You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: 873

PLAYS: 468

(Martin Dies, 1939 - managed to take the lunatic fringe to the lunatic edge)

A few months ago I ran a piece on Martin Dies, and his infamous Dies Committee for Un-American Activities. An earlier incarnation of Joe McCarthy, Dies also managed to slide off the rails with vicious accusations and wild innuendos about people in and around power. Famously fabricating lists of "known communists", many of whom did not exist.

But just before World War 2, paranoia was rife. We were dangling on the precipice of getting involved. The war had already started by the time this address was given on October 27, 1939 and fear of being overtaken by some evil foreign entity was running rampant in the newspapers on the radio and on Capitol Hill.

So Dies took up the crusade, cloaking himself in Americanism and preaching the gospel of fear, whipping people into a state of frenzy.

Martin Dies: “These enemies within our country are not easily exposed, it is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic, because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether he’s a Democrat or he’s a Republican. Whether he’s a New Dealer or an anti-New Dealer. Whether he works in the government or whether he’s working in industry. Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience. If the time has come when in the interest of political expediency and in behest to demands of party leadership I must qualify my conscience, I’ll surrender my commission and go back to private life. At least with my honor unimpaired.”

Clearly, fear and paranoia haven't gone out of fashion. And the practitioners of that fear will probably never go broke perpetuating it. The times change, the situations change, the enemies change. But the fear hate and mistrust, then as now, are all the same.

Comforting, isn't it?

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: 33

PLAYS: 10

(A little hate goes a long way)

Something about November 4th - it must be the moon.

Frank Stasio (NPR News): “Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been shot and killed. Rabin was shot to death as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel-Aviv. Police have arrested an Israeli Jew, a man in his twenties who is said to be a member of a little known right-wing extremist group. The alleged gunman is identified as Yigal Amir. According to Israeli Television he is a law student at Bar-Ilan University and had been involved in right wing causes. Government spokesman Uri Dromi said that a Jewish organization which is anti-government and which is against the peace process took responsibility. He said the group identified the gunman as acting for them.”

The gunman later claimed to be acting "on God's behalf". Little comfort in knowing insanity is universal.

David Gregory paints this phony outrage as a firestorm, but Friedman has to correct him. Even Tom Brokaw was stunned at the ignorance and stupidity of the right wingers going ballistic over President Obama's speech to our school kids.

Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We brought it up with David Axelrod. Well, this has created such a firestorm. Here's the New Canaan Public Schools, writing a parent letter, and in it they say this. "In developing their plans our principals have considered issues such as developmental appropriateness, curricular relevance, the time at which the speech is being broadcast and the importance of teachers assuming responsibility for the selection of instructional materials. In elementary schools the administration and faculty will view the speech, download it and after discussing it, make decisions regarding how it might be used in the future--including deciding its appropriateness for various grade levels. Parents will be notified, if and when, the decision to show the speech is made." Tom Brokaw, talk about tortured language. What's going on here?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Signs of the apocalypse. I mean, really.

MR. BROKAW: It's stunning to me. I come from a time and a place in America where it would be thrilling to have a president of the United States address your school about the importance of studying and staying in school. And this president, whatever else you think about his political philosophy, is a symbol of working hard, coming from difficult circumstances and getting to where he is in part because of education. I think it's so ripe for satire, it's unbelievable. The superintendent of the Gettysburg Public School System said today that they have devised a plan for students to be shielded from a President Abraham Lincoln who will be coming to make an address. Look, that is the most tortured thing I can possibly imagine, what we just read there. It sounds like East Germany trying to form some restrictions on people leaving the eastern sector to go into the western sector. I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to say, "I don't want my child to hear that. I would rather keep them out or put them in a different school that day." But this is completely out of control, in my judgment. And it's not--it's not partisan. I mean, if--when I was a student or when my children were in school...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: ...if it had been Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush, the idea of hearing a president of the United States saying we should study hard and that's how we advance and we all need to get in on, on this, I think is an appropriate message.

MR. GREGORY: Mayor Giuliani, you ran for president and one of the things that I've noticed in my experience covering a Republican president,George W. Bush, is the lack of respect for the institution of the presidency. Whether it's people saying during Bush's time, "Hey, he's not my president." Well, no, yes, he is. Does that trouble you?

MR. GIULIANI: Yes, it does, and Tom is right. But the difference is we looked at President Eisenhower or President Reagan, even up to about that point, even President Bush 41 differently. There's a lack of respect for the president, there's a lack of respect for politicians. And David Axelrod said, "Well, this isn't politics." Everything the president does nowadays is politics, for better or worse. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing people distrust the president's motives or the administration's motives. It's not just about the speech, it's about the lesson plan. I think it's unfortunate and I think, you know, what's the--it almost seems a shame to say what's the harm in a president speaking to a group of children.

FMR. REP. FORD: I wish when I was in fourth...

MR. GIULIANI: I think, I think the president should be given the opportunity to do it.

MR. FRIEDMAN: But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid.

Wow, Friedman said something I can get behind here. "Signs of the apocalypse." That's how their reaction is to everything done by the president. Why didn't Gregory call it stupid too? Rudy couldn't even defend their actions. That's saying a lot when the only thing he can come up with is that it's all politics now. How does that make it OK? When will the media start acting like the f*&king media? They can't even do it for something as absurd as this.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1671)

PLAYS: (5507)

David Frum spoke out this weekend about the reckless direction America's right-wing talk-show hosts are taking our national discourse -- embodied by the nuts bringing guns to events featuring President Obama:

Nobody has been hurt so far. We can all hope that nobody will be. But firearms and politics never mix well. They mix especially badly with a third ingredient: the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters.

The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is "literally at war with the American people"; former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning "death panels" to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he "harbors a deep resentment of America," that he feels a "deep-seated hatred of white people," that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties": All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.

And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.

Frum notes that conservatives were quick to attack a Homeland Security bulletin warning law-enforcement officers of a looming threat from right-wing extremists -- only to have those warnings come all too true:

Newt Gingrich tweeted: "The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired."

I don't think the former speaker could tweet such a thing today in good conscience. The person who drafted that homeland security memo has gained very good reason to be worried. The guns are coming out. The risks are real.

It's not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

Frum was on CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday and talked about it with Howard Kurtz:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Um, just before I came out here, David Frum, I read a column that you wrote for The Week magazine about people who bring guns to these town meetings or Obama events. And you really took on some on the right, on your side, so to speak -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity -- you talked about hysterical talk about violence, you said that we have to tone it down, we have to tone down, excuse me, "the militant and accusatory rhetoric."

DAVID FRUM: Ah, we do. We do. Because --

KURTZ: Is it fair to blame the broadcasters for this atmosphere?

FRUM: Uh, yeah, it's very -- coping with a downward trend in advertising revenues for talk radio, the broadcasters have ramped up what they are saying. When you have broadcasters saying the president is, quote, literally at war with the American people, um -- literally at war is a very serious thing, Al Qaeda is literally at war with the American people.

KURTZ: And has a deep-seated hatred for white people.

FRUM: And has a deep-seated hatred -- so it's inflammatory. And the thing that is so enraging about all this, is obviously people are getting more excited about that, than they do about the details of health insurance.

Interestingly, Kurtz a little later discusses Fox's flaming hypocrisy in backing anti-Obama protesters when previously it had dismissed anti-war protesters as "loons", something they were called out for by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:

KURTZ: [H]asn't Fox, in fact, flipped -- some Fox hosts, I should say -- from slamming liberal protesters to defending these anti-Obama protesters?

That, in fact, is part of the bigger picture: The teabaggers are being inflamed and openly encouraged to act irrationally and disruptively by Fox News and its right-wing radio cohorts, specifically because they know that no matter how crazy they act -- even bringing guns to events featuring the president -- they will be actively defended for it, instead of exposed for the thugs they are.

Transcript below the fold:

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1170)

PLAYS: (4249)

Conservatives have been working like mad to whitewash out of public view the existence of violent right-wing extremists, only to run into one problem: They keep popping back up again, time after time. Darned reality intrudes again.

So when the Southern Poverty Law Center recently confirmed what we've been reporting at C&L for awhile now -- that the far-right "militia" movement of the 1990s was roaring back to life -- it really wasn't a big surprise when Fox ran a story quoting a bunch of various right-wing officials dismissing it:

"I think it's utter nonsense to say it's racial," said Carter Clews, spokesman at Americans for Limited Government. Clews said Obama's "doctrinaire socialistic approach to government" has triggered a populist backlash, but "it's inappropriate to use the word militia."

The SPLC report came just four months after the Department of Homeland Security issued a controversial report on "right-wing extremists." That assessment carried many of the same themes and warnings as the new "militia" report, also warning that the election of the first black president could be exploited as a recruiting tool.

According to data ALG obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the DHS relied in large part on news articles, questionable Web sites and several already-public SPLC reports -- not official government sources -- in writing its "right-wing extremists" report.

William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the latest SPLC report suggests that DHS and the law center are relying largely on the same pool of information to make their claims about the rise in right-wing extremism.

"They are attempting to brand all right-of-center protesters as potential domestic terrorists or extremists," he said. "They are painting whole swaths of people as hate groups and extremists."

This is, of course, pure bunk of a sort: The report specifies that the key to considering someone under the influence of the Patriot movement is their willing adoption of the various conspiracy theories and provably false "facts" that form the bedrock of the movement's belief systems. Things like, for instance, believing Obama is actually a non-citizen born in Kenya.

So to the extent that the SPLC is branding "whole swaths" of people, that's only true as far as these kinds of far-right beliefs spread. Unfortunately, as we've seen with the adoption of "birther" beliefs by nearly half of all Republicans, that now includes a much broader swath of society than we'd heretofore suspected.

But that is not the SPLC's fault. Rather, all that point raises is serious questions about the direction that movement conservatism is now taking.

After all, all those Obama-hating crazies are not coming out of the woodwork in a vacuum.

Earlier this week, Keith Olbermann explored this in depth with the SPLC's Mark Potok. It's an enlightening discussion.

Jon Voight is the right's Hollywood darling, and as always, everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie:

A Hollywood conservative has headed East. It's "Freedom Concert" time for Jon Voight. The Academy Award winner will join Sean Hannity in Cincinnati and Atlanta this weekend to honor fallen soldiers and present college scholarships to surviving children. Mr. Voight -- a warrior himself in many ways -- has been cogitating about the state of America, meanwhile.

"There's a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?" Mr. Voight tells Inside the Beltway.

"The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them," Mr. Voight says. "So I ask again. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?" Read on... (warning, link goes to Washington Times)

The only people trying to start a civil war are the extreme, right wing fringe elements of our society who are beginning to take over the Republican Party. How many Obama supporters have been showing up to town hall meetings with loaded weapons, shouting uncontrollably? How many Obama supporters are wanting to secede from the United States?

(video courtesy of Think Progress)

CNN's Don Lemon interviewed two astroturf town hall protesters in Atlanta Monday, and when one of them claimed that no "real Americans" spoke at Obama's town hall meetings, Don shut him down instantly -- and didn't let up:

Lemon:...At least the president is trying to reform health care, so where did the outrage suddenly come from?

Hardage: Don, this is the second town hall he's done in the last week that I actually saw real Americans get up and ask questions, it wasn't a pre-selected group or a -

Lemon: Hang on, before you do that - Real Americans - that's another term that sets people off. We're ALL real Americans, everybody.

Hardage: Anybody can get in, anybody can ask questions, you've seen a completely different tenor in the town hall he held on Tuesday and today than townhalls we've been seeing so far in this debate. That's what I mean by real Americans.

Lemon: You know what, that whole real Americans thing, can we lose that real Americans? Because everybody in the country who is a citizen is a real American. We're all real Americans and that's part of the issue that really sets people off and divides people, so let's get rid of that "real American." I'm a real American, you're a real American, conservative, liberals, independents, we're all real Americans."

How refreshing to see on a corporate news channel.