Monday, October 27, 2008

Call Orkin

Well, with a week before the election, it's time for the vermin to crawl out! Two skinhead supremacists from Jackson, TN just got arraigned for planning an "assassination" (yeah, right) of Obama, and Sarah Palin tried to stay unflustered while a supporter hollered "Obama is a nigger!" at a rally (video below). Man, oh man, seven more days of this crap, should we expect an armed coup attempt by those convinced of a Zionist Order of Government and Illuminati plot to turn the U.S. over to the UN?

12 comments:

Ruth said...

7 more days? What happens after he's elected? I imagine white supremicist groups will grow with an AA President in place.

Sharon said...

You're probably right Ruth but his venues will be better planned and the security tighter. These large uncontrolled campaign crowds are the scariest right now.

I don't think I could take it if such ugliness becomes mainstream or is successful. There just aren't words.....

Loring Wirbel said...

Well, Sharon, it's a question of HOW mainstream. Remember, there were plenty of Christian militias in the Clinton administration (including plenty in Michigan!), but they were all pretty marginalized. The interesting thing will be to see how the Republican Party reconfigures itself, and whether they try to shed part of the extreme right.

Two interesting side notes today:
1. Did you see Sarah's "damn with faint praise" words for Ted Stevens? "We need to fight corruption and I am sure he will do what is right for the citizens of Alaska." In other words, "resign you bastard, before you wreck my campaign."

2. Did you catch Barbara West of WFTV interviewing Joe Biden and calling Obama a Marxist? She doesn't even attempt to be a balanced journalist, she just spouts O'Reilly-style invective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW8YhKnKIU

Sharon said...

It will be interesting although I don't know from a numbers standpoint if they can afford to alienate the evangelicals. And while the public has a short attention span it's going to take some work to convince people that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.

I thought Joe did great!

Ruth said...

The Republican Party has to be so careful, right? The base got fired up with Sarah. It isn't likely the base will change in essentials. So the question is, as you say, Loring, what happens when this mentality keeps getting bombarded by the segments of the media that are more left-thinking? Will they be forced back into the less militaristic hiding between elections? Or do they continue to give voice to this riled up base? They don't want to lose that momentum, I would think. They are presented with a very tricky dilemma.

Brian Santo said...

Oh, please. These clowns traded in tax-and-spend for borrow-and-spend, are living with the results, and still think the GOP is better for the economy.

The problem with rightwingnuts is that they believe whatever they want to believe, and no amount of evidence will ever, ever, ever change their minds. That is the fundamental (and fundamentalist) problem with the right wing.

Loring Wirbel said...

Brian, I've been spending the last two years researching a book on the stability of nationalist (and ideological) myth, and I'm convinced it's not limited to the right, though the traditionalist mindset seems to adhere to myth the strongest. There's damned few people who will put faith-based ways of knowing in their place.

I have no problems with people harboring some necessity for faith-based truth, but I've taken on a new mission - the militant supporter of the Enlightenment.

The rules are, go ahead, have fun with faith-based truth, authority-based truth, "revolutionary truth," but all must be trumped by scientific observation, logic, validated facts from the "external world" (assuming you agree the external world is real), because those are the only facts that can achieve consensus across cultures. If someone isn't willing to put the scientific method on a trumping plane, I'll just dismiss that person as a moron and move on.

By the way, I finished the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem, last night, which has a lot to say about all of this. Scientists and math theorists are sequestered away in monasteries and segregated from the secular world. You get the picture.

Brian Santo said...

Do you discern any difference between people who have strong convictions and need a lot of convincing, versus religious fundamentalists, who as a matter of course deliberately reject any evidence that contradicts their beliefs?

Is there an argument to be made, then, that left-wing dogma is tantamount to secular fundamentalism?

If there is a difference, as I believe there is (ha! have I betrayed myself as a secular fundamentalist?!) is it possible to separate religious fundamentalism from rightwingnut politics?

Or are you going to make me read your book (or, like the pseudo-intellectual I am, read the review of your book)?

Loring Wirbel said...

It's all a matter of how loud you shout "Don't confuse me with the facts!" Marxist sectarians and various leftoid cultists do not want to hear the truth - Ward Churchill did indeed plagiarize, Anna Mae Aquash was killed by AIM, not the FBI, etc. etc. Shit, when I was dissing Christic Institute in the late 1980s (and I used to work for them, I knew what I was talking about), people called me a police agent. And the same holds true these days for "9/11 Truth" types. They can't handle the truth, as Nicholson would sneer. They just look at you with glazed eyes and tell you the Twin Towers fell by implosion and the Pentagon was brought down by a cruise missile. Freakin' morons.

Loring Wirbel said...

And do you pronounce it "swaydo-inallekshul" like J. Edgar Hoover?

Brian Santo said...

Ha. Yes.

Sometimes I figure the political spectrum isn't a line, it's a circle. You put the mythical Ideal Moderate at 0 degrees, then go left or right, and the closer you get to 180 degrees from either direction, all the nuts begin to sound like one another, the main difference is the path they took to get there...

Loring Wirbel said...

Yeah, but the moderates are so boring. Nothing in the middle of the road but dead skunks. If only more rads were crazy like a fox instead of just plain crazy.