Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Right

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment. - The Hutaree's Holy Mission Statement.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is looking more and more like a fucking prophet these days.

11 months ago (on, ironically, a week before teabaggers held their first rallies), it was Homeland Security under Secretary Napolitano that warned us and law enforcement agencies in a report (.pdf file) of the rise of right wing extremism, one that made the right wingers extremely pissed. It was angrily dismissed as so much left wing, Socialist agitprop that was whipped up to frighten the masses, agitprop not at all like the heightened threat levels at Homeland Security during the Bush years that seemed to rise at key points during the 2004 campaigns.

Initially, even the White House tried to distance itself from the report since the Obama administration flinches every time Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh scratch their asses because right wing rage isn't so, well, extreme when you think about it. Still, better to not get them going. Such flinching before proper white, southern and Midwest outrage has made the President look like little more than an Uncle Tom who's, from time to time, a bit uppity.

Now, from the state that brought you Tim McVeigh and the Nichols brothers, consider the case of the Hutaree, self-appointed Christian warriors who were arrested this past week for conspiring to murder police officers en masse. This Michigan militia group's holy mission was to slaughter a few police officers then to use IED's to kill many more at their funerals. If you thought Fred Phelps and his inbred devotees from Westboro Baptist church were human herpes sores at heroes' funerals, think of what these bozos could've done.


However, early this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center released an almost equally noteworthy report stating that last year saw a 244% rise in so-called Patriot groups. This includes homegrown militias such as the Hutaree, self-appointed border patrol groups such as the one that murdered a man and his nine year-old daughter all the way down to the pair that was busted in 2008 in Tennessee for planning to murder scores of African Americans, including the future President of the United States, in a suicide mission while wearing white tails and top hats in some surreal plot that brings to mind "Irving Berlin goes to Rosewood."

And let's not forget that 24% of Republicans out of 2230 people recently polled by Harris stated they thought President Barack Obama is the antichrist and that gun sales have gone through the roof since election day 2008. Then there are the religious groups such as the ones that united to produce the Manhattan Declaration that promised the same kind of civil disobedience that the Old Testament God would've found intolerable and the Rev. Steven Anderson who time and again also wished death on the President and inspired if not commanded a man to show up fully armed at an Obama rally in Phoenix.

Lest we forget, there are also the harder ones to spot, the lone nuts who shoot abortion doctors, Unitarian churches and people at the Holocaust Museum, fly their planes into IRS buildings and blow up their own with them still inside. When Hal Turner was arrested last year for threatening the lives of three federal judges, he wasn't an aberration but a symptom of a larger fever gripping this country, the fever of hateful intolerance.

Finally, there's the so-called liberal media led at the vanguard by the top-rated Fox network that employs Glenn Beck, who called the president a racist, as well as the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, commentators who have accused Mr. Obama of being a Muslim, a fist-jabbing pal of terrorists, a Socialist, a Communist, a fascist and have invited unchallenged guests to also sling such unfounded and easily disprovable lies about our Chief Executive.

The one common denominator in virtually all these right wing groups is obvious: Racism, white supremacy wrapped up in the colors of Old Glory. And you would think, at some time and at some point, a line would be drawn in the sand somewhere in Washington, DC but what we're seeing, instead, are Republicans exhorting others to slit their wrists, egg on the teabaggers during a congressional session, calling the President a liar to his face on international television and stopping short of condemning people such as antitax opponents like Joe Stack.

Yet, in spite of all the violence and threatened violence, xenophobic Rep. Steve King thinks that overthrowing the government in a "velvet revolution" through teabaggery is actually possible.

However, this trend on Capitol Hill and within the RNC that seems to condone violence against those who don't toe the conservative line is not a new one, as Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Congressman and former Majority Leader Tom DeLay showed us five years ago.

It doesn't take a genius to be able to connect the dots and see a rapidly accelerating trend that was pacified into only occasional outbursts of wingnuttery under a GOP-dominated Congress, Supreme Court and White House.

But now that they've lost power in two of the three branches of government they profess to hate, anyway, the right wing has already passed the point where Republicans and teabaggers should have their own theme music played on a carnival calliope. Now, it's rage, rage against the dying of the right. The loss of control, coupled by the fact that a black man is in control of the executive branch and a Latina infiltrating their last stronghold, which is the Supreme Court, makes the acts of violence and threats of it still shocking but hardly surprising to those of us in the cynically-named "reality-based community."

So how come the liberal media are still not connecting the dots and seeing the beginning of what could look like the next civil war?

History tells us time and again that events leading up to civil unrest, rebellion, sedition and outright revolution and civil war accelerate. It begins with rhetoric such as what we've been hearing from the entrenched right wing media and the GOP, civil disobedience as promised by the religious right's own Manhattan Project, mass demonstrations as we've seen with the teabaggers, bigotry-fueled pogroms in which certain minorities are targeted for abuse and death.

Eventually, people begin dying in small numbers. Two in a Unitarian church, a couple more in an IRS office, another at a Holocaust Museum. Pretty soon it begins to add up to real casualties, especially when elected officials and leading figures in the media are not only failing to condemn it, they're actually condoning and encouraging it.

Next thing you know, a new party rises up from the ashes of its own obscurity in the President's own back yard with little opposition from that President and a complete coalescing and organization of these disparate anti-democratic factions is all but inevitable.