That was inappropriate of me...

[elfs]

If Rush Limbaugh and company want to encourage his followers to wear a t-shirt (the uniform of the common man) to his various events as a way of making the point that "there are a lot of us," he can do that. They can even pick a striking color like yellow or orange or something, or maybe they'll go with the tried-and-true red, white and blue. They could even be cute and turn it upside down.

I should not have made the Brownshirt joke, for the same reason that the various birthers and teabaggers should not be going around with Nazi symbols on their posters and placards. The Nazis really were evil; if we're going to hold them as images of fundamental evil, we shouldn't bleach out the efficacy of Nazi imagery by cheapening it in this way.

My apologizing for it, however, doesn't mean the right won't keep doing it.

America has always been a place, at least during my lifetime, where political violence was damn near unthinkable. I worry that what the extremists have learned, over the years, is that political violence works. Before the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle of cable television, we heard about bombings and terrorism in distant countries and had no concept of its effectiveness. Now we do, and you know what? It's pretty damned effective. It hurts a lot of people, but if you don't care that much about the other side, if you're convinced the other side is demonic and deserving of death, political violence seems like an excellent tactic.

The eliminationist rhetoric and pureblind scare tactics coming out of the right are stunning. When Newt Gingrich supports Sarah Palin's claim that health care reform will lead to euthanizing disabled children, he's allowed to get away with this blatant lie, and when Business Daily says that "Under the UK system, Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die," few people on the right will point out that Hawking is and always has been a UK citizen and seems to be surviving just fine.

I've never understood why the Nazis are the canonical bad guys, and not Pol Pot or Stalin or Japan's Unit 731. But they're what we've got. It's unfortunate how many dupes there are on the right, and how unwilling they are to listen.

An anonymous blogger wrote to Andrew Sullivan:

For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush's failed presidency.

So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

I suspect that's closer to the truth than we'd like to hear.

Comments

[lovingboth]

The NY Library Desk Reference on science claimed Alan Turing was American. Perhaps they think Hawking is too.

How rich do you need to be to survive motor neuron disease in the US? How many graduate students are that rich?

No Elf, It Was Sadly All-Too Acurate

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Screaming at your opponents is intimidation. This behavior is thuggery. William F. Buckley must be rolling in his grave.

If the media outlets continues to call this, "protest," and give this behavior legitimacy, then physical, as well as verbal, intimidation will be coming soon. And the Brownshirts used physical intimidation to silence opponents.

If the ruby-slipper fits, then I'm calling her Dorothy.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

As I have lived both in the UK, and currently live in New Zealand, both of which have public health care available for all, and having a son with Down's Syndrome, I can categorically state that Sarah Palin, and thus Gingrich as well, are completely wrong.

There was never any pressure to euthanize our son. In fact, as he basically only had two valves in his heart on birth, he required radical heart surgery to survive beyond his early years, something we could never have afforded under the USA health system.

We did have to put on a little pressure to get the surgery as soon as possible due to the huge waiting lists at the only surgery capable of doing such work in New Zealand.

In case anyone thinks the waiting lists and only having one capable surgery are a result of having a public health system, I'd remind them that New Zealand is a country of less than four million people. There are larger population centres in the US that don't have such facilities. If it was left to market forces we wouldn't have the facility at all, and all heart surgery would have to be done overseas at much greater cost and also greater loss of life, due to the distance and travel involved.

So contrary to Palin's claim, public health systems are actually better for disabled children, because they get the care they need, which their parents probably wouldn't be able to afford in the USA, especially as most health insurance policies don't cover congenital defects.

It is valid for anti-public health people to complain that their tax dollars are being spent on keeping disabled children alive. But when they do that they make it more obvious what the real fear of having a public health system is, that rich people will being paying for the health care of poor people, and that some people will cost more than others, and that not everyone will get their "fair share" of medical services paid for tby their tax dollars.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

BTW, thought you might be interested in < ahref="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/12/birthers-stephen-hawking-paul-rowen">this Guardian article where Stephen Hawking himself refutes the claim, and says he wouldn't be alive today without the NHS (the UK's National Health Service).

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

America has always been a place, at least during my lifetime, where political violence was damn near unthinkable. I worry that what the extremists have learned, over the years, is that political violence works.

The Kent State shootings were less than 40 years ago. (And Kent State is a twofer - right wing political violence in the form of the guard opening fire on the protesters, and, two days prior, left wing political violence in the torching of the ROTC building and subsequent assaults on the fire department personnel responding to the fire.)

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

At least they're not beating the "we have to kick-start the Apocalypse so we can see Jesus before we die" drum so hard anymore. That scared me.

Amazed *and* Impressed

[(Anonymous)]

Elf,

I amazed, and *very* impressed, by this post—and I'm not going to dilute this statement by commenting further on it.

--DB_Story

Re: Amazed *and* Impressed

[pieforeveryone.livejournal.com]

DB, a few posts back I said some things that made you mad. I was overly casual in dismissing your complaint about Elf's post, and I'm sorry about that. In response to what you said to me, all I can say is that I have been reading Elf's writing for more than 15 years now. Despite never having met him, I have faith in him being an extremely decent human being. So when he made a joke in poor taste, I assumed it was just a joke and not a veiled allusion to secretly-held beliefs or what have you. (This seems to be why the right-wing is not allowed to make similar comments.)

This comment has taken about 20 minutes to write. I am trying very hard not to miss the point in quite so glorious a fashion as I did with my last one. Thank you for your patience.

Re: Amazed *and* Impressed

[(Anonymous)]

PieForEveryone,

Thank you also for your heartfelt words. They are unexpected, appreciated, and I'm sure as difficult to put down exactly as you wish them as you indicate in your post.

Gentlemen can just about always Agree to Disagree without being Disagreeable.

If it helps, I picked my words very carefully as well in my earlier reply to this posting of Elf's. As I said there, it's always good to know when not to dilute your good words of the moment by adding in too many more afterwards.

I Remain, Amazed and *Impressed*.

--DB_Story

[tagryn]

I obviously missed all the Nazi banners flying at the GOP convention last year. "The right" are no more swastika wavers than the Westboro Baptist Church is a good representative of mainstream Christianity.

If all one listens to to get a sample of the "right" is Hannity, Limbaugh, and Savage, then it does all seem bombastic and sensationalistic. I'd recommend instead taking in fellows like Hewitt and Medved to get a more leavened (though still unapologetically partisan) viewpoint from the conservative side. Online, I read bloggers like Drezner, Vodkapundit, and McArdle to get a dose of critical thinking; the more out-there bloggers like LGF are easier to dismiss, but browsing only them also too easily gives the (false) impression that the other side has no ideas of their own, and hence are all screamers and maniacs. Sully's tendency to strawman his opponents by selecting only the most crazy arguments is unfortunately common, I've seen him sliding into doing this more and more over time. I'd be careful about relying on him as a balanced barometer of opinions across the spectrum.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to recommend Jerry Doyle, and San Diego's Chip Franklin (he's on KOGO AM600 in the mornings, don't know if his show is syndicated).

Roger Hedgecock is also worth listening to, but he occasionally goes overboard on moral issues at times.

I'm a fiscal conservative and believe in a strong national defense, but I'm more of a libertarian when it comes to moral issues - keep government out of it.

My Favorite Conservative Commentator

[(Anonymous)]

My favorite conservative commentator, and the one with whom both my wife and I would love to share a dinner with any time, is Walter E. Williams, who sometimes substitutes for Rush.

Roger Hedgecock I've met personally on a couple of occasions and find him to be a great guy. I also lived in San Diego during the time he was mayor.

--DB_Story

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if I link to this on my blog? It's classic stuff that deserves wider propagation, IMHO.

[(Anonymous)]

First, swastikas whilst most iconic of the nazi party aren't exclusive to them and weren't invented by them. That said often people do use them to represent nazism, ironic since Hitler believed in the "German super race"... why would people from other rqaces want to be associated with that?

Second, maybe they wouldn't want Turing if they knew he had allegedly lost is security clearance because he got caught for being involved with another man...