from what I gather.

Brown's a good man, and California was prosperous during his previous time in office. But I don't think that he can solve the state's current problems. No-one can. Gridlock in Sacramento will continue,because the Republicans (many of whom make Sharron Angle look like Eleanor Roosevelt) simply will not compromise.

So I got out of Dodge. But things do not appear to be muich better elsewhere.

During our first night out of the state, we spoke to a motel manager who revealed that he has a Master's degree in physics. Running a motel -- working for a nice gentleman from India -- is the best job he can get.

Libertarianism has destroyed America. Marx never harmed us. Milton Friedman did.

See you on the other side...

...the other side of the country, that is. While most of you were out celebrating, I spent the night packing the Hippo.

It just occurred to me that many readers will find the previous sentence obscene. "The Hippo" is the nickname for our minivan.

A cross-country trip like this is scary, especially after one has read tales of 100-car pile-ups in North Dakota. But one must embrace adventure. An infinitude of thanks to readers who made this adventure possible. Thanks for everything.